12 Weird Things Prehistoric Humans Did That Science Still Can't Explain

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]Time to travel back in time. Number 12, trepation. Drilling holes in living skulls. When archaeologists first began excavating Neolithic burial sites across Europe in the 19th century, they kept encountering the same impossible detail.

[00:00:17]The skulls they pulled from the earth had holes in them. Not holes made by weapons or predators, but smooth circular openings cut with deliberate precision into living bone by human hands using stone tools at least 7,000 years ago. What made these discoveries so difficult to process was not the holes themselves, but what surrounded them. The edges of the openings showed clear signs of bone regrowth. new tissue slowly filling the wounds perimeter over months and years. These people had not been operated on after death. They had survived. They had woken up, lived their lives, and in some documented cases, returned to the same kind of surgeon for a second or third procedure on the same skull. The practice is called trepation, and it is one of the most widely distributed surgical behaviors in all of human prehistory. Evidence of deliberate skull drilling has been found across Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa in cultures with no documented contact with one another, spanning thousands of years of independent development. At burial sites associated with the Inca Empire in Peru, forensic anthropologist John Verono published research in 2016 documenting survival rates in tree pan skulls approaching 80%. a figure that would not embarrass a modern surgical ward operating with antibiotics and anesthesia. The procedure required considerable skill. The surgeon using obsidian blades or bronze tools depending on the area and region had to remove a section of skull bone without penetrating the brain's protective membrane beneath. Too shallow and the operation accomplished nothing. Too deep and the patient died on the spot.

[00:02:12]Researchers have attempted to replicate the procedure on cadaavver skulls and found that achieving the documented results requires practice, anatomical knowledge, and a steady hand that implies formal training of some kind passed from practitioner to practitioner across generations.

[00:02:31]No text explains what prehistoric surgeons believed they were releasing or relieving. The best current hypotheses suggest they were treating head injuries, seizures, or behaviors attributed to spiritual possession. But the global independent repetition of the same invasive procedure points towards something more universal than any single cultural explanation can account for.

[00:02:55]What did prehistoric surgeons believe lived inside the skull that was worth drilling through bone to reach? Number 11, deliberately painting in darkness.

[00:03:06]In 1940, four teenagers following a dog into a collapsed hole in the hillside near Montyok, France, stumbled into one of the most extraordinary discoveries in the history of human art. The cave system they found, which the world would come to know as Lasco, contained more than 600 painted and drawn animals across its walls and ceilings, rendered with an anatomical accuracy and compositional sophistication that left early 20th century scholars struggling to accept that the artists had been fully prehistoric human beings. The paintings at Lasco date to approximately 17,000 years ago. The images at Altameira in northern Spain, discovered in 1879 and initially dismissed as fakes precisely because they were too skillful, date to approximately 35,000 years ago, making them among the oldest figurative art ever found. Both sites share a detail that only deepens with scrutiny. The deepest, most elaborate paintings are not near the cave entrances where daylight reaches. They are in the most remote, most difficult chambers, accessible only by crawling through narrow passages, sometimes for hundreds of meters, in absolute darkness. The artists carried small stone lamps burning animal fat to see by. Reconstructions of these lamps built to period specifications produce a flickering, unstable light with a radius of roughly 1 meter. by that light on surfaces they could barely see.

[00:04:42]Prehistoric artists painted horses in motion, bison with anatomically correct musculature, and deer with antlers rendered in precise perspective.

[00:04:53]French researcher Igor Resnikov documented in 1988 that the chambers containing the most elaborate paintings at Lasco and other French cave sites are also the chambers with the most dramatic acoustic resonance. places where a single voice or drum creates extraordinary reverberations. At Lasco specifically, archaeologists have found holes in the cave floor consistent with scaffolding posts, meaning the ceiling paintings above them required constructed platforms to reach. This was not casual decoration. The effort involved in reaching these chambers, building platforms, maintaining light sources, and executing images of this quality in those conditions represents a sustained, organized, purposeful activity. Scholars, including David Lewis Williams, have proposed that these chambers functioned as sites of ritual altered consciousness, places where the boundary between the everyday world and a spirit world was considered permeable, and where painting on the stone was understood as reaching through the membrane between worlds rather than marking a surface. What remains haunting is the combination of commitment and invisibility. These images were made in places where very few people could ever see them under conditions that made seeing them nearly impossible. They were not painting for an audience that could see. They were painting for something else entirely.

