Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Human Cannibalism In Europe

The 18,000-year-old discoveries from the Maszycka Cave include decorated hunting tools made of bone and antler.

Photo: Darek Bobak.

Information for the Media - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

A good 8,000 years before creationism's little god created the small flat planet with a dome over it as described in Genesis, modern humans were painting wonderful paintings in caves in France and Spain, and cannibalising other humans in what is now southern Poland.

These people were the Magdalenian, a pan-European culture that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum, who are widely regarded as having a form of religion and belief in an afterlife, or at least a spiritual connection to the animals they hunted and depicted on cave walls. However, judging by their cannibalism and casual disposal of human remains along with the bones of the species they hunted for food, and the fact that they decorated and used human bones as utilities such a drinking cups made from human skull caps, they may not have had much regard for the dead.

Do you have any information on the dating of human remains found in the Maszycka Cave in Poland? Yes! The human remains from Maszycka Cave in Poland have been radiocarbon dated to around 18,000 years ago, placing them in the Late Upper Palaeolithic (Gravettian or Epigravettian period). These remains are significant because they provide insight into human populations in Central Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum.

The Maszycka Cave site also contained artifacts, including stone tools and bone implements, suggesting a well-developed hunter-gatherer culture. The remains have been interpreted as possibly belonging to a group that was massacred or subjected to cannibalism, based on cut marks and other modifications on the bones.

Would you like more details on the dating methods or the archaeological context?

Could you briefly describe how radiocarbon dating works, please

Sure! Radiocarbon dating is a method used to determine the age of organic materials, like bone, charcoal, or wood, by measuring the amount of carbon-14 (\(^{14}C\)) remaining in a sample.
How It Works:

Formation of \(^{14}C\): Cosmic rays in the atmosphere convert nitrogen-14 (\(^{14}N\)) into radioactive carbon-14. This \(^{14}C\) gets incorporated into carbon dioxide and absorbed by living organisms.
Decay After Death: When an organism dies, it stops absorbing \(^{14}C\), and the existing \(^{14}C\) starts decaying into (\(^{14}N\))
Half-Life: \(^{14}C\) has a half-life of about 5,730 years, meaning half of it decays in that time. By measuring the remaining \(^{14}C\) in a sample and comparing it to modern levels, scientists can estimate when the organism died.
Calibration: Since \(^{14}C\) levels in the atmosphere have fluctuated, raw radiocarbon dates are adjusted using calibration curves based on tree rings, corals, and other long-dated materials.
For the Maszycka Cave remains, radiocarbon dating would have been performed on collagen extracted from the bones to estimate their age.

These are the findings of an international team of palaeontologists including researchers from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany. They have published their findings, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports. It is also explained in a news release from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen:

Evidence of cannibalism 18,000 years ago
Researchers analyse traces of manipulation of human remains from Maszycka Cave
An international research team including the University of Göttingen has gained new insights into the burial rituals of Late Ice Age societies in Central Europe. Signs of human remains from the Maszycka Cave in southern Poland being manipulated indicate systematic dissection of the deceased, as well as cannibalism. The research was published in Scientific Reports.

The Maszycka Cave in Poland is a significant excavation site for the late Upper Palaeolithic times. More than 100 years ago, researchers discovered human bones there among stone and bone tools alongside the remains of hunted Ice Age animals. These discoveries were associated with a late Ice Age society in France, known as the Magdalenian, that existed between 20,000 and 14,500 years ago. Excavations in the 1960s yielded more human remains, so that a total of 63 bones from ten individuals dating back 18,000 years were available for examination. This is one of the most important collections of human remains from the late Upper Palaeolithic.

Using modern methods, the team identified 36 bone fragments, which showed signs that the individuals were dissected immediately after death. Cut marks on skull fragments indicate that the muscle attachments and scalp were removed before the long bones were smashed to get to the bone marrow. First author Francesc Marginedas from the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution explains:

The position and frequency of the cut marks, as well as the targeted smashing of bones, leave no doubt that their intention was to extract nutritious components from the dead.

