Feb 17
Say what you will about the forward march of technology, we’ve made some undeniably positive advances as a species–like how we don’t eat our breakfast cereal out of the top of a human skull anymore. That’s definitely one for the “win” column.
According to evidence culled from some recently unearthed human bits, this wasn’t always the case. London’s Natural History got its hands on three 14,700-year-old severed skull-cups it believes were used as drinking bowls, possibly in some kind of ritual.
The skulls, taken from Gough’s Cave, in Sommerset, England, were fashioned in a similar manner to skull-based drinking cups that have been discovered in areas like Tibet, Fiji, and India. The treatment of the skulls apparently shows too much care to be a simple case of one person drinking another’s delicious brain juices.
“I think the production of the skull-cups is ritualistic,” said the museum’s Dr. Silvia Bello. “If the purpose was simply to break the skulls to extract the brain to eat it, there are much easier ways to do that.” Sure, any simple zombie could tell you that.
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