[00:06:23]Number 10, carrying and burying red ochre with the dead. In a cave called Kafsa in what is now northern Israel, archaeologists excavating burial sites in the 1960s found something that shifted the known timeline of human symbolic behavior by tens of thousands of years. Buried alongside human remains dating to approximately 100,000 years ago was a powdered red mineral called ochre, an iron oxide pigment that occurs naturally in the earth but requires deliberate grinding to produce in usable form. It had been placed on the bodies intentionally. It served no practical purpose. Something about the color red and the fact of death had compelled these people to combine them. Ochre and burials is not a regional anomaly. It appears in the archaeological record across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas in cultures separated by ocean, mountain range, and tens of thousands of years. At the site of Pinnacle Point in South Africa, evidence of ochre processing pushes human engagement with the pigment back to approximately 164,000 years ago before anatomically modern humans had spread significantly beyond Africa. The material was not always locally available. At multiple European upper Paleolithic sites, chemical analysis has confirmed that the ochre found in burials was transported from sources hundreds of kilometers away, meaning people carried it deliberately over long distances and held onto it specifically for use with the dead. The burial at Sungeear in Russia, excavated beginning in 1955 and dating to approximately 34,000 years ago, offers the most staggering expression of this behavior. A man buried there was surrounded by roughly 3,000 beads carved from mammoth ivory, each requiring approximately 45 minutes to produce, placed in patterns on his body consistent with a decorated garment. Two children buried nearby were covered in similar quantities of ivory beads, and both the adults and the children were coated in red ochre. The labor represented by those beads alone runs to tens of thousands of hours, invested entirely in objects that would go into the ground. No living tradition has provided a definitive explanation for why red specifically carried this universal significance. Red is the color of blood, of fire, of life, and conceivably of the transition out of it.

[00:09:02]Some anthropologists argue the pigment was understood as a life force substance applied to the dead to sustain them in whatever followed. Others suggest it served a preservative function, ritual, rather than chemical. What makes neither explanation fully satisfying is the sheer geographic and temporal spread of the behavior. Cultures that never interacted across a span of time longer than the gap between us and the extinction of the woolly mammoth made the same decision about the same color at the moment of death. What did red mean to a mind 100,000 years old? And why did it have to go with you into the earth? Number nine, constructing monuments requiring millions of labor hours. The site of Gobecletepe sits on a limestone ridge in southeastern Turkey.

[00:09:54]And when German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt began serious excavation there in 1994, what he uncovered forced a fundamental rewriting of the timeline of organized human civilization. The structures he found, massive T-shaped stone pillars up to 5 1/2 m tall and weighing up to 10 tons, arranged in elaborate circular enclosures decorated with carved reliefs of animals, had been built approximately 11,500 years ago.

[00:10:23]That date matters enormously. It predates the Great Pyramid of Giza by more than 8,000 years. It predates the wheel. It predates agriculture. The people who built Gobec Leepe were hunter gatherers with no permanent settlements, no writing, and no metal tools. For most of the 20th century, the standard model of prehistoric social development held that complex organized construction required agriculture first. The logic seemed airtight. Farming creates food surplus. Surplus allows specialization.

[00:10:59]Specialization produces architects and laborers. and architects and laborers build monuments. Gobecuteep obliterated that sequence entirely. Here was monumental architecture produced by people who were still following animal herds across the landscape who had not yet domesticated a single crop and who somehow coordinated the quarrying, transport, and erection of multi-tonon stone pillars decorated with sophisticated imagery spanning dozens of animal species. The anomaly deepens considerably when you examine Stonehenge alongside it. The Sarsen stones at Stonehenge, erected around 2,500 B.CE.