Francesc Marginedas, lead author
Institut Català de Paleoecología Humana I Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA)
Tarragona, Spain

But how and why did cannibalism happen here? The Magdalenian are known for their impressive art – such as the famous cave paintings at Lascaux.

The wide range of artistic evidence points to favourable living conditions during this period. It therefore seems unlikely that cannibalism was practised out of necessity.

Professor Thomas Terberger, co-author
Niedersächsisches Landesamt Für Denkmalpflege
Hannover, Germany

It is possible that this was an example of violent cannibalism. After the last Ice Age, there was population growth, and that may have led to conflicts over resources and territories. And there is evidence of isolated incidences of cannibalism in connection with violent conflict. Furthermore, human remains were found mixed with settlement debris in the Maszycka Cave, which indicates that the dead were not treated with respect.

Francesc Marginedas.

The results help to improve our understanding of the cultural development and group-dynamics in the Late Ice Age society.

Publication:
Francesc Marginedas et al.
New insights of cultural cannibalism amongst Magdalenian groups at Maszycka Cave, Poland. Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-86093-w

Abstract
The manipulation of human corpses started to become commonplace during the Upper Paleolithic. This well-documented behavior among Magdalenian peoples consists of perimortem manipulation and the removal of soft tissues and has been understood as forming part of the cultural repertoire of mortuary actions. The study of these practices has given rise to several interpretations with the consumption of human flesh (cannibalism) occupying a central position. The human assemblage of Maszycka Cave (18,000 cal. BP) is part of this ongoing debate. Although initial research in the 1990s suggested cannibalism, more recent studies challenge this interpretation arguing that the low incidence of human activity rule out the likelihood of processing for the purpose of consumption and proposing skull selection as a funerary practice. This study reviews the assemblage and presents previously unpublished postcranial skeletal specimens along with evidence of whole-body manipulation for consumption. This behavior is also observed in other chronologically and culturally similar assemblages throughout continental Europe, suggesting that cannibalism was integral practice within the cultural systems of these Magdalenian groups.

Introduction
European Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers navigated the death of others through a wide variety of mortuary practices. These behaviors were particularly diverse during the Magdalenian, a period from which preserved human remains are scarce and fragmentary and occasionally represented only by isolated specimens¹. This fragmentation has been associated with human behavior, as a result of either the postmortem selection of certain anatomical portions or the perimortem manipulation of the cadavers^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}.

Primary burials during the Magdalenian period are distinctly rare among the human assemblages from the same period (e.g., France = 9%)⁴, although some particularly well-preserved examples have yielded valuable information of the Magdalenian funerary world¹¹. Elements of the cranial and postcranial skeleton have been widely recovered, and sometimes the position of the body can also be discerned³. Burial sites have occasionally been documented covered in ochre and containing grave goods^5,12. In these scenarios, the absence of some bones has been related to carnivore activity and/or the intentional selection of elements for secondary deposition elsewhere⁵. Meanwhile, the absence of other body parts has been linked to the presence of isolated elements commonly found in the Magdalenian record¹, perhaps because they were treated as relics. These assemblages tend to present interpretative problems regarding the context in which the bodies were deposited. However, it is commonly believed that the scarcity of materials and their dispersion cannot be related to natural processes¹. The appearance of disarticulated and unconnected elements, mostly from the skull, suggests their intentional selection³. In fact, the deliberate selection of certain body parts may be reflected in some examples of parietal art which depicts isolated body parts like heads and trunks without extremities¹³.

Magdalenian groups also used human bone as a raw material by for the manufacture of skull cups and jewelry². Some of these specimens bear decorative motifs or engravings added some time after the removal of the skin and flesh^14,15. In fact, the percentage of human remains with signs of soft tissue removal is significantly high. In France alone, cut marks generated during the defleshing of the bodies have been documented on 93 Magdalenian individuals, approximately 40% of those calculated for this period in this region4. Human-induced modifications (HIMs) have been linked to mortuary practices in which bodies were defleshed and disarticulated. Although evidence of this type has been recovered in central, northern, and western Europe regions (Table S1)^{2,6,10,12,16,17}, the scarcity of materials has impeded further interpretations for these assemblages. This is despite the fact that the presence of these modifications is most pronounced during the Middle and Late Magdalenian, when the archaeological record points to a general population increase⁴.

