Dinner- or Ritual?
Before the 2017 team accepted the zigzag cuts as a deliberate motif, many experts believed the Gough cave bones to be an example of plain homicidal cannibalism born of necessity. They speculated that the Horse Hunters may have been driven to eating their dead when the Horse Hunter’s main source of food began to disappear. The fact that the bones were then dumped in the same refuse pit as the animal bones lends a certain credibility to this, as does the fact the cave was not occupied for long before the hunters moved on.
The 2017 team believed that there was no reason for this sort of survivalist cannibalism as even if horses were off the menu, other game was not. “Animals like horse and red deer were available,” said Dr. Chris Stringer, the head of human origins at the Natural History museum. “There is also evidence of worked mammoth ivory at the site, indicating that these groups traveled into colder regions as well.”
One thing both schools of though agree on is that the bones do not belong to individuals who were deliberately killed, as there is no sign of associated trauma. For the 2017 team, this is the final proof that the zig zag decorations were part of a mortuary ritual, completed as soon as the bodies were de-fleshed. This practice, known as Endocannibalism has been found in other, historical contexts such as amongst the Amachuaca tribe of Peru. In Endocannibalism, any flesh consumed would have been part of the mortuary ritual and so an act of respect rather than born of necessity.
In this context, the marking of the bones could have been a way to complete the mortuary ritual. “The act of engraving has often been associated with ways of remembering events, places or circumstances — a sort of extension of our memory outside our body,” Dr Bello explained“In this case, however, the engraving of this bone may have been a sort of memory more directly related to the deceased, and an intrinsic part of the cannibalistic ritual itself.”
However, there is the possibility that the bodies in Gough’s cave weren’t the victims of cannibalism at all and that their disarticulation was for purely practical reasons. Although not dismissing the possibility that the bodies were consumed by other humans, the late Dr. Roger Jacobi of the Oxford Radiocarbon unit raised the possibility that the bones could have belonged to members of the tribe who died some distance from Gough’s cave. As a consequence, their bodies could have been cut up and stripped of flesh to make them more portable- rather than for consumption. In this context, the decoration of the bones could still have been a ritual mark of respect but without any associated ritual dining on the dead.
Where Do We Get This Stuff? Here are our Sources.
Gough’s Cave, Cheddar Gorge and caves.
Cave record of Britain’s pioneers, Paul Rincon, BBC News, July 16, 2009