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S3 E5. LAND PART V – Prehistoric Cannibalism 101

 
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İçerik Alix Penn and Carmella Lowkis tarafından sağlanmıştır. Bölümler, grafikler ve podcast açıklamaları dahil tüm podcast içeriği doğrudan Alix Penn and Carmella Lowkis veya podcast platform ortağı tarafından yüklenir ve sağlanır. Birinin telif hakkıyla korunan çalışmanızı izniniz olmadan kullandığını düşünüyorsanız burada https://tr.player.fm/legal özetlenen süreci takip edebilirsiniz.

For as long as humans have existed, we have been eating other humans. This week, Carmella takes us on a tour of six Stone Age sites where evidence of survival cannibalism has been uncovered.

CREDITS

Written, hosted and produced by Alix Penn and Carmella Lowkis.

Theme music by Daniel Wackett. Find him on Twitter @ds_wack and Soundcloud as Daniel Wackett.

Logo by Riley. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @tallestfriend.

Casting Lots is part of the Morbid Audio Podcast Network. Network sting by Mikaela Moody. Find her on Bandcamp as mikaelamoody1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

TRANSCRIPT

Alix: Have you ever been really, really hungry?

Carmella: You’re listening to Casting Lots: A Survival Cannibalism Podcast.

A: I’m Alix.

C: I’m Carmella.

A: And now let’s tuck into the gruesome history of this ultimate taboo…

[Intro Music – Daniel Wackett]

C: Welcome to Episode Five, where we’re exploring survival cannibalism in prehistory.

[Intro music continues]

C: Alix, would you say that survival cannibalism has been around since human history began?

A: Since the dawn of time.

C: Yeah, it was a trick question, because survival cannibalism also happened in prehistory.

A: [Excited] Oooh!

C: And that’s what this episode’s about. Today we’re going to look at prehistoric survival cannibalism.

A: Going further back than we ever have before.

C: When I set off researching this episode, I thought to myself, ‘shall I just check what the definition of prehistoric is?’ [Laughs]

A: Good point. Yeah.

C: Good starting point. And it’s a good job that I did, because, actually, I didn’t have any clue, as it turns out. From the Cambridge English Dictionary, prehistory is ‘the period of human history before there were written records of events’. So it’s linked to whether there was a writing system, which I didn’t realise. Did you know that?

A: [Patiently] I did know that.

C: Well, you’re winning.

[Alix snorts]

C: What that means is that what counts as prehistoric varies geographically, where cultures have developed written language at different speeds. In Eurasia and North Africa, prehistory tends to be split into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age – which are named after the tools that are being used, but again those ages can’t apply so tidily to all cultures and all locations etc.

A: So basically this is a vague approximation of ‘the before times’?

C: [Agreeing] The before times. Some of the earliest cultures to develop written history, all in the early Bronze Age, were Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley civilisation, and ancient Egypt. Then neighbouring civilisations followed suit, and then most other civilisations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. But not all of them, because prehistory technically ends really late in some places. For example, 1788 is the end of prehistory in Australia.

A: Sorry?!

C: Yeah. Sounds really arbitrary to me, but there we go.

A: I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with how we’re talking about prehistory now. Not necessarily us, I mean more academic institutions.

C: Yes, there’s a privileging of written history over oral history there, I think. So I’ve sort of ignored that in this episode, and what it means in terms of what we’re talking about today, I’m looking at prehistory in the Stone Age, which is a much tidier date range of about 2.2 million years ago up to about 3,000 BCE. You know, just really small and narrow.

A: There won’t be much to cover there at all.

C: [Laughs] I also hear you ask– [Laughs] ‘Carmella, what evidence do we have of survival cannibalism in prehistory, if, by its very definition, there is no written record?’

A: Carmella, we rely on people writing down that they have eaten other people. How can there be any evidence of survival cannibalism before people learned to write?

C: The answer is ‘bones’.

A: Gnaw marks.

C: [Chuckles] Literally. More loyal listeners will recall Jamestown, the Donner Party, Alfred Packer, the Franklin Expedition – and they will recall that archaeologists have examined the bones of all of these sites to determine whether or not cannibalism happened.

A: Carmella’s doing a lovely mime of what I think is ‘bones’, but I’m not quite sure. I’m just gonna pass that on so you can imagine it.

C: Yeah, that’s a bone mime. [Laughs] By looking at those sites where you know cannibalism is alleged to happen, and studying what marks there are there, it means that archaeologists can use that data to make a very solid guess at whether or not other bones have been cannibalised; for example, prehistoric ones.

A: An educated guess there. And, I seem to remember that when they analysed some of the bones from the Packer site, they did have academics of prehistory come and verify the cannibalism, because of there being limited instances of cannibal bones.

C: In order to identify that cannibalism may have happened, archaeologists look for a number of key signatures in human remains.

A: Tooth marks.

C: Tooth marks are one of them.

A: I’m going to assume also evidence that flesh has been cut off bones? And we’ve already had in old episodes, especially in Season 1, when we were really explaining the ins and outs of what part of the body to eat, where particularly fleshy parts of the body had been targeted. So you would assume that if there’s evidence that the thighs and buttocks have been cut off, that’s probably more likely to be for food than the head, which may be more ritualistic, perhaps.

C: Here are the indicators of cannibalism, and some of them are on there, well done. We’ve got: lack of a cranial base on an otherwise near-complete skeleton – that’s to get the brain out and each it. Absence of vertebrae, because they’ve been crushed or boiled down to get at the bone marrow and grease. Presence of cut and chop marks, as well as the arrangement of them – whether they’ve been defleshed and, like you said, where they’ve been defleshed. And also anvil abrasions, which is where a bone has been whacked against a rock. Which I am miming right now.

A: Now, I have a very visceral memory from when I was a young child, of coming downstairs and there was a TV show on which was about the history of music, and it was a parody. But there was a caveman using human bones to make a xylophone. I cannot tell you what this programme is. I have Googled it; I have asked people; no one seems to remember anything about this How It’s Made for grownups parody.

[Carmella chuckles]

A: But I can still see that caveman making a xylophone out of human bones. It just took me back.

C: So the actual reason you would do that is to break them open to get at the marrow, but sure, maybe for music as well. Following on from that, if the long bones have been broken to access the marrow – the long bones being arm bones, leg bones, them guys. If there are similar butchering techniques on human remains to animal remains that may be buried nearby. And equally if the human remains and the animal remains have been discarded in the same manner.

A: Ah, yeah.

C: Like, they’ve all just been thrown in the same trash, then you know that the human bones haven’t been buried with much particular care. Evidence of cooking: burnt bones and pot polish, which makes sense. ‘Peeling’, which is where a roughened bone surface is produced when fresh bone is fractured and peeled apart.

A: I don’t like that.

C: No. Percussion pits, which is the impact of stone or solid matter against a bone, that scars the surface.

A: Percussion pits? I’m going back to this xylophone thing was much more accurate than I ever thought it was!

C: And finally, scraping marks or, better, human teeth marks.

A: Sometimes the clichés are there for a reason.

C: When archaeologists examine bones, they look for a combination of those signatures, and some of those being present might suggest that cannibalism took place. It doesn’t always prove that, and it doesn’t exactly demonstrate the motive. For example, a skeleton could be defleshed for storage in an ossuary, rather than for eating. Equally, the cranial base could be removed to make a skull cup, which was apparently a really big trend back then.

A: A skull cup to drink from?

C: Yeah.

A: Okay, I was imagining more of a skull cap.

C: Oh!

A: To put…

C: Perhaps for that reason as well. Fashion as well as utility.

A: We are really, really going for the old caveman stereotypes here, aren’t we?

C: [Laughs] Yep.

A: Now, I was going to ask how one would go about working out if cannibalism took place for survival, rather than ritualistic [Pause] or other purposes. I’m falling into that trap of just assuming that if we don’t understand it, it’s a ritual. Which is very Eurocentric.

C: I’m so glad you asked the question, Alix, because it’s a perfect segue.

A: [Laughs] Didn’t even plan that. Genuine question.

C: Even if you can identify cannibalism, how do you tell if it was survival, and not as part of a funerary ritual, or, indeed, just part of a regular diet?

A: Or just for fun.

C: Just for fun. Sometimes it happens.

A: When was the first serial killer?

C: [Intrigued] Hmm!

A: I know this isn’t what we do in our podcast, but at some point there’s got to have been a first serial killer, and I see no reason that it can’t be in the Stone Age.

C: Yeah.

A: It’s the next BBC Four–

[Carmella laughs]

A: Drama.

C: Let’s pitch that! This is good. Well, the answer is that you have to look out for more clues. For example, are there lots of animal remains discarded in the same place? Then they probably weren’t starving to death. Have skull cups been made, or the bones otherwise carved or worked? Sounds like it was a ritual instead. Have the bones been intensely processed to get every last scrap of nutrition, such as through long bone breakage, pot polish? Sounds like maybe we’re onto something there.

A: If you’re at the point where you have to extract brain matter and bone marrow, you are probably very hungry. Even some of our most prolific survival cannibals have pointed out that brain matter isn’t the most tasty of substances.

C: You’ll recall that the Donner Party, for example, we know that they ate people, and from those bones we can see that they were processed in that manner, because of how desperate and starving they were. So that’s how you would make that leap. [Laughing[ And then I have one final word on definitions before we get started.

A: We’ve not started yet?

