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-Europeans probably ate their dead loved ones instead of burying them 15,000 years ago. -According to a new study, the consumption of dead people was not essential, but a ritual. -Researchers also said people used the remaining bones as cups and chewed on them. Cannibalistic Europeans likely feasted on their deceased loved ones at funerals instead of burying them, according to a new study. Scientists now believe that cannibalism was widespread among Magdalenian Upper Palaeolithic people, who lived across Europe between 11,000 and 17,000 years ago, according to the study published in Quaternary Science Reviews. The study's researchers analyzed funerary...

Traces of Alpine ibex hunters from several thousand years ago have been discovered in the Belianske Tatras in Slovakia.Based on isotope analyses, the joint Slovak-Polish research expedition in Hučivá Cave (Hučivá diera), say the traces were found in what was a Palaeolithic settlement left by the Magdalenian people, best known from France and Spain in the 13th millennium BC.Professor Paweł Valde-Nowak from the Institute of Archeology of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków said: “It was a group of hunters specialising in hunting ibex, a species no longer found in the Tatras today.“We found several hundred blades of thrown weapons, bone...

A team of archaeologists, palaeozoologists, geologists, sedimentologists, archaeobotanists and palaeogeneticists from the Institute of Archaeology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, found hundreds of blades made from either radiolarite, flint or limnosilicite, in addition to bone needles and the bones of various animals in the remains of a large hearth or fire within the cave.The researchers also found faunal and archaeobotanical remains, as well as bones from species of chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra), deer (Cervus elaphus) and wild horse (Equus ferus). More than a dozen bones have traces of cut marks, cracking for marrow extraction and smoothing with stone tools...Most of...

In fact in recent years archaeologists equipped with sophisticated methodological means have discovered 17 previously unnoticed sites in the Basque region that have art from the late Palaeolithic period, some of which may be as old as 40,000 years. The finds debunk the void theory and bring the total known Stone Age graphic sites there to 23, Ochoa confirms in conversation with Haaretz. Danbolinzulo Cave, which lies on the slopes of Mount Ertxiña by the town of Zestoa in northern Spain, has a dazzling view of the surrounding area, the archaeologists enthuse. Analyzing the faint, eroded images at Danbolinzulo within...

The burial of the so-called Red Lady, dating back to the Upper Palaeolithic, was discovered in El Mirón cave (Cantabria) in 2010. The Journal of Archaeological Science has devoted a special edition to all the studies conducted at this unique burial site, because there are hardly any Palaeolithic tombs like this one which is intact and which has not been contaminated. One study is the research led by the UPV/EHU's Ikerbasque lecturer Mª José Iriarte, who analysed the remains of fossilised pollen dating back more than 16,000 years ago and which appeared on the tomb. "They put whole flowers on...

Aged between 35 and 40 when she died, she was laid to rest alongside a large engraved stone, her body seemingly daubed in sparkling red pigment. Small, yellow flowers may even have adorned her grave 18,700 years ago -- a time when cave burials, let alone one so elaborate, appear to have been very rare. It was a momentous honour, and no one knows why she was given it... Her remains were discovered when Straus's team began digging behind this block in 2010. Radiocarbon dating reveals that the block fell from the ceiling at most only a few hundred years...

Dancing girls and the merry Magdalenian Archaeologists believe that 13,000-year-old cave paintings in Nottinghamshire were part of a continent-wide culture Sean Clarke Thursday April 15, 2004 The Guardian (UK) The people who created the first surviving art in Britain were committed Europeans, belonging to a common culture spanning France, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, according to the man who discovered the cave art in Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire. And the essential preoccupations of this single market in ice-age art, it seems, were hunting and naked dancing girls. The discovery of 13,000-year-old rock paintings in Nottinghamshire last year rewrote ice-age history in...