"A rapid period of warming more than 120,000 years ago drove Neanderthals in the south of France to eat six of their own, new research suggests.
The bones bear many of the hallmarks of cannibalism: cut marks made by stone tools, complete dismemberment of the individuals, and finger bones that look as if they’ve been gnawed by Neanderthal teeth,
Before and after the warming, remains from reindeer and woolly mammoths are found, During the warmer period when the Neanderthals lived, the area was devoid of large mammals, instead inhabited by rodents and tortoises and snakes that migrated up from the Mediterranean.
Neanderthals wouldn’t have made good food as part of a regular diet, because they aren’t as rich in calories as other animals, such as deer. There also were only a few hundred of the hominins inhabiting western Europe at the time, so hunting them would have been out of the question."