C: [Laughs] Before we get started with the cases, I guess we should say. Because of how far back we’re going, I’m saying ‘humans’, but not all of them are gonna be homo sapiens. There are gonna be a lot of Neanderthals and other members of the homo genus thrown in.

[Alix snorts]

C: ‘Pause to get giggles over homo out of the way’ is a note in my script.

[Both laugh]

A: I was trying– I was trying to formulate a ‘tell me more about the homos’ joke, so I’m glad you preempted it.

C: So we’re gonna make that joke only now–

[Both continue to giggle]

C: And then be very mature for the rest. In this episode, I’m going to take you through a selection of archaeological sites where there’s evidence of prehistoric cannibalism, and then we’re going to be detectives and discuss whether we think it was survival cannibalism or not.

A: We are slightly biased as a podcast, but let’s go for it. We’ll try and take our survival cannibalism hat off.

C: Let’s start in Yorkshire.

A: I love Yorkshire. Let’s go.

C: Kinsey Cave in the Yorkshire Dales, which is the UK, for our international listeners.

A: I was about to do a Yorkshire accent. I’m not sure whether my four years in the North allow me to do that or not. No, I’ve decided they don’t.

C: [Laughs] I mean…

A: [In a Yorkshire accent] Up t’moors.

C: Yeah.

A: There we go.

C: That’s where we’re going. In the 1920s, amateur archaeologist/greengrocer, Tot Lord, was exploring Kinsey Cave in the Yorkshire Dales.

A: I’d like to point out that even up North, prehistory had ended by the 1920s.

C: [Laughs] Yeah, I’m giving some context on the discovery of the site. It’s for flavour.

A: Flavour.

C: He had a hobby, liked to go into caves and look for human bones. [Laughs].

A: That’s worrying, and I think he’d be on a list.

C: He discovered some human bones alongside animal bones inside Kinsey Cave, but he was not taken seriously by professional archaeologists, because he was just a greengrocer – what did he know?

A: He probably knows what a bone looks like…

C: They were like, ‘These bones probably aren’t that old. Why you showing us these Roman bones?’

A: See, I still think the first thing would be the police would get involved.

C: [Laughing] 1920s.

A: It was a different time.

C: Tom Lord, Tot Lord’s grandson.

A: Tot.

C: Tot and Tom. Tom took the bones to an archaeologist, Tim Taylor, at Bradford University in the early 2000s.

A: So they just kept these bones hanging around the house for years?

C: They had a family collection of many bones. Tot also purchased ones that other people had collected, he liked– He just collected bones.

A: This is a strange family. I would not be buying my food from this family greengrocers.

C: So Tom inherited all of these bones, and decided to do something with them.

A: [Snorts] Build a sculpture.

C: Taylor from Bradford University analysed the bones between 2005 and 2011, and he found that the bones had been ‘heavily processed’. There were cut marks in the long bones: fine ones on the arm bones, and heavy chops at the end of the thigh bones, which suggest butchery. They also displayed a certain amount of pot polish, which implies that they’ve been cooked in a pot – clue’s in the name. Taylor initially suspected that the bones came from Roman Britain, much like the other archaeologist who turned their nose up at them.

A: Archaeologists do also quite like Roman Britain.

C: The phrase used was “of no significant age”. And apparently the Romans apply to that period.

A: Even if they’d eaten each other?

C: [Laughs] I don’t question it.

A: I do! I question it a lot. What are these archaeologists getting up to that these alleged cannibalistic Romans of North Yorkshire are just, oh well, ten a penny? I wanna be studying what these archaeologists are studying.

C: Taylor then notices that the cut marks appear to have been made with stone tools, which is not something that the Romans would be doing. So, sent them off for carbon dating, and they returned as being from around 3,900 BCE, making them the oldest identified human bones in the North of England.

A: [Impressed] Oooh.

C: Based on the uncovered samples, there’s a minimum total of three individuals: two infants (one of them perinatal) and a young adult aged between 18 and 25. On the other hand, the largest possible number of individuals in the cave is eleven neonatal children, five infants, and ten adults. Pretty hard to be precise, but I’m impressed they can come up with any numbers based on a load of bone bits.

A: I can see why there’s such a problem with defining exactly how many bodies are in the cave, but also you can’t help but picture your old greengrocer going in and just finding perfect skeletons.

[Carmella laughs]

A: So you sort of have to remember that, no, these are fragments and bits, and maybe that explains slightly why all the other archaeologists were like, ‘Oh no, you fool, these are but Roman bones.’ Because there’s no solid story attached to them. You need the science and the technology to drag out all of those details.

C: Yeah. Taylor and a team went to properly excavate the caves, where they found more butchered animal bones mixed in with a newborn baby’s arm bone. Warning: this is unpleasant!

[Both laugh]

C: Infant bones also displayed marks of butchery, such as a rib bone with a hack mark on the inside, suggesting the baby had literally been torn open.

A: Carmella mimed that as well.

C: Alongside the bones were pot boilers, which were stones that you heat in a fire and then use for cooking. So looks like cannibalism is a pretty likely explanation here for what’s going on.

A: I do get the feeling that the flesh from these bodies was eaten.

C: But for what purpose? Taylor hypothesises that this could be the result of an “ethnic conflict”, so different groups eating one another as an act of rivalry. According to Taylor, the date suggests a conflict between Mesoliths and Neoliths, and, to quote, him, “They are symbolically wresting the future, trying to kind of put a stop on the future(…) of those farming communities by eating their best and youngest”. Not sure I fully am behind that one, Taylor, but okay.

A: Hmm, I feel that there’s a lot of hypothesising going on there. With absolutely no written record, you’re just pulling ideas out the air as to why these children were eaten.

C: Well, you’re gonna love this next one, Alix. This is from osteologist (bone scientist) Diana Good, who was also on Taylor’s team. She suggests that it could be a family putting their own dead newborn into a cave, “which has the connotations of a uterine environment”.

A: Oh fuck off!

C: As a funerary question. [Laughing] And I have to ask, how does one explain all the adult bones, and also the fact that they’ve all been boiled for eating?

A: I don’t know what her uterus does once a month!

[Carmella cackles]

C: So I don’t necessarily buy what the experts are suggesting here. I’m not saying they’re definitely wrong, but I’m saying that there are some leaps and assumptions made there.

A: It’s like, yes, a cave is yonic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything when it comes to people being boiled.

C: [Laughs] The connection’s just not there. That’s all the evidence I have to present. What’s your verdict, Alix?

A: My verdict is that the cave probably isn’t a vagina.

C: [Laughs] Okay, step one.

A: Profit.

C: [Laughs] My verdict is inconclusive, I think, on this one. Definite cannibalism. Can’t necessarily say what it was for.

A: You did say that animal bones were also discovered.

C: There were some animal bones, yes. So perhaps more of a dietary habit, rather than desperation?

A: Possibly, but the amount of work that these bones had had done on them does indicate that extreme efforts were made to extract nutrients.

C: Possibly. Although, with the pot polish and all the different bones, you could imagine a big stewpot, and you just sort of smash everything and throw it all in together, which would show the same kind of extraction methods but would just be as a result of making a stew. Not sure.

A: Our cookbook will be released in time for Christmas 2021.

C: [Laughs] Next up, we’re going to Cheddar.

A: [Appreciatively] Cheddar Gorge.

C: Cheddar Gorge indeed. Gough’s Cave, which is in Somerset in the UK, for, again, those international listeners who may not be–

A: Intimately familiar with British geography.

C: Yes. As a Brit who grew up in South-West England, for me, Cheddar Gorge is a fun day out for all the family. There’s a limestone gorge, there are caves, there’s a museum about bones and cannibalism. Apparently the caves were the inspiration for Helm’s Deep (J. R. R. Tolkein, Lord of the Rings). So just picture that bit in Lord of the Rings in Helm’s Deep and, you know, that’s pretty much it. Context is there.

A: Yep, they’re interchangeable. Completely.

C: Gough’s Cave is famous as the discovery site of Cheddar Man, the oldest almost complete homo sapiens skeleton discovered in the UK. No evidence that he was cannibalised, I’m afraid.

A: That’s a shame. Isn’t he the one that they did a recreation of recently?

C: Yes, yes.

A: And all the racists came out to play because he wasn’t white?

C: Fun fact! He wasn’t white. But yes, indeed, that’s the guy. However, before Cheddar Man, in Gough’s Cave, there were the Horse People of Cheddar Gorge.

A: They sound like your worst nightmare!

C: Well, they’re long dead, so they can’t get to me now. They arrived in Britain around 14,700 years ago, and they led a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with their most notable prey being horses – which they had followed across Doggerland from Europe. A collection of the Horse People’s bones was first discovered between 1986 and 1992 by a team from the Natural History Museum, and then was re-examined again in 2017. So we’ve got a lot of data on these bones. The remains appear to belong to five people: a two-to-three-year-old child; two adolescents; a young adult; and an older individual. The bones are mixed in with animal bones, flint remains, and small pieces of carved antler and mammoth ivory. The skeletons had all be disarticulated in the same way as the butchered animals.

A: Nice!

C: And had been defleshed. And 42% of the remains showed human teeth marks.

A: I love it. I love it. I am picturing the gallery in the Cheddar museum, just with the bones and the teeth marks. I can see the interpretation, it’s more respectful than we are.

