By James Donahue

A French anthropologist has found evidence in bones dug up in Europe that at least some of the Neanderthals were hunted, cooked and eaten by homo sapiens as the “modern human” emerged on the scene about 30,000 years ago.

This is the suggestion outlined by Fernando Rozzi in an article published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences. Rozzi, the leader of a research team from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, wrote that bones of Neanderthals were found showing knife marks suggesting that the body had been cut up like humans would cut dear carcasses in that period.

Rozzi suggests that humans not only killed and ate the Neanderthals, but used their teeth to make jewelry.

The paper is a gory new theory explaining what happened to the Neanderthals, a hearty race of humanoids who evolved in Europe 300,000 years ago and then disappeared 270,000 years later, just as modern humans began arriving in Europe from Africa.

The Neanderthals were apparently a successful species for such a long time, their sudden disappearance has been a mystery among archaeologists and anthropologists. These people made complex stone tools, lived in colonies, buried their dead and showed all the signs of evolving. The problem seems to have been that they did not evolve fast enough.

The arrival of modern humans obviously played a role in the demise of the Neanderthals. The various theories have ranged from interbreeding, failure to compete for resources and warfare. The concept of our eating them, however, is new and startling. Feeding on the flesh of a Neanderthal man just smacks of cannibalism.

The findings by Rozzi at Les Rois in southwest France provides strong support for the belief that human-Neanderthal interactions were violent and deadly for the Neanderthals.

While one jawbone of a Neanderthal showing cut marks from the knifing away of flesh does not prove early humans were cannibals, Rossi argues that it offers evidence that humans attacked Neanderthals and killed them. It also proves that the bodies were brought back to caves for food. The bodies may even have been kept as trophies and the teeth used for jewelry.

Whatever happened, the findings by Rozzi prove that humans and Neanderthals lived in Europe at the same time, they were interacting, and humans appear to have played a role in the extinction of the Neanderthals.

We have to wonder, however, that after staying around for so many thousands of years, and possibly growing to a relatively large population, how this species could be brought to complete extinction.

We know from contemporary attempts at ethnic cleansing among African and European peoples, and most dramatically by the Germans who sought the elimination of the Jews during World War II, that the complete destruction of another race of humans is just about impossible to accomplish.