New fossil discoveries at Gran Dolina cave in northern Spain show that cannibalism practised by an ancient human relative called Homo antecessor was not limited to children, as earlier evidence had suggested. Researchers recovered two dozen bones and teeth belonging to this now extinct species, which lived in Europe between roughly 1.2 million and 770,000 years ago, and found that many of the newly uncovered remains came from adults rather than the young, defenceless individuals identified in previous excavations. Several of the bone fragments carried cut marks consistent with the use of stone tools, adding fresh detail to what is already considered the oldest known evidence of cannibalism practised for nutritional reasons among human relatives. What's telling here is how much the picture shifted with a single new batch of bones, a reminder that even well-studied sites like Gran Dolina can still overturn assumptions researchers had settled on for decades.
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