C: [Laughs] A third of the bones had also been broken up post-mortem, presumably to extract marrow. Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said: “These people were processing the flesh of humans with exactly the same expertise that they used to process the flesh of animals. They stripped every bit of food they could get from those bones.”

A: Sounds like survival cannibalism to me.

C: Experts did originally tend to find in favour of survival cannibalism. The human teeth marks mean that it was definitely cannibalism, there’s no– Why else are you gnawing bones?

A: Boredom.

C: Yeah. [Snorts] The heavy processing suggests desperate extraction, etc. etc. However, the 2017 team who re-examined the bones found some extra evidence to confuse matters. Some of the long bones displayed zig-zag cut marks that seemed to form an intentional pattern that had been made deliberately rather than as part of the defleshing process. Furthermore, the edges of some of the skulls had been smoothed down to make them into skull cups. Doctor Silvia Bello from the Earth Sciences department of the Natural History Museum suggests that it could, in fact, be some kind of ritual or funerary cannibalism, where the flesh is eaten and then the bones decorated in some manner. The fact that none of the dead appear to have been killed in a violent incident backs that up… Apart from one who was beheaded, by the way, just to correct Doctor Silvia Bello there.

A: But it was a non-violent beheading.

C: Non-violent beheading. I guess you can’t tell whether it was posthumous or not? Oh, maybe you could…

A: I think that you can tell. I feel like you should be able to tell.

C: Yeah, come on, get it together, Natural–

A: Natural History Museum.

[Both laugh]

C: In any case, it seems like at least most of them weren’t killed for food, so, rather, “this was some kind of cultural process”, according to Doctor Bello. But she does also concede that “it is still quite possible people ate each other because there simply wasn’t anything else to eat”. What’s the verdict on that one, then?

A: I was thinking about Doctor Bello, and I was thinking about whether there’s any evidence of the timeframe between the consumption and the decoration.

C: Yeah, perhaps you could eat them, then get bored.

A: I was more thinking desperation and then actually things stabilise, so you then go back to bodies that you have previously cannibalised out of desperation and add the carvings and turn them into skull cups.

C: Like as a sort of… apology? Or for fun? Or…? What’s the vision here?

A: Sort of an apology, sort of an acknowledgement. Because one of the things I’m not clear about with this one, is whether the bodies have been found in a prehistoric trash heap or not. Because there’s bits of–

C: They were found with some animal remains and also other worked bones, so sort of carved and decorated animal bones and ivory.

A: Antlers and the mammoth ivory.

C: Yeah.

A: So that confuses it for me, because this isn’t necessarily all just waste product, but it’s also not all necessarily evidence of a cultural process. There seems to be several things that have happened here.

C: It’s also possible that these are, you know, these are just various things that were in the cave whilst it was occupied, and not so much a trash heap so much as what you leave behind and over time becomes trash? I don’t know.

A: It might not all have happened on the same day.

C: [Laughs] Yeah! They were there with their mammoths and their dead friends and, yeah.

A: It’s another inconclusive, isn’t it?

C: Another inconclusive, I think.

A: But definitely cannibalism.

C: Absolutely.

A: The cannibals of Cheddar Gorge.

C: Now, let’s travel to Belgium. We’re going to the Goyet Caves in Wallonia in Belgium, which have so many bones.

A: Endless, endless bones.

C: They’re a series of caverns. They boast the distinction of having the oldest dog skull in the world.

A: What a good boy.

C: We’re looking at the Third Cave today, which was excavated in the late 19th and early 20th century, and then again at the end of the ‘90s. The most extensive excavations were carried out by Edouard Dupont in 1868.

A: Oh God, the Victorians are getting in on it.

C: He found five “fauna-bearing levels”, aka lots of bones.

[Alix snorts]

C: Among them are Neanderthal remains dating from around 40,500 to 45,500 years ago. These “show distinctive anthropogenic modifications”, which is a very polite euphemism for cannibalism.

A: That is the most Victorian euphemism for cannibalism. I love it.

C: The bones have been broken to extract marrow in the same manner as animal bones found in the cave. There are cut marks demonstrating disarticulation and defleshing, and finally, some of the bones appear to have then been used as tools to sharpen stone tools and flints.

A: We’ve used the word ‘defleshing’ far too much in this episode already.

C: It’s gonna keep coming back. Experts conclude cannibalism happened here.

A: ‘I diagnose you with cannibalism.’

C: Due to the dates of the remains, it seems likely that they were consumed by other Neanderthals, because there weren’t any other homo species in the area – so actual, proper cannibalism, rather than inter-homo species cannibalism.

A: Inter-homo cannibalism.

C: I was trying to avoid saying that! Yes. The site “provides the first unambiguous evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in Northern Europe”. There’s no evidence to suggest the motivation for cannibalism, though. Verdict?

A: Cannibalism.

C: Yeah. Let’s travel to Spain next.

A: Hola.

C: El Sidrón in Asturias, Spain, is a cave.

A: I’m getting a feeling that most of these are caves.

C: There are a lot of caves.

A: Any bogs?

C: No, they’re all caves.

A: [Disappointed] All caves.

C: Neanderthal fossil remains were ‘accidentally’ unearthed in the El Sidrón cave in 1994. I don’t know how you accidentally unearth bones, but– Were they just digging for fun?

A: Treasure.

C: Treasure? Could be treasure. Well, they found bones.

A: Which is treasure for us.

C: The cave was then intensively executed between 2000 and 2014 by a team led by Javier Fortea at Oviedo University, then by Marco de la Rasilla after Fortea’s death. Over 25,000 Neanderthal fossil remains were excavated, making it one of the largest collections of Neanderthal fossils in Europe.

A: Would those be each individual fossil, or over 25,000 Neanderthal people?

C: That would be individual fossils. I don’t think that there were even that many people, like, literally in the world at that point!

A: The size of this cave! It would be difficult not to accidentally unearth one.

C: It adds up to at least thirteen individuals, including infants, juveniles, adolescents, young adults and adults.

A: So the whole range?

C: All of the ages.

A: All of the categories on the Sims 4.

C: Yes. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA suggests they’re a family group, with the adult men related to each other and the adult women unrelated, and then the children related to both. Which is to say, seems like the men stick together in the family group, and then women join them from other family groups and, you know, have children with their new hubbies, etc.

A: Settle down in the cave, one big happy, cannibalistic family.

C: Well, presumably they weren’t the cannibals, as they were all eaten by someone else. [Brief pause] Or they all ate one another, one at a time, but then who would have eaten the last person?

A: There might have been… more.

C: Could have been. The family appear to have died around 49,000 years ago. The bones indicate a lifetime of “nutritional stress”, with a diet made up mostly of plants and very little meat.

A: Now this sounds like there’s going to be some arguments for survival cannibalism coming up.

C: Yeah, this is a pretty good one. Non-human bones are very scarce at the site. There are some remains of deer, bovids, and a few small mammals, and slugs and/or snails.

A: Slugs! What does a fossilised slug look like?

C: [Regretfully] I didn’t look it up.

A: Homework for you, listeners.

C: The bones have strong evidence of “anthropic activity”, including cut marks, percussion pits, flaking, scarring, and anvil abrasions. All the classics. Which, again, suggests disarticulation, defleshing, breaking open to get the marrow.

A: The whole works.

C: The bones of different individuals appear to have been treated differently, which implies that what happened wasn’t part of a customary process, but rather just sort of happened in the moment, rather than as a ritual. So, again, supports us. Our endeavour.

A: Our argument to make survival cannibalism mainstream.

C: [Laughs] Normally the criteria for diagnosing nutritional cannibalism – whether that’s dietary or for survival – is that the human bones have been treated in the same manner as animal bones. Which obviously is difficult if you don’t have many animal bones in the cave. But between the intense processing, the lack of animal remains, the nutritional stress, the lack of ritual signs etc., the general consensus is probably survival cannibalism. The going theory currently is that they’re a whole family group that have been attacked and cannibalised by another family group of Neanderthals who were also starving, because of whatever was going on in the region to prevent them from eating.

A: Now that makes a lot of sense. I, however, would like to put an argument in for gastronomic incest. There is no argument that there was not a third brother and his wife, who decided that they were just going to be the ones who survived.

C: [Incredulous] And ate the whole family in one go?

A: It’s like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

C: [Laughs] Whilst I appreciate your idea – I won’t rule it out – it does seem like perhaps by the time they’ve got to, you know, your third child, you’d be like, ‘Maybe I’m gonna ditch my brother and go to another cave.’

A: Good point well made.

C: Next up, we’re still in Spain. We’ve got Gran Dolina in the Atapuerca Mountains.

A: Is it a cave?

C: It’s a ‘Great Sinkhole’ – that’s what Gran Dolina means.

A: Even better than a cave!

C: It’s in the Atapuerca Mountains in Spain, and the remains in there date from a whopping 800,000 years ago.

A: That’s too far away.

C: It is the oldest case of human cannibalism presently known.

A: We do love a trailblazer.

C: A trendsetter. The first of a long line.

A: The OG?

C: [Laughing] The OG.

A: Is that the phrase?

C: [Laughs] Yeah. 165 remains have been discovered so far, making up a minimum of eleven homo antecessor individuals. Four of them are zero-to-four years old; two of them are five-to-nine years old; two of them are adolescents; and three of them are young adults. Will note, the homo antecessor label seems to be contested in the expert communities; they could be another form of homo, but that’s the one that was suggested in this paper I read.

