Here’s today’s horseshit headline for ya. “Extraordinary’ Italian Neanderthal remains put to rest theory they were cannibals” says the headline, which technically is accurate yet is phrased in a way that is misleading. Was this deliberate or just a result of negligence? Laziness? Probably more the latter two, I would think. See, the headline suggests that the new evidence leads to a universal determination, which it does not. It’s evidence of a specific nature.
See, a few years back a Neanderthal skull was found with a hole in the skull. It was theorized this hole was made by other Neanderthals to extract the brain, which may have been for the purpose of cannibalizing it. Now they’ve found new bones in a cave in Italy, near Rome, and a skull there has an almost identical puncture—only they know for sure this hole was made by the tooth of a prehistoric hyena. These huge beats, ancestors of the modern hyena, “dragged their prey to their dens [like the aforementioned cave], using the cave as a food cache”—and part of the food they were caching was dead Neanderthals.
This doesn’t disprove Neanderthals ever engaging in cannibalism. It proves that an incident that was previously attributed to cannibalism on the part of Neanderthals might not have been. Specific evidence, hardly universal. We don’t know that Neanderthals partook of generous helpings of long pig, no, but we also don’t know that they didn’t. We just now know that holes left in skulls by giant hyena teeth can look like holes made by pointy tools wielded by Neanderthal hands. (Maybe Neanderthals once used giant hyena teeth *as* pointy tools?)