Opposing explanations have been proposed to explain how perimortem handling of corpses occurred in assemblages with a greater abundance of skeletal remains. On the one hand, cut marks have been related to the perimortem cleaning of bones as part of mortuary practices in which the aim is a secondary deposition^16,17. On the other hand, the location and frequency of the cut marks suggests that the cadavers were intensively processed for consumption^2,6,10.

The human bone assemblage from Maszycka Cave (Poland) is one of the Magdalenian sites where both interpretations about the manipulation of carcasses have been proposed. While early anthropological studies from the 1990s suggested the selection of skulls for the consumption of the brain¹⁸, later studies disproved the cannibalism hypothesis pointing to the lack of human tooth marks and the scarcity of cultural modifications. Proponents of this argument attribute the modifications present on the assemblage to the funerary processing of the skulls¹⁷.

This research aims to examine the Maszycka Cave assemblage to determine the origin of the cultural modifications and to consider the significance of these remains within the Magdalenian cultural system in central Europe.

Fig 1.

Superposition of lateralized parietals resulting in the minimum number of individuals count. Each color represents an individual on a complete parietal background (a-d). Representation of anthropogenic activity on juvenile and adult parietals and occipitals displaying cut marks (blue line), percussion pits (red dot) and notches (green dot).

Fig 2.

Confocal microscope images of anthropogenic modifications from Maszycka Cave. Example of cut marks (white arrow) on long bones: fibula (a), humerus (b), radius (c), clavicle (d) and femur (e), and two parietal bones (f, g). Each image includes the specimen ID alongside the bone element identification and scale at the bottom.

Fig 3.

Confocal microscope images of anthropogenic modifications from Maszycka Cave. Example of cut marks (white arrow) on three parietals (a, d, f), an occipital bone (c, e) and a femur (b). Each image includes the specimen’s ID alongside the bone element identification and scale at the bottom.

Fig 5.

Human induced modifications on cranial and postcranial remains. Cut marks (blue and yellow) due to scalping (e, u) and defleshing of the skull (c, d, f, i, j, t), percussion damage (red) on skull fragments (a, b). Defleshing marks on a mandible (g, h), on a clavicle (l, n), on a radius (o), on a femur (p, q) and on a fibula (s). Disarticulation marks on a humerus (k, r) and peeling (green) on a clavicle (m). The specimen ID is located next to the scale at the bottom of the images.

Fig 6.

Representation of the newly identified specimens from the upper and lower long limb bones of Maszycka Cave. Each color represents one specimen fitting on a complete element. The cultural modifications are cut marks (blue line), percussion pits (red dot) and notches (green dot).

Francesc Marginedas et al.
New insights of cultural cannibalism amongst Magdalenian groups at Maszycka Cave, Poland. Scientific Reports (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-86093-w

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

According to the Bible, the god described in it threw a hissy fit because a couple disobeyed him, even though he had rigged things so they didn't know right from wrong at the time, and for some unfathomable reason it arbitrarily deemed us all guilty of that 'original sin' and wants to forgive us, but seems powerless to.

And yet much earlier, in a place of which the authors of that tale were blissfully unaware, people were eating other people - a state of affairs, if we believe the myths, of which the god of the Bible knew nothing and cared less, it being far more important what a couple in the Middle East were getting up to when his back was turned.

This is the same god who endorsed slavery and laid down the rules about when a slave could be beaten, who relegated women to the mere chattels of men and deemed being raped a capital crime with peremptory execution.

It seems the god of the Bible had a strange set of priorities and a repugnant moral code. Or was as unaware of the world beyond the Middle East as were the authors of the tales about it.

But of course, since this all happened thousands of years before creationism's god created the small flat planet for the naughty couple to 'sin' on, perhaps it can be forgiven for not knowing about the rest of the world and the history of human culture, or that there is behaviour far more antisocial than eating apples, and yet not a mention of cannibalism in it's 'Ten Commandments'.

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