A: We kept a straight face at ‘they could be another sort of homo.’

[Carmella laughs]

A: What I’m really gathering from this, is you don’t really want to be a child in prehistory.

C: I guess that they’re the easiest ones. Or just child mortality rates, could be that, you know.

A: We don’t have a lot of evidence that points in favour of murder-cannibalism versus posthumous cannibalism. So you still wouldn’t want to be a child, but you might not literally be murdered for your very skin.

C: Let’s find out… These bones also show all of the classics – the cut marks, the bone breakage. They’re found mixed in with lithic tools and animal bones. The human and animal remains have a similar butchering process, and all of that suggests nutritional, rather than ritual or funerary cannibalism.

A: Or just for fun.

C: There’s no conclusive evidence of other human species inhabiting Europe at the time, so again looks like proper cannibalism from another member of the same species. But there’s no way of telling if that’s endo-cannibalism or exo-cannibalism within that.

A: We’re not intimately aware with the families.

C: [Agreeing] Mmhmm.

A: The family connections.

C: So the next question is, is it dietary cannibalism, where it’s just part of a balanced food pyramid, or is it survival cannibalism, where it’s their last resort? Well, the human remains are mixed in with animal bones throughout, which suggests that it wasn’t a one-off event of cannibalism; it certainly seems to have happened over different time periods.

A: With your argument before, eleven people is quite a number to eat in one go.

C: [Laughing] Yeah! The data also suggests that the landscape at the time would have been a temperate forest, with diversity of flora and fauna – so there should have been other food to eat that wasn’t people. In that case, perhaps humans from other groups were hunted as part of the general diet, rather than out of particular necessity?

A: Oh God, it’s The Purge.

C: Indeed. I would love, now, to tell you about a delightful article I encountered, which sounds like something that you would enjoy reading, Alix.

A: That somehow feels like a criticism of my life choices. Let’s hear it.

C: ‘Assessing the calorific significance of episodes of human cannibalism in the Palaeolithic’.

A: I love a scientific survey, I can’t help it. Facts.

C: James Cole wrote this, and, in the article, Cole uses comparable animals to develop a template for calculating the nutritional value of a human body. I know that we’ve spoken before about how many calories you might be able to get from a human body. I think the normally-cited figure is 8,000 calories from 30kg of muscle mass.

A: We’re normally looking at more emaciated bodies, so that’s obviously much lower, but that sounds about right.

C: Cole’s taken another stab at the calculation, to take into considerations such as the fact that organs are often eaten as well as flesh, for example.

A: Good point.

C: Cole’s figure comes to 9,951 calories per 24.897kg of muscle mass, which is pretty similar. Although, he points out that this is just an estimate of the total possible nutritional value of an average adult human man, and, quote, “data for females and sub-adults are not available within the published literature, and the collection of primary data of this nature was outside the ethical (and legal) scope of this study.” [Laughs] A very good point!

A: Sorry, what was he doing?

C: [Laughs] Well, no, he wouldn’t have done it, because it would have been illegal.

A: But it was fine to do for men?

[Carmella continues laughing]

A: See, I was going to start my reaction to that with ‘well that’s just sexist’, but now I think this man should be in prison.

C: [Still laughing] Anyway! Cole concludes that human prey presents “significantly lower[…] calorie value when compared to single large fauna” such as cattle, mammoths, horses etc.

A: I mean, I could have told you that.

C: So hunting humans for strictly nutritional reasons isn’t very smart.

A: You heard it here first, kids. Don’t go people hunting.

C: Does that mean that the bodies would have been hunted and eaten for a different purpose than just for nutrition? Firstly, I doubt that homo antecessors had a method to calculate the relative calories of different meats, so I’m not sure they would have been aware of this.

A: People have always been fucked up. I see no reason why our most distant, distant, distant, distant ancestors many times removed wouldn’t also have been fucked up.

C: I also argue, probably easier to catch a human child than a mammoth. [Pause] If you’re in a tight spot.

A: If you had to pick one that you could take down.

C: [Laughs] One of them’s fast food, and the other one’s more of a slog to get, you know?

[Alix snorts]

C: It’s been suggested that the young ages of the cannibalised individuals indicates hunting another group out of competition. So, it’s a nice meal and also an easy way to cull their population, to prevent them from occupying the niche.

A: I mean, you see it with other species, don’t you? You see the cannibalisation of infants and children when resources are low, but not necessarily gone.

C: Yeah.

A: And in order to assert dominance – either in an endo- or an exo- fashion – so that your gene pool survives. This isn’t something that has just appeared out of nowhere and is never seen in any other species.

C: Yeah. What’s the verdict on this one, then?

A: Indiana Jones is gonna have a field day. That’s my verdict.

C: Let’s head to France next.

A: Ooh, the geography’s all over the place.

C: Yeah, I didn’t… plan this. There’s no– There’s no specific pattern to these cases.

A: Our carbon footprint for this episode is appalling.

C: [Over-pronouncing the French] Moula-Guercy in France. In the 1990s, the remains of six Neanderthals were found in a cave at Moula-Guercy, which is in the south of France. There’s two adults, two adolescents, and two children.

A: Balanced meal.

C: [Laughs] The bones exhibit cut marks made by stone tools, dismemberment, and the finger bones have been gnawed by human teeth. [Shudders]

A: Nice.

C: The bones also indicate a time of ‘dietary stress’.

A: More than the gnawing on human finger bones?

C: Well, the victims also were under dietary stress, not just the gnawers. Interestingly, the remains of hearths indicate that the Neanderthals had access to fire within the cave, but the bones don’t really have any signs of burning. So either the flesh was eaten raw for some reason, or it was removed from the bone and then cooked, maybe. It seems like survival cannibalism could be what’s going on here. What could have caused that?

A: The survival cannibalism? [Pause] Hunger.

[Carmella laughs]

A: So I was Occam’s razoring why they wouldn’t light the fire, and surely a really obvious reason would be there’s nothing to burn, aka really bad weather, which would also be an argument for why people weren’t able to hunt.

C: Close! The hypothesised answer is global warming.

A: [Delighted] Oh, get in!

C: The remains date to the last interglacial period, which lasted from 128,000 to 114,000 years ago. Temperatures then were a couple of degrees higher than they are today, and several degrees higher than they would have been just before and after that period. We know that for tens of thousands of years, Neanderthals lived on a cold steppe, hunting large mammals like reindeer and woolly mammoth, and eating predominantly meat rather than fish or plants. Then the climate changes. Sea levels rise, and sediment core samples show that the open plains became forested. The herds of megafauna moved off and were replaced with smaller animals, like deer and reptiles.

A: Minor fauna.

C: Minor fauna. It looks like the Neanderthals who remained in the area perhaps didn’t know how to hunt any more.

A: Struggled to adjust.

C: Exactly, if you can’t adapt… It’s Darwin, isn’t it? Is it?

Both: Yes.

A: Survival of the fittest.

C: The remains of all six individuals would have fed 15-25 people, which is apparently the average size of a hunter gatherer group, for about two days, or four days with careful rationing. The archaeologists Defleur and Desclaux conclude: “Moula-Guercy is not a mark of bestiality or sub-humanity. The synthesis of the data makes it possible to interpret this occurrence as a short and single episode of survival endo-cannibalism in response to nutritional stress induced by rapid and radical environmental changes.”

A: Well said! It’s not a sign of anything other than the need to survive.

C: So verdict on this one seems pretty clear!

A: Survival cannibalism. We’re at one definite, and all of the rest of them are– In our hearts, they’re survival cannibalism.

C: Thank you for joining me on this clickbait article of ‘Six archaeological sites most likely to indicate prehistoric survival cannibalism’.

A: ‘The last one will shock you.’

C: [Laughs] Did prehistoric people eat one another?

Both: [Emphatically] Yes.

C: Why? Not always clear; the answer isn’t always the same. As our friend James Cole (famous for the calorie calculations) puts it: “We know that modern humans have a range of complex motivations for cannibalism that extend from ritual, aggressive, and survival to dietary reasons. Why then would a hominin species such as the Neanderthals[…] not have an equally complex attitude towards cannibalism?”

A: Neanderthals: they’re just like us.

[Outro Music – Daniel Wackett]

A: Thank you for listening to Episode Five. Vindication! Survival cannibalism has been around longer than humanity itself. And we only giggled a little bit about homo sapiens.

C: [In a truly terrible cowboy voice] Join us next time for a rootin’ tootin’ good time.

A: Howdy!

[Outro music continues]

A: Casting Lots Podcast can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr as @CastingLotsPod, and on Facebook as Casting Lots Podcast.

C: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, don’t forget to subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please rate, review and share to bring more people to the table.

A: Casting Lots: A Survival Cannibalism Podcast, is researched, written and recorded by Alix and Carmella, with post-production and editing also by Carmella and Alix. Art and logo design by Riley – @Tallestfriend on Twitter and Instagram – with audio and music by Daniel Wackett – Daniel Wackett on SoundCloud and @ds_wack on Twitter. Casting Lots is part of the Morbid Audio Podcast Network – search #MorbidAudio on Twitter – and the network’s music is provided by Mikaela Moody – mikaelamoody1 on Bandcamp.

[Morbid Audio Sting – Mikaela Moody]

[Dog barking]

C: Dog.

A: The oldest dog in Europe!