[00:11:39]are the largest stones on the site, with the heaviest weighing approximately 25 tons. They were quarried at Marlboro Downs, roughly 25 km away. The blue stones used in earlier phases of the monument's construction were sourced from the Presley Hills in Wales, approximately 320 km distant, and transported across terrain that included open sea. Estimates of the total labor investment required to complete Stonehenge across all its construction phases run to tens of millions of hours, organized by a society with no writing system and no wheeled vehicles. what Schmidt's team found as they continued excavating at Gobecley.

[00:12:20]Teepe added a layer of strangess that no model of practical construction logic can explain. At some point around 9,000 years ago, the builders of Gobecée deliberately backfilled their own monument. They covered the entire complex carefully, intentionally with soil and rubble, preserving it beneath the earth. They did not abandon it. They buried it. This was not erosion or conquest. The backfill was deliberate and organized. Whatever the site had been built to do, at some point its builders decided the purpose was complete and they sealed it. Whatever compelled hunter gatherers to abandon the food search for years to build a temple and then bury it when they were done has no name in any language we currently speak. Number eight, performing elaborate funerals for strangers. In 1957, archaeologist Ralph Selei was excavating Shannidar Cave in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq when his team uncovered a series of Neanderthal burials that would reframe the scientific conversation about our closest evolutionary relatives for decades. The cave had been occupied repeatedly over tens of thousands of years, and the Neanderthal remains Selei found were among the oldest and most complex burial contexts ever identified for a non-modern human species. What the site implied about the minds that produced it was profoundly unsettling to a scientific community that had largely categorized Neanderthalss as brutish and cognitively limited. The conventional view of Neanderthalss in the midentth century positioned them as capable of basic survival behaviors but unlikely candidates for anything resembling ritual or symbolic thought. They made tools. They hunted. They sheltered. But the idea that they buried their dead with deliberate care, let alone with objects or materials carrying symbolic weight, was considered implausible. The evidence from Shannidar began to erode that certainty immediately. Among the skeletons found at the site, the individual designated Shannidar 1 showed evidence of severe physical disabilities accumulated over a lifetime. A withered right arm, healed fractures, and arthritic damage extensive enough to have significantly limited mobility and hunting capacity. This individual had survived for years with injuries that would have made independent survival nearly impossible implying sustained care by others in the group. The burial designated Shannidora for dating to approximately 60,000 years ago produced the finding that entered the popular scientific imagination most forcefully.

[00:15:09]Soil samples taken from around the skeleton were analyzed by palinologist Arlet Loy Gorhan in 1975 and found to contain dense concentrations of pollen from at least eight flowering plant species clustered in patterns she interpreted as consistent with flowers having been deliberately placed on or around the body. Several of the identified species including a fedra and groundil have known medicinal or psychoactive properties suggesting the selection may not have been random. The interpretation has been contested. In 1999, archaeologist Jeffrey Summer published an analysis in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, arguing that the pollen concentrations were more consistent with deposition by burrowing rodents, specifically Persian jerds known to inhabit the cave site than with deliberate human placement. The debate has not been resolved, but the flower question, while the most famous element of Shannidar, is not actually the most significant one. The care demonstrated towards Shannidar 1, the disabled individual kept alive through years of dependency, implies that a community of Neanderthalss understood themselves as having obligations to members who could not contribute to group survival. That implication does not rest on pollen samples. It rests on healed bone. If they buried their dead with flowers, what else did Neanderthalss feel that we have spent a century refusing to give them credit for? Number seven, intentional skull shaping from birth.

[00:16:46]When European explorers and anatomists in the early 19th century first encountered the elongated skulls recovered from burial sites along the southern coast of Peru, the initial and persistent response was disbelief. The skulls were too different. The cranial volume and shape fell so far outside the normal range of human variation that some researchers proposed they represented a distinct population.

[00:17:12]perhaps a vanished tribe with a biological anomaly. It took systematic physical anthropological analysis to establish what was actually happening.

[00:17:22]These were ordinary human skulls deliberately reshaped by sustained pressure applied during infancy before the cranial plates fuse producing a permanent elongation that no adult intervention could create or reverse.

