The earliest known instance of cannibalism among hominids occurred roughly 800,000 years ago. The victims, mainly children, may have been eaten as part of a strategy to defend territories against neighbors, researchers report online in the Journal of Human Evolution. The new study shows how anthropologists use the behavior of modern humans and primates to make inferences about what hominids did in the past -- and demonstrates the limitations of such comparisons. The cannibalism in question was discovered in the Gran Dolina cave site of Spain's Atapuerca Mountains. Eudald Carbonell of the University of Rovira and Virgili in Spain and...