C: Oh, I can still hear him now…

A: Echoing through the caves…

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İçerik Alix Penn and Carmella Lowkis tarafından sağlanmıştır. Bölümler, grafikler ve podcast açıklamaları dahil tüm podcast içeriği doğrudan Alix Penn and Carmella Lowkis veya podcast platform ortağı tarafından yüklenir ve sağlanır. Birinin telif hakkıyla korunan çalışmanızı izniniz olmadan kullandığını düşünüyorsanız burada https://tr.player.fm/legal özetlenen süreci takip edebilirsiniz.

For as long as humans have existed, we have been eating other humans. This week, Carmella takes us on a tour of six Stone Age sites where evidence of survival cannibalism has been uncovered.

CREDITS

Written, hosted and produced by Alix Penn and Carmella Lowkis.

Theme music by Daniel Wackett. Find him on Twitter @ds_wack and Soundcloud as Daniel Wackett.

Logo by Riley. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @tallestfriend.

Casting Lots is part of the Morbid Audio Podcast Network. Network sting by Mikaela Moody. Find her on Bandcamp as mikaelamoody1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

TRANSCRIPT

Alix: Have you ever been really, really hungry?

Carmella: You’re listening to Casting Lots: A Survival Cannibalism Podcast.

A: I’m Alix.

C: I’m Carmella.

A: And now let’s tuck into the gruesome history of this ultimate taboo…

[Intro Music – Daniel Wackett]

C: Welcome to Episode Five, where we’re exploring survival cannibalism in prehistory.

[Intro music continues]

C: Alix, would you say that survival cannibalism has been around since human history began?

A: Since the dawn of time.

C: Yeah, it was a trick question, because survival cannibalism also happened in prehistory.

A: [Excited] Oooh!

C: And that’s what this episode’s about. Today we’re going to look at prehistoric survival cannibalism.

A: Going further back than we ever have before.

C: When I set off researching this episode, I thought to myself, ‘shall I just check what the definition of prehistoric is?’ [Laughs]

A: Good point. Yeah.

C: Good starting point. And it’s a good job that I did, because, actually, I didn’t have any clue, as it turns out. From the Cambridge English Dictionary, prehistory is ‘the period of human history before there were written records of events’. So it’s linked to whether there was a writing system, which I didn’t realise. Did you know that?

A: [Patiently] I did know that.

C: Well, you’re winning.

[Alix snorts]

C: What that means is that what counts as prehistoric varies geographically, where cultures have developed written language at different speeds. In Eurasia and North Africa, prehistory tends to be split into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age – which are named after the tools that are being used, but again those ages can’t apply so tidily to all cultures and all locations etc.

A: So basically this is a vague approximation of ‘the before times’?

C: [Agreeing] The before times. Some of the earliest cultures to develop written history, all in the early Bronze Age, were Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley civilisation, and ancient Egypt. Then neighbouring civilisations followed suit, and then most other civilisations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. But not all of them, because prehistory technically ends really late in some places. For example, 1788 is the end of prehistory in Australia.

A: Sorry?!

C: Yeah. Sounds really arbitrary to me, but there we go.

A: I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with how we’re talking about prehistory now. Not necessarily us, I mean more academic institutions.

C: Yes, there’s a privileging of written history over oral history there, I think. So I’ve sort of ignored that in this episode, and what it means in terms of what we’re talking about today, I’m looking at prehistory in the Stone Age, which is a much tidier date range of about 2.2 million years ago up to about 3,000 BCE. You know, just really small and narrow.

A: There won’t be much to cover there at all.

C: [Laughs] I also hear you ask– [Laughs] ‘Carmella, what evidence do we have of survival cannibalism in prehistory, if, by its very definition, there is no written record?’

A: Carmella, we rely on people writing down that they have eaten other people. How can there be any evidence of survival cannibalism before people learned to write?

C: The answer is ‘bones’.

A: Gnaw marks.

C: [Chuckles] Literally. More loyal listeners will recall Jamestown, the Donner Party, Alfred Packer, the Franklin Expedition – and they will recall that archaeologists have examined the bones of all of these sites to determine whether or not cannibalism happened.

A: Carmella’s doing a lovely mime of what I think is ‘bones’, but I’m not quite sure. I’m just gonna pass that on so you can imagine it.

C: Yeah, that’s a bone mime. [Laughs] By looking at those sites where you know cannibalism is alleged to happen, and studying what marks there are there, it means that archaeologists can use that data to make a very solid guess at whether or not other bones have been cannibalised; for example, prehistoric ones.

A: An educated guess there. And, I seem to remember that when they analysed some of the bones from the Packer site, they did have academics of prehistory come and verify the cannibalism, because of there being limited instances of cannibal bones.

C: In order to identify that cannibalism may have happened, archaeologists look for a number of key signatures in human remains.

A: Tooth marks.

C: Tooth marks are one of them.

A: I’m going to assume also evidence that flesh has been cut off bones? And we’ve already had in old episodes, especially in Season 1, when we were really explaining the ins and outs of what part of the body to eat, where particularly fleshy parts of the body had been targeted. So you would assume that if there’s evidence that the thighs and buttocks have been cut off, that’s probably more likely to be for food than the head, which may be more ritualistic, perhaps.

C: Here are the indicators of cannibalism, and some of them are on there, well done. We’ve got: lack of a cranial base on an otherwise near-complete skeleton – that’s to get the brain out and each it. Absence of vertebrae, because they’ve been crushed or boiled down to get at the bone marrow and grease. Presence of cut and chop marks, as well as the arrangement of them – whether they’ve been defleshed and, like you said, where they’ve been defleshed. And also anvil abrasions, which is where a bone has been whacked against a rock. Which I am miming right now.

A: Now, I have a very visceral memory from when I was a young child, of coming downstairs and there was a TV show on which was about the history of music, and it was a parody. But there was a caveman using human bones to make a xylophone. I cannot tell you what this programme is. I have Googled it; I have asked people; no one seems to remember anything about this How It’s Made for grownups parody.

[Carmella chuckles]

A: But I can still see that caveman making a xylophone out of human bones. It just took me back.

C: So the actual reason you would do that is to break them open to get at the marrow, but sure, maybe for music as well. Following on from that, if the long bones have been broken to access the marrow – the long bones being arm bones, leg bones, them guys. If there are similar butchering techniques on human remains to animal remains that may be buried nearby. And equally if the human remains and the animal remains have been discarded in the same manner.

A: Ah, yeah.

C: Like, they’ve all just been thrown in the same trash, then you know that the human bones haven’t been buried with much particular care. Evidence of cooking: burnt bones and pot polish, which makes sense. ‘Peeling’, which is where a roughened bone surface is produced when fresh bone is fractured and peeled apart.

A: I don’t like that.

C: No. Percussion pits, which is the impact of stone or solid matter against a bone, that scars the surface.

A: Percussion pits? I’m going back to this xylophone thing was much more accurate than I ever thought it was!

C: And finally, scraping marks or, better, human teeth marks.

A: Sometimes the clichés are there for a reason.

C: When archaeologists examine bones, they look for a combination of those signatures, and some of those being present might suggest that cannibalism took place. It doesn’t always prove that, and it doesn’t exactly demonstrate the motive. For example, a skeleton could be defleshed for storage in an ossuary, rather than for eating. Equally, the cranial base could be removed to make a skull cup, which was apparently a really big trend back then.

A: A skull cup to drink from?

C: Yeah.

A: Okay, I was imagining more of a skull cap.

C: Oh!

A: To put…

C: Perhaps for that reason as well. Fashion as well as utility.

A: We are really, really going for the old caveman stereotypes here, aren’t we?

C: [Laughs] Yep.

A: Now, I was going to ask how one would go about working out if cannibalism took place for survival, rather than ritualistic [Pause] or other purposes. I’m falling into that trap of just assuming that if we don’t understand it, it’s a ritual. Which is very Eurocentric.

C: I’m so glad you asked the question, Alix, because it’s a perfect segue.

A: [Laughs] Didn’t even plan that. Genuine question.

C: Even if you can identify cannibalism, how do you tell if it was survival, and not as part of a funerary ritual, or, indeed, just part of a regular diet?

A: Or just for fun.

C: Just for fun. Sometimes it happens.

A: When was the first serial killer?

C: [Intrigued] Hmm!

A: I know this isn’t what we do in our podcast, but at some point there’s got to have been a first serial killer, and I see no reason that it can’t be in the Stone Age.

C: Yeah.

A: It’s the next BBC Four–

[Carmella laughs]

A: Drama.

C: Let’s pitch that! This is good. Well, the answer is that you have to look out for more clues. For example, are there lots of animal remains discarded in the same place? Then they probably weren’t starving to death. Have skull cups been made, or the bones otherwise carved or worked? Sounds like it was a ritual instead. Have the bones been intensely processed to get every last scrap of nutrition, such as through long bone breakage, pot polish? Sounds like maybe we’re onto something there.

A: If you’re at the point where you have to extract brain matter and bone marrow, you are probably very hungry. Even some of our most prolific survival cannibals have pointed out that brain matter isn’t the most tasty of substances.

C: You’ll recall that the Donner Party, for example, we know that they ate people, and from those bones we can see that they were processed in that manner, because of how desperate and starving they were. So that’s how you would make that leap. [Laughing[ And then I have one final word on definitions before we get started.

A: We’ve not started yet?

