Well, it is true that cannibalism was reported from antecessor in a published article in a respected journal a few years ago. The exact reference eludes my memory, but it should be easy to find when I get home (within 10 days) if anyone needs it. And yes it's true that for the moment, anyway, the Beeb is about as bad in science reporting as it gets.
Dar
Neither do I have the exact reference(s) on hand – too (temporarily handicapped – I hope -- up to reach out for it), but a bit of information can also be found (about "cannibalism") on the Atapuerca Website, in which references to it can be found in the "Trinchera Dolina" pages. These can be accessed
HERE.It would appear that what we have here is just a simple case of gross, journalistic over-generalization or distortion. "Cannibalism" sells well and I suspect that the appearance of this word in press releases causes the "hits" to increase. But then, …
… here is a quote from another informative site
(CLICK HERE) that suggests that the researchers may have, all by themselves, in this and other venues, overstated the "cannibalism" issue.
cannibalism
In level TD-6, which dates to 800,000 years ago, the human remains appeared literally covered with stone tools and flakes, as if there was some kind of relationship between them, and the researchers began to suspect something. It isn´t normal to find human fossils. In fact, it’s extremely rare to find remains in the mouth of a cave, as Dolina was at that time. It is more common to find remains of meals consumed by carnivores, or by humans, taking advantage of the tranquility and shade. Was it possible that the fossils found in TD-6 were the remains of a cannibalistic feast? The suspicions were soon confirmed. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, Dolina served as a dining room for a macabre banquet whose main course was human beings. The cutmarks on the bones are clear: at least on two phalanges and one cranium there are signs of defleshing. There could be no doubt that, at the least, the bodies were cut up, or dismembered, and the flesh was removed from the bones. Although cases of defleshing are known which do not entail consuming the meat, the placement of the cutmarks on the bones demonstrated that these human bodies were cut up using the same techniques applied to the animals which were consumed. It’s very likely that for these primitive humans the difference between the body of a deer and a human cadaver didn´t exist yet. After all, the first signs of funerary behavior could be at the nearby site of the Sima de los Huesos, albeit much later in time. We don’t know why they did it, but we can affirm that the first Europeans were cannibals.
Ergo, in this case, the messengers may not be the only ones to blame.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
