850,000-Year-Old Homo Antecessor Remains Suggest Ancient Child Was Decapitated And Eaten By Its Own Kind

Warning: This is a grisly one. Around 850,000 years ago, a small child belonging to a now extinct human species was decapitated and processed for food, according to new archaeological finds in northern Spain.

The specimen, a tiny vertebra, belonged to a two- to four-year-old member of the archaic human species known as Homo antecessor , which was recently excavated from the Gran Dolina site in Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain. This species of human lived in Western Europe during the Lower Palaeolithic era, around 1.2 million to 800,000 years ago. Some have argued that this species may have represented the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens .

The vertebra showed evidence of precision cutting, while other bones found at the site exhibited marks characteristic of defleshin