C: [Laughs] Before we get started with the cases, I guess we should say. Because of how far back we’re going, I’m saying ‘humans’, but not all of them are gonna be homo sapiens. There are gonna be a lot of Neanderthals and other members of the homo genus thrown in.

[Alix snorts]

C: ‘Pause to get giggles over homo out of the way’ is a note in my script.

[Both laugh]

A: I was trying– I was trying to formulate a ‘tell me more about the homos’ joke, so I’m glad you preempted it.

C: So we’re gonna make that joke only now–

[Both continue to giggle]

C: And then be very mature for the rest. In this episode, I’m going to take you through a selection of archaeological sites where there’s evidence of prehistoric cannibalism, and then we’re going to be detectives and discuss whether we think it was survival cannibalism or not.

A: We are slightly biased as a podcast, but let’s go for it. We’ll try and take our survival cannibalism hat off.

C: Let’s start in Yorkshire.

A: I love Yorkshire. Let’s go.

C: Kinsey Cave in the Yorkshire Dales, which is the UK, for our international listeners.

A: I was about to do a Yorkshire accent. I’m not sure whether my four years in the North allow me to do that or not. No, I’ve decided they don’t.

C: [Laughs] I mean…

A: [In a Yorkshire accent] Up t’moors.

C: Yeah.

A: There we go.

C: That’s where we’re going. In the 1920s, amateur archaeologist/greengrocer, Tot Lord, was exploring Kinsey Cave in the Yorkshire Dales.

A: I’d like to point out that even up North, prehistory had ended by the 1920s.

C: [Laughs] Yeah, I’m giving some context on the discovery of the site. It’s for flavour.

A: Flavour.

C: He had a hobby, liked to go into caves and look for human bones. [Laughs].

A: That’s worrying, and I think he’d be on a list.

C: He discovered some human bones alongside animal bones inside Kinsey Cave, but he was not taken seriously by professional archaeologists, because he was just a greengrocer – what did he know?

A: He probably knows what a bone looks like…

C: They were like, ‘These bones probably aren’t that old. Why you showing us these Roman bones?’

A: See, I still think the first thing would be the police would get involved.

C: [Laughing] 1920s.

A: It was a different time.

C: Tom Lord, Tot Lord’s grandson.

A: Tot.

C: Tot and Tom. Tom took the bones to an archaeologist, Tim Taylor, at Bradford University in the early 2000s.

A: So they just kept these bones hanging around the house for years?

C: They had a family collection of many bones. Tot also purchased ones that other people had collected, he liked– He just collected bones.

A: This is a strange family. I would not be buying my food from this family greengrocers.

C: So Tom inherited all of these bones, and decided to do something with them.

A: [Snorts] Build a sculpture.

C: Taylor from Bradford University analysed the bones between 2005 and 2011, and he found that the bones had been ‘heavily processed’. There were cut marks in the long bones: fine ones on the arm bones, and heavy chops at the end of the thigh bones, which suggest butchery. They also displayed a certain amount of pot polish, which implies that they’ve been cooked in a pot – clue’s in the name. Taylor initially suspected that the bones came from Roman Britain, much like the other archaeologist who turned their nose up at them.

A: Archaeologists do also quite like Roman Britain.

C: The phrase used was “of no significant age”. And apparently the Romans apply to that period.

A: Even if they’d eaten each other?

C: [Laughs] I don’t question it.

A: I do! I question it a lot. What are these archaeologists getting up to that these alleged cannibalistic Romans of North Yorkshire are just, oh well, ten a penny? I wanna be studying what these archaeologists are studying.

C: Taylor then notices that the cut marks appear to have been made with stone tools, which is not something that the Romans would be doing. So, sent them off for carbon dating, and they returned as being from around 3,900 BCE, making them the oldest identified human bones in the North of England.

A: [Impressed] Oooh.

C: Based on the uncovered samples, there’s a minimum total of three individuals: two infants (one of them perinatal) and a young adult aged between 18 and 25. On the other hand, the largest possible number of individuals in the cave is eleven neonatal children, five infants, and ten adults. Pretty hard to be precise, but I’m impressed they can come up with any numbers based on a load of bone bits.

A: I can see why there’s such a problem with defining exactly how many bodies are in the cave, but also you can’t help but picture your old greengrocer going in and just finding perfect skeletons.

[Carmella laughs]

A: So you sort of have to remember that, no, these are fragments and bits, and maybe that explains slightly why all the other archaeologists were like, ‘Oh no, you fool, these are but Roman bones.’ Because there’s no solid story attached to them. You need the science and the technology to drag out all of those details.

C: Yeah. Taylor and a team went to properly excavate the caves, where they found more butchered animal bones mixed in with a newborn baby’s arm bone. Warning: this is unpleasant!

[Both laugh]

C: Infant bones also displayed marks of butchery, such as a rib bone with a hack mark on the inside, suggesting the baby had literally been torn open.

A: Carmella mimed that as well.

C: Alongside the bones were pot boilers, which were stones that you heat in a fire and then use for cooking. So looks like cannibalism is a pretty likely explanation here for what’s going on.

A: I do get the feeling that the flesh from these bodies was eaten.

C: But for what purpose? Taylor hypothesises that this could be the result of an “ethnic conflict”, so different groups eating one another as an act of rivalry. According to Taylor, the date suggests a conflict between Mesoliths and Neoliths, and, to quote, him, “They are symbolically wresting the future, trying to kind of put a stop on the future(…) of those farming communities by eating their best and youngest”. Not sure I fully am behind that one, Taylor, but okay.

A: Hmm, I feel that there’s a lot of hypothesising going on there. With absolutely no written record, you’re just pulling ideas out the air as to why these children were eaten.

C: Well, you’re gonna love this next one, Alix. This is from osteologist (bone scientist) Diana Good, who was also on Taylor’s team. She suggests that it could be a family putting their own dead newborn into a cave, “which has the connotations of a uterine environment”.

A: Oh fuck off!

C: As a funerary question. [Laughing] And I have to ask, how does one explain all the adult bones, and also the fact that they’ve all been boiled for eating?

A: I don’t know what her uterus does once a month!

[Carmella cackles]

C: So I don’t necessarily buy what the experts are suggesting here. I’m not saying they’re definitely wrong, but I’m saying that there are some leaps and assumptions made there.

A: It’s like, yes, a cave is yonic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything when it comes to people being boiled.

C: [Laughs] The connection’s just not there. That’s all the evidence I have to present. What’s your verdict, Alix?

A: My verdict is that the cave probably isn’t a vagina.

C: [Laughs] Okay, step one.

A: Profit.

C: [Laughs] My verdict is inconclusive, I think, on this one. Definite cannibalism. Can’t necessarily say what it was for.

A: You did say that animal bones were also discovered.

C: There were some animal bones, yes. So perhaps more of a dietary habit, rather than desperation?

A: Possibly, but the amount of work that these bones had had done on them does indicate that extreme efforts were made to extract nutrients.

C: Possibly. Although, with the pot polish and all the different bones, you could imagine a big stewpot, and you just sort of smash everything and throw it all in together, which would show the same kind of extraction methods but would just be as a result of making a stew. Not sure.

A: Our cookbook will be released in time for Christmas 2021.

C: [Laughs] Next up, we’re going to Cheddar.

A: [Appreciatively] Cheddar Gorge.

C: Cheddar Gorge indeed. Gough’s Cave, which is in Somerset in the UK, for, again, those international listeners who may not be–

A: Intimately familiar with British geography.

C: Yes. As a Brit who grew up in South-West England, for me, Cheddar Gorge is a fun day out for all the family. There’s a limestone gorge, there are caves, there’s a museum about bones and cannibalism. Apparently the caves were the inspiration for Helm’s Deep (J. R. R. Tolkein, Lord of the Rings). So just picture that bit in Lord of the Rings in Helm’s Deep and, you know, that’s pretty much it. Context is there.

A: Yep, they’re interchangeable. Completely.

C: Gough’s Cave is famous as the discovery site of Cheddar Man, the oldest almost complete homo sapiens skeleton discovered in the UK. No evidence that he was cannibalised, I’m afraid.

A: That’s a shame. Isn’t he the one that they did a recreation of recently?

C: Yes, yes.

A: And all the racists came out to play because he wasn’t white?

C: Fun fact! He wasn’t white. But yes, indeed, that’s the guy. However, before Cheddar Man, in Gough’s Cave, there were the Horse People of Cheddar Gorge.

A: They sound like your worst nightmare!

C: Well, they’re long dead, so they can’t get to me now. They arrived in Britain around 14,700 years ago, and they led a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with their most notable prey being horses – which they had followed across Doggerland from Europe. A collection of the Horse People’s bones was first discovered between 1986 and 1992 by a team from the Natural History Museum, and then was re-examined again in 2017. So we’ve got a lot of data on these bones. The remains appear to belong to five people: a two-to-three-year-old child; two adolescents; a young adult; and an older individual. The bones are mixed in with animal bones, flint remains, and small pieces of carved antler and mammoth ivory. The skeletons had all be disarticulated in the same way as the butchered animals.

A: Nice!

C: And had been defleshed. And 42% of the remains showed human teeth marks.

A: I love it. I love it. I am picturing the gallery in the Cheddar museum, just with the bones and the teeth marks. I can see the interpretation, it’s more respectful than we are.

