%0 Journal Article
%A Saladié, Palmira
%A Huguet Pamiès, Rosa
%A Rodríguez Hidalgo, Antonio
%A Cáceres Cuello de Oro, Isabel
%A Esteban Nadal, Montserrat
%A Arsuaga Ferreras, Juan Luis
%A Bermúdez de Castro, José María
%A Carbonell i Roura, Eudald
%T Intergroup cannibalism in the European Early Pleistocene: The range expansionand imbalance of power hypotheses
%D 2012
%@ 0047-2484
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/44381
%X In this paper, we compare cannibalism in chimpanzees, modern humans, and in archaeological caseswith cannibalism inferred from evidence from the Early Pleistocene assemblage of level TD6 of GranDolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain). The cannibalism documented in level TD6 mainly involves theconsumption of infants and other immature individuals. The human induced modifications on Homoantecessor and deer remains suggest that butchering processes were similar for both taxa, and theremains were discarded on the living floor in the same way. This finding implies that a group of homininsthat used the Gran Dolina cave periodically hunted and consumed individuals from another group.However, the age distribution of the cannibalized hominins in the TD6 assemblage is not consistent withthat from other cases of exo-cannibalism by human/hominin groups. Instead, it is similar to the ageprofiles seen in cannibalism associated with intergroup aggression in chimpanzees. For this reason, weuse an analogy with chimpanzees to propose that the TD6 hominins mounted low-risk attacks onmembers of other groups to defend access to resources within their own territories and to try andexpand their territories at the expense of neighboring groups.
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