[00:17:37]The practice is called intentional cranial modification or artificial cranial deformation and its global distribution across unconnected cultures is one of the more unsettling patterns in the prehistoric record. The skulls found along the Peruvian coast are associated with the Paracas culture dating to approximately 3,000 to 2,000 years ago. Similar practices producing similar elongated forms have been documented in pre-Colombian Mexico in ancient Egypt in the Mangbetu people of central Africa in the Pacific islands and in migration period Europe where the expansion of the Huns in the fourth and fifth centuries CE spread the practice across populations from the Black Sea to France. These cultures had no documented contact with one another. They arrived at the same modification of the same body part through independent development. The process must begin within the first months of life. The skull plates of a newborn remain unfused and pliable, and sustained pressure applied through bandages, boards, or padded frames over months or years produces a permanent reshaping of the cranium. The procedure is uncomfortable for the infant and requires sustained attention from caregivers over an extended period. It produces no survival benefit. It does not enhance strength, intelligence, or sensory capacity. It makes the individual visually distinct from unmodified people and presumably marks membership in a particular social group or status category. But the fact that cultures with no knowledge of each other independently decided that this specific modification of the specific body part was worth the sustained effort it requires points towards something that transcends individual cultural explanation. Researchers studying the paraca skulls have noted that the most extensively modified individuals appear in higher status burial contexts, suggesting the practice was associated with social elevation or spiritual distinction.

[00:19:46]Elongated skulls found at the ancient Hunish site of Kirch in Crimea similarly appear in wealthy graves, indicating the modification marked elite identity across cultures as geographically distant as Peru and the Pontic step. But why this modification universally across cultures that shared nothing else? For thousands of years across cultures that never met, the first thing parents did to their newborns was decide that the shape they were born with was not the right shape.

[00:20:20]Number six, the mass accumulation of horses at Solut.

[00:20:25]In 1866, a local doctor named Henry Testo Ferry and a student named Adrian Arcelon began digging at the base of a limestone escarment near the village of Solutre in the Burgundy region of France. Within a short time, they had uncovered something that would take more than a century to fully comprehend.

[00:20:46]Beneath the soil at the foot of the rock lay an accumulation of animal bones unlike anything previously documented in European prehistory. The bones were predominantly those of horses. Enormous quantities of horses. As excavation continued over subsequent decades, the total count of individual animals represented in the deposit climbed toward an estimated 100,000, accumulated at the same location across a period of roughly 20,000 years from approximately 35,000 to 15,000 years ago. The site gave its name to an entire archaeological culture, the Solutrian, dated to roughly 22,000 to 17,000 years ago and notable for producing some of the most finely crafted stone tools in the prehistoric record. But the horse deposit at the site's base predates and outlasts the Solitrian period, spanning a time frame so vast that it encompasses civilizational change of a scale we can barely conceptualize. 20,000 years ago, modern humans had not yet reached the Americas. Written language would not exist for another 15,000 years. The Roman Empire would not rise for another 14,000 years, flourish for 5 centuries, and collapse, all within the final fraction of the period during which people were returning to Solut to kill horses. Early interpretations proposed that prehistoric hunters had driven the horses off the cliff in mass stampedes, a vivid, but ultimately unsupported theory that archaeologists have largely set aside. The bone deposit sits at the foot of the rock rather than at the base of its steepest face, and the distribution of the remains is inconsistent with the pattern a cliff drive would produce. Current interpretation favors organized seasonal hunting at the location with carcasses processed for meat, marrow, hide, and bone. But organized seasonal hunting explains the presence of bones. It does not explain the return. 20,000 years of return to the same specific place when the horses were presumably available across a much wider landscape implies that solutely for geographic convenience. The limestone escarment itself is a visually dramatic feature rising sharply above the surrounding plane and visible from considerable distances.

[00:23:20]Some researchers have proposed that the rock held cosmological or territorial significance, functioning as a landmark around which group identity and seasonal gathering organized themselves across thousands of years and dozens of generations. A location that people returned to for 20,000 years was not just a hunting ground. It was by any functional definition a sacred site.

