Early Bronze Age England was the site of a horrifically violent massacre in which at least 37 people may have been "systemically dismembered" and eaten, according to a team of archaeologists who published their findings in a journal titled Antiquity.
Over 4,000 years ago, one prehistoric group of people attacked another in what is now considered Charterhouse Warren, a cave system about 20 miles south of Bristol in southwest England. More than 3,000 bones, originally discovered by cave divers back in the 1970s, were found in a 50-foot pit, many of which were chosen for analysis because they were absolutely chock full of cut marks, indicating that their deaths were not natural or caused by an animal attack. This was explicitly human-on-human violence.
The lead researcher on the project, Rick Schulting, told NBC News that the bones were more beat up and cut up than you normally see "in a butchered animal bone assemblage." Meaning, that these human beings suffered an even more grisly fate than animals killed for food and fur at the time.
The evidence suggests that these prehistoric humans were killed with devastating blows to the head. The attackers then cut the victims apart limb from limb, removed and ate their flesh, and finally smashed their bones to bits. Archaeology isn't necessarily good for detecting motives, but the researchers theorize that this extreme violence was intended to not just defeat a rival group but to dehumanize them; to essentially reduce them to livestock.
The researchers also found that some of the smaller bones had tiny fractures that were consistent with the flat molars of omnivores, suggesting that human teeth had munched down to the bone before all the evidence was buried.
The final and biggest piece of evidence indicating that the victims were not cannibalized out of hunger is the fact that animal bones were found amongst the human bones, suggesting that there was a sufficient amount of food available.