C: [Laughs] A third of the bones had also been broken up post-mortem, presumably to extract marrow. Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said: “These people were processing the flesh of humans with exactly the same expertise that they used to process the flesh of animals. They stripped every bit of food they could get from those bones.”

A: Sounds like survival cannibalism to me.

C: Experts did originally tend to find in favour of survival cannibalism. The human teeth marks mean that it was definitely cannibalism, there’s no– Why else are you gnawing bones?

A: Boredom.

C: Yeah. [Snorts] The heavy processing suggests desperate extraction, etc. etc. However, the 2017 team who re-examined the bones found some extra evidence to confuse matters. Some of the long bones displayed zig-zag cut marks that seemed to form an intentional pattern that had been made deliberately rather than as part of the defleshing process. Furthermore, the edges of some of the skulls had been smoothed down to make them into skull cups. Doctor Silvia Bello from the Earth Sciences department of the Natural History Museum suggests that it could, in fact, be some kind of ritual or funerary cannibalism, where the flesh is eaten and then the bones decorated in some manner. The fact that none of the dead appear to have been killed in a violent incident backs that up… Apart from one who was beheaded, by the way, just to correct Doctor Silvia Bello there.

A: But it was a non-violent beheading.

C: Non-violent beheading. I guess you can’t tell whether it was posthumous or not? Oh, maybe you could…

A: I think that you can tell. I feel like you should be able to tell.

C: Yeah, come on, get it together, Natural–

A: Natural History Museum.

[Both laugh]

C: In any case, it seems like at least most of them weren’t killed for food, so, rather, “this was some kind of cultural process”, according to Doctor Bello. But she does also concede that “it is still quite possible people ate each other because there simply wasn’t anything else to eat”. What’s the verdict on that one, then?

A: I was thinking about Doctor Bello, and I was thinking about whether there’s any evidence of the timeframe between the consumption and the decoration.

C: Yeah, perhaps you could eat them, then get bored.

A: I was more thinking desperation and then actually things stabilise, so you then go back to bodies that you have previously cannibalised out of desperation and add the carvings and turn them into skull cups.

C: Like as a sort of… apology? Or for fun? Or…? What’s the vision here?

A: Sort of an apology, sort of an acknowledgement. Because one of the things I’m not clear about with this one, is whether the bodies have been found in a prehistoric trash heap or not. Because there’s bits of–

C: They were found with some animal remains and also other worked bones, so sort of carved and decorated animal bones and ivory.

A: Antlers and the mammoth ivory.

C: Yeah.

A: So that confuses it for me, because this isn’t necessarily all just waste product, but it’s also not all necessarily evidence of a cultural process. There seems to be several things that have happened here.

C: It’s also possible that these are, you know, these are just various things that were in the cave whilst it was occupied, and not so much a trash heap so much as what you leave behind and over time becomes trash? I don’t know.

A: It might not all have happened on the same day.

C: [Laughs] Yeah! They were there with their mammoths and their dead friends and, yeah.

A: It’s another inconclusive, isn’t it?

C: Another inconclusive, I think.

A: But definitely cannibalism.

C: Absolutely.

A: The cannibals of Cheddar Gorge.

C: Now, let’s travel to Belgium. We’re going to the Goyet Caves in Wallonia in Belgium, which have so many bones.

A: Endless, endless bones.

C: They’re a series of caverns. They boast the distinction of having the oldest dog skull in the world.

A: What a good boy.

C: We’re looking at the Third Cave today, which was excavated in the late 19th and early 20th century, and then again at the end of the ‘90s. The most extensive excavations were carried out by Edouard Dupont in 1868.

A: Oh God, the Victorians are getting in on it.

C: He found five “fauna-bearing levels”, aka lots of bones.

[Alix snorts]

C: Among them are Neanderthal remains dating from around 40,500 to 45,500 years ago. These “show distinctive anthropogenic modifications”, which is a very polite euphemism for cannibalism.

A: That is the most Victorian euphemism for cannibalism. I love it.

C: The bones have been broken to extract marrow in the same manner as animal bones found in the cave. There are cut marks demonstrating disarticulation and defleshing, and finally, some of the bones appear to have then been used as tools to sharpen stone tools and flints.

A: We’ve used the word ‘defleshing’ far too much in this episode already.

C: It’s gonna keep coming back. Experts conclude cannibalism happened here.

A: ‘I diagnose you with cannibalism.’

C: Due to the dates of the remains, it seems likely that they were consumed by other Neanderthals, because there weren’t any other homo species in the area – so actual, proper cannibalism, rather than inter-homo species cannibalism.

A: Inter-homo cannibalism.

C: I was trying to avoid saying that! Yes. The site “provides the first unambiguous evidence of Neanderthal cannibalism in Northern Europe”. There’s no evidence to suggest the motivation for cannibalism, though. Verdict?

A: Cannibalism.

C: Yeah. Let’s travel to Spain next.

A: Hola.

C: El Sidrón in Asturias, Spain, is a cave.

A: I’m getting a feeling that most of these are caves.

C: There are a lot of caves.

A: Any bogs?

C: No, they’re all caves.

A: [Disappointed] All caves.

C: Neanderthal fossil remains were ‘accidentally’ unearthed in the El Sidrón cave in 1994. I don’t know how you accidentally unearth bones, but– Were they just digging for fun?

A: Treasure.

C: Treasure? Could be treasure. Well, they found bones.

A: Which is treasure for us.

C: The cave was then intensively executed between 2000 and 2014 by a team led by Javier Fortea at Oviedo University, then by Marco de la Rasilla after Fortea’s death. Over 25,000 Neanderthal fossil remains were excavated, making it one of the largest collections of Neanderthal fossils in Europe.

A: Would those be each individual fossil, or over 25,000 Neanderthal people?

C: That would be individual fossils. I don’t think that there were even that many people, like, literally in the world at that point!

A: The size of this cave! It would be difficult not to accidentally unearth one.

C: It adds up to at least thirteen individuals, including infants, juveniles, adolescents, young adults and adults.

A: So the whole range?

C: All of the ages.

A: All of the categories on the Sims 4.

C: Yes. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA suggests they’re a family group, with the adult men related to each other and the adult women unrelated, and then the children related to both. Which is to say, seems like the men stick together in the family group, and then women join them from other family groups and, you know, have children with their new hubbies, etc.

A: Settle down in the cave, one big happy, cannibalistic family.

C: Well, presumably they weren’t the cannibals, as they were all eaten by someone else. [Brief pause] Or they all ate one another, one at a time, but then who would have eaten the last person?

A: There might have been… more.

C: Could have been. The family appear to have died around 49,000 years ago. The bones indicate a lifetime of “nutritional stress”, with a diet made up mostly of plants and very little meat.

A: Now this sounds like there’s going to be some arguments for survival cannibalism coming up.

C: Yeah, this is a pretty good one. Non-human bones are very scarce at the site. There are some remains of deer, bovids, and a few small mammals, and slugs and/or snails.

A: Slugs! What does a fossilised slug look like?

C: [Regretfully] I didn’t look it up.

A: Homework for you, listeners.

C: The bones have strong evidence of “anthropic activity”, including cut marks, percussion pits, flaking, scarring, and anvil abrasions. All the classics. Which, again, suggests disarticulation, defleshing, breaking open to get the marrow.

A: The whole works.

C: The bones of different individuals appear to have been treated differently, which implies that what happened wasn’t part of a customary process, but rather just sort of happened in the moment, rather than as a ritual. So, again, supports us. Our endeavour.

A: Our argument to make survival cannibalism mainstream.

C: [Laughs] Normally the criteria for diagnosing nutritional cannibalism – whether that’s dietary or for survival – is that the human bones have been treated in the same manner as animal bones. Which obviously is difficult if you don’t have many animal bones in the cave. But between the intense processing, the lack of animal remains, the nutritional stress, the lack of ritual signs etc., the general consensus is probably survival cannibalism. The going theory currently is that they’re a whole family group that have been attacked and cannibalised by another family group of Neanderthals who were also starving, because of whatever was going on in the region to prevent them from eating.

A: Now that makes a lot of sense. I, however, would like to put an argument in for gastronomic incest. There is no argument that there was not a third brother and his wife, who decided that they were just going to be the ones who survived.

C: [Incredulous] And ate the whole family in one go?

A: It’s like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

C: [Laughs] Whilst I appreciate your idea – I won’t rule it out – it does seem like perhaps by the time they’ve got to, you know, your third child, you’d be like, ‘Maybe I’m gonna ditch my brother and go to another cave.’

A: Good point well made.

C: Next up, we’re still in Spain. We’ve got Gran Dolina in the Atapuerca Mountains.

A: Is it a cave?

C: It’s a ‘Great Sinkhole’ – that’s what Gran Dolina means.

A: Even better than a cave!

C: It’s in the Atapuerca Mountains in Spain, and the remains in there date from a whopping 800,000 years ago.

A: That’s too far away.

C: It is the oldest case of human cannibalism presently known.

A: We do love a trailblazer.

C: A trendsetter. The first of a long line.

A: The OG?

C: [Laughing] The OG.

A: Is that the phrase?

C: [Laughs] Yeah. 165 remains have been discovered so far, making up a minimum of eleven homo antecessor individuals. Four of them are zero-to-four years old; two of them are five-to-nine years old; two of them are adolescents; and three of them are young adults. Will note, the homo antecessor label seems to be contested in the expert communities; they could be another form of homo, but that’s the one that was suggested in this paper I read.