[00:23:44]Even if nothing about the material record allows us to say precisely what was sacred about it, what did this cliff mean to 700 generations of humans that made it worth returning to again and again for 20,000 years? Number five, decorating the dead to look alive. In 1953, archaeologist Kathleen Kenyan was excavating the ancient site of Jericho in the West Bank when her team began recovering objects that no one had anticipated finding. From beneath the floors of Neolithic houses, they extracted human skulls that had been carefully removed from their bodies after death and then transformed. The skulls had been filled with plaster, their surfaces built up and modeled to reconstruct the facial features of the person who had worn them in life.

[00:24:33]cheekbones, nose ridges, and lips were shaped with evident care and considerable anatomical knowledge.

[00:24:41]Into the eye sockets, the ancient crafts people had pressed cowry shells, giving the finished objects an expression of unsettling fixed attention. The skulls had then, in at least some cases, been stored in groups inside domestic spaces before eventual burial. The practice dates to approximately 9,000 years ago during the period archaeologists call the pre- pottery Neolithic B and it appears across a cluster of sites in the ancient near east with a consistency that confirms it as an organized cultural tradition rather than isolated behavior. Plastered skulls have been recovered at Jericho and at a gazal in Jordan, at Kafar Horesh in Israel and at Tel Awad in Syria. The craftsmanship varies across sites and individuals, but the core procedure is consistent. Remove the skull, reconstruct the face, install artificial eyes, and keep the result.

[00:25:41]The lower jaw is typically removed during the process, giving the finished skull a slightly forward tilted presentation when set on a surface as if the face is looking slightly upward at whoever is in the room with it. What makes this practice particularly difficult to categorize is how much deliberate skill it required. Removing a skull cleanly from a decomposed body, packing it with lime plaster without cracking the bone, and modeling anatomically recognizable facial features using nothing but fingers and simple tools represents a technical competence that was clearly developed and transmitted across generations. This was not improvised. Someone learned to do this from someone who already knew how, which means there were teachers and students and presumably a shared understanding of why the result was worth producing. The shells selected for eyes are cowery shells, which in many ancient cultures carried associations with fertility, protection, and the boundary between the living world and the world of the dead. The interpretation that has attracted most scholarly support frames these objects as instruments of ancestor veneration, a way of maintaining the presence and perhaps the council of the recently dead within the household.

[00:26:59]Comparable practices of retaining the dead within domestic space appear in cultures across the Pacific and in parts of subsaharan Africa, suggesting that the impulse to keep the dead close, visible, and present is not unique to the ancient near east. But the specific technology of reconstruction, the decision to rebuild the face rather than simply retain the skull, implies something more precise than general proximity to the dead. It implies that the face specifically was understood as the location of identity and that identity did not end at death. For approximately a thousand years, people in the ancient near east lived alongside the rebuilt faces of their dead, kept them indoors, and apparently found this entirely normal.

[00:27:48]Number four, walking thousands of miles to throw things into water. The process of making a highquality bronze sword in the European Bronze Age was not a casual undertaking. The smith required access to copper and tin ore, knowledge of their correct proportions, a furnace capable of reaching the necessary temperatures, molds, finishing tools, and the accumulated skill of years of practice. The finished object was useful, valuable, durable, and difficult to replace. And yet across a period stretching from roughly 4,000 to 500 years ago, people throughout Britain, Scandinavia, France, and Ireland took these objects along with shields, helmets, jewelry, cauldrons, and elaborate ornaments and threw them into rivers, lakes, bogs, and coastal waters, never to retrieve them. The scale of this behavior is staggering once you begin to map it. The rivers in England has yielded more Bronze Age metal work from its bed than almost any other single location in Europe. Most of it deposited deliberately in water rather than lost accidentally. The site of Flag Finn in Cambridge, excavated extensively by archaeologist Francis Prior, preserves a timber platform built over wetland around 1300 B.CE and used for approximately a,000 years as a structured deposition site. Objects placed into the water at flag fin show consistent evidence of deliberate selection and in many cases deliberate damage before deposition. Bronze weapons with their edges blunted, pins bent, and ornaments broken in ways that required effort were placed into the water in what Prior described as intentional ritual destruction. The killing of the object before its offering. The body found in 1984 in a pete bog at Lindo Moss in Cheshure, England, designated Lindo Man and dating to roughly the 1st century B.C.E. extends the picture into human sacrifice.

