Cannibalism Ritual: 35,000 Years Ago in Crimea?

Of passage for a hunting trip, they force plump antelope, horses and hares. They forgot some mammoth ivory beads, shells pierced. And, probably during a single episode, they have really weird stuff with skulls of humans. (Photo: Temporal bone of modern man of former Buran-Kaya III presenting traces of cutting.

This story is recounted in the journal PLoS One by an international team (France, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Netherlands, Germany). Which brought together a team of many talents – paleoanthropologist, pre-historians, specialists in carbon-14 dating, archaeozoologists, chemist … – to take advantage of the exceptional richness of a site discovered in 1990 in the Crimea, the Ukrainian Alexander Yanevich.

The site of Buran-Kaya, the river descends Burulcha mountains of Crimea (map below), has offered many excavators stratigraphic layers neatly arranged and thus the chronology intact. They show that the oldest to be spent in this rock shelter are human culture “Middle Palaeolithic” according to their stone tools, therefore, in theory of Neanderthals in this region. Then came that manufacturers of a mysterious “culture of transition,” said Stephane Pean (National Museum of Natural History) that blends the features of the Map Middle Palaeolithic Crimea and higher … the latter being specific theory of Homo sapiens .

However, always falling over prehistory (see this entry: Cro-Magnon has never made the revolution) to determine if this culture of transition – called Châtelperronian in Western Europe and the East-Szélétien is the fact of Neanderthals may be influenced by cultural exchanges with the “anatomically modern human,” as they say in prehistory or the latter. Then, surprise, comes a new layer of the Middle Paleolithic. Back Neanderthal? If the author of the culture of transition, this would be an index of cultural diversity. And if not, imagine a group of Neanderthals went there after modern humans.

Finally, the last layer does no doubt because at the tools typical of the Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian type) added nearly 200 human bones and teeth fossils attributed to modern humans. “In other words, a man biologically identical to us from the analysis of Sandrine Prat CNRS,” says Stephane Pean.

The value of this archeological dig is the multidisciplinary approach undertaken. And above all a rare opportunity: direct dating of carbon-14 (with a double analysis, Groningen and Gif sur Yvette (CNRS / CEA) under the responsibility of Helen Valladas stating that “the date is between there 35,400 and 35,900 years “) human fossils whose stratigraphic position and the archaeological context are well known.

These men were the Crimean peninsula in a climate and an environment very different from the current Riviera. “A mixed tundra in the far north with his reindeer, cold steppes of Central Asia and wooded valleys,” Stephane Pean risk. The occupants of the passenger but recurring shelter – there is no trace of a camp of Pearl ivory long – have reworked their tools and most importantly, according to studies by Laurent Crépin cut of the antelope, the horse, bison, rabbit, fox and wolf. Meat and furs were their goals. (Photo: Elements of mammoth ivory ornaments discovered in the shelter of Buran-Kaya III.