A: We kept a straight face at ‘they could be another sort of homo.’

[Carmella laughs]

A: What I’m really gathering from this, is you don’t really want to be a child in prehistory.

C: I guess that they’re the easiest ones. Or just child mortality rates, could be that, you know.

A: We don’t have a lot of evidence that points in favour of murder-cannibalism versus posthumous cannibalism. So you still wouldn’t want to be a child, but you might not literally be murdered for your very skin.

C: Let’s find out… These bones also show all of the classics – the cut marks, the bone breakage. They’re found mixed in with lithic tools and animal bones. The human and animal remains have a similar butchering process, and all of that suggests nutritional, rather than ritual or funerary cannibalism.

A: Or just for fun.

C: There’s no conclusive evidence of other human species inhabiting Europe at the time, so again looks like proper cannibalism from another member of the same species. But there’s no way of telling if that’s endo-cannibalism or exo-cannibalism within that.

A: We’re not intimately aware with the families.

C: [Agreeing] Mmhmm.

A: The family connections.

C: So the next question is, is it dietary cannibalism, where it’s just part of a balanced food pyramid, or is it survival cannibalism, where it’s their last resort? Well, the human remains are mixed in with animal bones throughout, which suggests that it wasn’t a one-off event of cannibalism; it certainly seems to have happened over different time periods.

A: With your argument before, eleven people is quite a number to eat in one go.

C: [Laughing] Yeah! The data also suggests that the landscape at the time would have been a temperate forest, with diversity of flora and fauna – so there should have been other food to eat that wasn’t people. In that case, perhaps humans from other groups were hunted as part of the general diet, rather than out of particular necessity?

A: Oh God, it’s The Purge.

C: Indeed. I would love, now, to tell you about a delightful article I encountered, which sounds like something that you would enjoy reading, Alix.

A: That somehow feels like a criticism of my life choices. Let’s hear it.

C: ‘Assessing the calorific significance of episodes of human cannibalism in the Palaeolithic’.

A: I love a scientific survey, I can’t help it. Facts.

C: James Cole wrote this, and, in the article, Cole uses comparable animals to develop a template for calculating the nutritional value of a human body. I know that we’ve spoken before about how many calories you might be able to get from a human body. I think the normally-cited figure is 8,000 calories from 30kg of muscle mass.

A: We’re normally looking at more emaciated bodies, so that’s obviously much lower, but that sounds about right.

C: Cole’s taken another stab at the calculation, to take into considerations such as the fact that organs are often eaten as well as flesh, for example.

A: Good point.

C: Cole’s figure comes to 9,951 calories per 24.897kg of muscle mass, which is pretty similar. Although, he points out that this is just an estimate of the total possible nutritional value of an average adult human man, and, quote, “data for females and sub-adults are not available within the published literature, and the collection of primary data of this nature was outside the ethical (and legal) scope of this study.” [Laughs] A very good point!

A: Sorry, what was he doing?

C: [Laughs] Well, no, he wouldn’t have done it, because it would have been illegal.

A: But it was fine to do for men?

[Carmella continues laughing]

A: See, I was going to start my reaction to that with ‘well that’s just sexist’, but now I think this man should be in prison.

C: [Still laughing] Anyway! Cole concludes that human prey presents “significantly lower[…] calorie value when compared to single large fauna” such as cattle, mammoths, horses etc.

A: I mean, I could have told you that.

C: So hunting humans for strictly nutritional reasons isn’t very smart.

A: You heard it here first, kids. Don’t go people hunting.

C: Does that mean that the bodies would have been hunted and eaten for a different purpose than just for nutrition? Firstly, I doubt that homo antecessors had a method to calculate the relative calories of different meats, so I’m not sure they would have been aware of this.

A: People have always been fucked up. I see no reason why our most distant, distant, distant, distant ancestors many times removed wouldn’t also have been fucked up.

C: I also argue, probably easier to catch a human child than a mammoth. [Pause] If you’re in a tight spot.

A: If you had to pick one that you could take down.

C: [Laughs] One of them’s fast food, and the other one’s more of a slog to get, you know?

[Alix snorts]

C: It’s been suggested that the young ages of the cannibalised individuals indicates hunting another group out of competition. So, it’s a nice meal and also an easy way to cull their population, to prevent them from occupying the niche.

A: I mean, you see it with other species, don’t you? You see the cannibalisation of infants and children when resources are low, but not necessarily gone.

C: Yeah.

A: And in order to assert dominance – either in an endo- or an exo- fashion – so that your gene pool survives. This isn’t something that has just appeared out of nowhere and is never seen in any other species.

C: Yeah. What’s the verdict on this one, then?

A: Indiana Jones is gonna have a field day. That’s my verdict.

C: Let’s head to France next.

A: Ooh, the geography’s all over the place.

C: Yeah, I didn’t… plan this. There’s no– There’s no specific pattern to these cases.

A: Our carbon footprint for this episode is appalling.

C: [Over-pronouncing the French] Moula-Guercy in France. In the 1990s, the remains of six Neanderthals were found in a cave at Moula-Guercy, which is in the south of France. There’s two adults, two adolescents, and two children.

A: Balanced meal.

C: [Laughs] The bones exhibit cut marks made by stone tools, dismemberment, and the finger bones have been gnawed by human teeth. [Shudders]

A: Nice.

C: The bones also indicate a time of ‘dietary stress’.

A: More than the gnawing on human finger bones?

C: Well, the victims also were under dietary stress, not just the gnawers. Interestingly, the remains of hearths indicate that the Neanderthals had access to fire within the cave, but the bones don’t really have any signs of burning. So either the flesh was eaten raw for some reason, or it was removed from the bone and then cooked, maybe. It seems like survival cannibalism could be what’s going on here. What could have caused that?

A: The survival cannibalism? [Pause] Hunger.

[Carmella laughs]

A: So I was Occam’s razoring why they wouldn’t light the fire, and surely a really obvious reason would be there’s nothing to burn, aka really bad weather, which would also be an argument for why people weren’t able to hunt.

C: Close! The hypothesised answer is global warming.

A: [Delighted] Oh, get in!

C: The remains date to the last interglacial period, which lasted from 128,000 to 114,000 years ago. Temperatures then were a couple of degrees higher than they are today, and several degrees higher than they would have been just before and after that period. We know that for tens of thousands of years, Neanderthals lived on a cold steppe, hunting large mammals like reindeer and woolly mammoth, and eating predominantly meat rather than fish or plants. Then the climate changes. Sea levels rise, and sediment core samples show that the open plains became forested. The herds of megafauna moved off and were replaced with smaller animals, like deer and reptiles.

A: Minor fauna.

C: Minor fauna. It looks like the Neanderthals who remained in the area perhaps didn’t know how to hunt any more.

A: Struggled to adjust.

C: Exactly, if you can’t adapt… It’s Darwin, isn’t it? Is it?

Both: Yes.

A: Survival of the fittest.

C: The remains of all six individuals would have fed 15-25 people, which is apparently the average size of a hunter gatherer group, for about two days, or four days with careful rationing. The archaeologists Defleur and Desclaux conclude: “Moula-Guercy is not a mark of bestiality or sub-humanity. The synthesis of the data makes it possible to interpret this occurrence as a short and single episode of survival endo-cannibalism in response to nutritional stress induced by rapid and radical environmental changes.”

A: Well said! It’s not a sign of anything other than the need to survive.

C: So verdict on this one seems pretty clear!

A: Survival cannibalism. We’re at one definite, and all of the rest of them are– In our hearts, they’re survival cannibalism.

C: Thank you for joining me on this clickbait article of ‘Six archaeological sites most likely to indicate prehistoric survival cannibalism’.

A: ‘The last one will shock you.’

C: [Laughs] Did prehistoric people eat one another?

Both: [Emphatically] Yes.

C: Why? Not always clear; the answer isn’t always the same. As our friend James Cole (famous for the calorie calculations) puts it: “We know that modern humans have a range of complex motivations for cannibalism that extend from ritual, aggressive, and survival to dietary reasons. Why then would a hominin species such as the Neanderthals[…] not have an equally complex attitude towards cannibalism?”

A: Neanderthals: they’re just like us.

[Outro Music – Daniel Wackett]

A: Thank you for listening to Episode Five. Vindication! Survival cannibalism has been around longer than humanity itself. And we only giggled a little bit about homo sapiens.

C: [In a truly terrible cowboy voice] Join us next time for a rootin’ tootin’ good time.

A: Howdy!

[Outro music continues]

A: Casting Lots Podcast can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr as @CastingLotsPod, and on Facebook as Casting Lots Podcast.

C: If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, don’t forget to subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and please rate, review and share to bring more people to the table.

A: Casting Lots: A Survival Cannibalism Podcast, is researched, written and recorded by Alix and Carmella, with post-production and editing also by Carmella and Alix. Art and logo design by Riley – @Tallestfriend on Twitter and Instagram – with audio and music by Daniel Wackett – Daniel Wackett on SoundCloud and @ds_wack on Twitter. Casting Lots is part of the Morbid Audio Podcast Network – search #MorbidAudio on Twitter – and the network’s music is provided by Mikaela Moody – mikaelamoody1 on Bandcamp.

[Morbid Audio Sting – Mikaela Moody]

[Dog barking]

C: Dog.

A: The oldest dog in Europe!

C: Oh, I can still hear him now…

A: Echoing through the caves…

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