[00:29:55]Analysis of Lindo Man's remains revealed that he had been struck on the head, had his throat cut, and had been strangled.

[00:30:03]Three separate methods applied in sequence before being placed face down in the bog. His last meal, identifiable in his preserved stomach contents, included a grain mixture consistent with ritual rather than everyday food. His fingernails were carefully trimmed. He was not a victim of crime disposed of in a marsh. He was a prepared offering. The Briter horde discovered in County London, Ireland in 1896, and dating to the 1st century B.C.E. contained a miniature gold boat complete with ores, a mast and benches deposited in what was at the time a tidal estuary. The gold boat is one of the most technically sophisticated objects produced in prehistoric Ireland, and it was placed in water with no expectation of recovery. Across the full span of these deposits, researchers have noted that the objects chosen for deposition tend to be the finest available rather than the discarded or inferior, which rules out the interpretation that these were simply objects being disposed of. People were giving their best things away permanently to water in organized and sustained ritual behavior lasting thousands of years. What did prehistoric Europeans believe lived below the surface of the water? And what did they think they were receiving in return for a thousand years of gifts? Number three, the global obsession with aligned astronomical monuments.

[00:31:31]On the morning of the winter solstice, December 21st, at the prehistoric monument of New Graange in County Meath, Ireland, something happens that has happened every year for approximately 5,200 years. As the sun rises at its most southerntherly point on the horizon, a shaft of light enters a narrow opening above the monument's main doorway, a specifically designed aperture called the roof box and travels down a stone passage approximately 19 m long to illuminate the inner chamber.

[00:32:03]The illumination lasts for approximately 17 minutes before the sun's angle shifts and the chamber returns to darkness. For the remaining 364 days of the year, no direct sunlight reaches the inner chamber at all. This is not an accident of orientation.

[00:32:21]The monument was designed, engineered, and built to produce exactly this result 500 years before the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. New Graange was constructed around 3,200 B.CE. by Neolithic farmers who left no written records and no direct description of their intentions. To achieve the solstice alignment, the monuments builders had to observe the winter solstice sunrise repeatedly over years or decades to establish the precise horizon position of the sun on that specific morning. They then had to orient a structure covering approximately 1 acre of ground so that the angle of the passage matched that observation with sufficient precision to produce illumination in a chamber 19 m from the entrance. The tolerance for error was extraordinarily small. Modern surveys have measured the alignment's accuracy at approximately 1 degree. The people who built New Graange had no magnetic compasses, no surveying instruments, no mathematical notation, and no written astronomical records.

[00:33:31]They achieved this through naked eye observation, memory, and organizational coordination across what was almost certainly more than one human lifetime.

[00:33:41]What transforms this from an impressive local achievement into something genuinely bewildering is the global pattern it belongs to.

[00:33:50]At Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England, the monument's axis align with the midsummer sunrise and the mid-inter sunset.

[00:33:58]Orientations that required the same sustained observational work and were incorporated into a structure whose construction spanned centuries. At the pyramid of Kukul Khan at Chichenitsa in Mexico, the staircase ballastrades are positioned so that on the spring and autumn equinoxes, the play of shadow and light creates the visual illusion of a serpent descending the steps, an effect that requires precise solar angle and occurs for only a few days each year. At the great temple of Cararnach in Egypt, the sanctuary's axis is aligned to the winter solstice sunset so that the setting sun at its southernmost point shines directly into the sanctuary's innermost room. These cultures existed on different continents in different centuries with no documented contact with one another. Archoastronomers, including Clive Rugles at the University of Leicester, have documented hundreds of prehistoric sites worldwide, showing deliberate astronomical alignments, far too many to attribute to coincidence and too geographically diverse to explain through cultural diffusion. The alignments tend to concentrate on the same astronomical events, solstesses, equinoxes, the rising and setting of specific bright stars, and the lunar standstills that occur on an approximately 18.6ear cycle across cultures that shared nothing in terms of language, religion, economy, or technology. The same celestial moments received the same architectural acknowledgement.

[00:35:33]Every culture that developed monumental architecture independently decided that the first thing the building needed to do was track the sky. As if the sky itself required acknowledgement and as if failing to provide that acknowledgement carried consequences too serious to risk.

[00:35:51]Number two, ritualized cannibalism as a near universal practice. In 2017, a research team led by Sylvia Bellow of the Natural History Museum in London, published findings in the journal Plus One that recontextualized a site that had been under study for over a century.

[00:36:10]Guff's cave in Somerset, England, had yielded human bones dating to approximately 14,700 years ago since the 19th century. But advances in forensic analysis allowed Bellow's team to examine those bones with a precision previously impossible.

[00:36:27]What they found was systematic and deliberate. The bones had been defleed using stone tools, the marks distinguishable from animal gnawing by their angle and depth. The long bones had been cracked to extract marrow using a technique identical to the one applied to the animal bones at the same site.

[00:36:47]and the human skulls had been carefully shaped into vessels, their edges smoothed and prepared in a process requiring considerable time and skill.

[00:36:57]The people who used Guff's cave had not eaten other humans out of desperation.

[00:37:01]They had processed human bodies with the same methodical organization they applied to their food animals, and they had made cups from the skulls. The instinct is to categorize Goff's cave as an aberration, a single strange community practicing something their contemporaries would have found as troubling as we do. The archaeological record does not support that comfort.

[00:37:25]Evidence of systematic cannibalism, distinguishable forensically from survival cannibalism by the organization and deliberateness of the bone processing, extends through the human lineage far deeper than any modern cultural context. At Goyat cave in Belgium, a 2016 paper published in the journal Scientific Reports by a team including Elen Rouier documented Neanderthal bones from approximately 45,000 years ago, processed in ways indistinguishable from the animal food bones at the same site. Defleshed, marrow extracted, and in some cases used as tools. At the site of Grandolina in the Ataporca Hills of Spain, bones of homo anticcessor dating to approximately 800,000 years ago show the same processing signatures. Cannibalism of some organized deliberate form appears at the homoanccessor level of the human family tree before Neanderthalss diverged from our lineage, before homo sapiens existed as a species. Forensic anthropology has developed reliable methods for distinguishing between what researchers call survival cannibalism and nutritional or ritual cannibalism.

[00:38:36]Survival cannibalism practiced by communities facing starvation tends to focus on the largest muscle groups and produces a characteristic pattern of cuts and breaks consistent with maximum caloric extraction in minimal time. The pattern at Guff's cave is different. The processing is more thorough, more organized, and extends to the creation of the skull vessels, objects with no nutritional function whatsoever. The cups required effort that served no caloric purpose. They were made because someone wanted them for a use the bones themselves cannot explain. The temporal depth of this behavior is what makes it genuinely difficult to integrate into any comfortable narrative about human nature. We are not looking at a cultural practice that emerged in one place and spread. We are looking at a recurring pattern across species that are separated from us by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution appearing independently in populations that could not have transmitted the behavior to each other. Whatever organized purposeful engagement with human flesh represents in terms of belief, cosmology or social structure, it is not a modern invention. not a cultural accident and not a behavior that belongs to only the darkest corners of human history. The evidence suggests it is something that reappears across time and across species as if summoned by something in the architecture of minds that process death and community and the boundary between them. Whatever drove 14,000-year-old people in Somerset to make vessels from the skulls of other humans is not as distant from us as we would like to believe and the record suggests it was not new even then.

[00:40:27]Number one, the invention of death ritual before language. In 2013, paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwaters strand received a message from a colleague describing bones that had been spotted deep inside a cave system in the cradle of humankind, a UNESCO World Heritage site northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa. Reaching the bones required navigating through a passage called Superman's crawl, a section of cave approximately 25 cm wide at its narrowest, and then descending a near vertical chute into a chamber that had apparently never been disturbed. What Burer's team found in that chamber in subsequent expeditions beginning in 2013 and continuing across the following decade constituted one of the most significant and most disputed discoveries in the history of paleo anthropology. The chamber contained the remains of at least 15 individuals of a previously unknown hominin species, which Burger's team named Homo Nalady.

[00:41:28]The species had a brain approximately the size of a clenched fist, roughly one-third the volume of a modern human brain, and small enough that most researchers would have categorized it on brain size alone as incapable of complex symbolic or planning behavior. And yet nothing about its presence in that chamber made sense under any explanation except deliberate organized disposal of the dead.

[00:41:54]The context of the find is what makes the conventional explanations fail one by one. The denoliti chamber is accessible only through passages so narrow that a modern adult of average build requires considerable effort to navigate them. There is no evidence of predator activity in the chamber, ruling out the possibility that a carnivore dragged bodies there. There is no evidence of flooding or water transport capable of moving bones into the space.

[00:42:23]The remains include individuals of multiple ages from infants to elderly adults deposited over what appears to have been an extended period rather than in a single catastrophic event. The most parsimonious explanation, the one that accounts for all the evidence most directly is that members of a homonyady community carried their dead through those passages and place them in that chamber repeatedly over time.

[00:42:49]In June 2023, Burger's team published a series of papers in the journal EIFE describing what they interpreted as evidence extending well beyond simple body disposal. The team reported geometric markings on the cave walls near the deposits, shapes, including cross-hatching, lines, and what they described as hashtaglike forms, which they proposed were deliberately made by Homonoliti itself. They also reported what they interpreted as prepared areas within the chamber that may have functioned as discrete burial contexts.

[00:43:25]These findings have been met with significant skepticism from parts of the paleoanthropological community.

[00:43:31]Researchers, including Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, have raised questions about the attribution of the engravings and the interpretation of the depositional evidence, noting that the extraordinary nature of the claims requires a correspondingly high standard of proof.

[00:43:48]The debate is ongoing with peer-reviewed challenges and responses still being published. The question of the engravings is legitimately contested.

[00:43:56]The question of how the bodies got there is considerably harder to answer without deliberate deposition.

[00:44:03]Homonyi has been dated to between approximately 335,000 and 236,000 years ago, placing it as a contemporary of early Homo sapiens. both species present on the African continent at the same time. Both leaving traces in the earth that the other never knew about. The brain volume of homooni falls within the range of 300 to 610 cm. For context, modern humans average approximately 1350 cm. Many primates alive today have larger brains than homonyiti and we do not credit them with burial ritual. The cognitive leap required to understand death as a category. To recognize the dead as different from the living in a way that requires a response. To organize a community effort to carry those dead through narrow passages to a specific remote location. And to repeat that behavior across multiple individuals in what appears to be an extended time frame is not a small one.

[00:45:07]It is by most frameworks a leap that should require a much larger brain than homoiti possessed. What the rising star cave system appears to preserve is evidence that the deepest human compulsion. The need to do something with our dead to mark death as an event that requires a response is not a product of the cultural complexity that language and large brains eventually made possible. It appears to predate those things. It appears in a creature that could not have spoken to us in any language, could not have written down its reasons, and almost certainly could not have understood the civilization we would eventually build. We have spent the entire span of recorded history assuming that what separates us from the animals is precisely this quality. The acknowledgement of death. The ritual response to loss. The insistence that the dead require something from the living. Homonyi had a brain smaller than some of the animals we keep as pets. And it was already carrying its dead underground deliberately in the dark 300,000 years ago. The impulse that drives a funeral that insists the dead cannot simply be left where they fall is not civilization's invention. It is something written into the biological substrate itself. Something that was already ancient when the first human ancestor stood upright. Something we share across a gulf of evolutionary time with a creature we have never spoken to and can barely imagine. and something we still despite everything do not understand. If you want to see more videos like this, click the video on screen now and make sure to subscribe.