Jose Carillo's Forum

TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR

This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.

The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.

I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here.

Joe Carillo

Grisly findings about the diet of our pre-human ancestors

Are we ready for some grisly revelations about our closest pre-human ancestors?

A new study of the remains of cannibal feasts consumed about one million years ago reveals these findings: first, the world’s first known cannibals ate each other to satisfy their nutritional needs; second, the cannibals belonged to the species Homo antecessor, related to both Neanderthals and modern humans; and third, Homo antecessor appears to have preyed on competing groups, treating victims like any other meat source.

As reported by Jennifer Viegas in the August 26, 2010 issue of Discovery magazine, these are the conclusions of a study published in the latest issue of Current Anthropology by a team of anthropologists led by Eudald Carbonell, a professor at the University of Rovira and Virgili in Catalonia, Spain. The team analyzed food remains, stone tools, and other finds associated with Homo antecessor at a cave site called Gran Dolina in the Sierra de tapuerca near Burgos, Spain.

“Cut marks, peeling, and percussion marks show that the corpses of these individuals were processed in keeping with the mimetic mode used with other mammal carcasses: skinning, defleshing, dismembering, evisceration, and periosteum (membrane that lines bones) and marrow extraction,” the researchers reported.

According to the team, Homo antecessor was “the last common ancestor between the African lineage that gave rise to our species, Homo sapiens, and the lineage leading to the European Neanderthals of the Upper Pleistocene.”

Read “First Cannibals Ate Each Other for Extra Nutrition” in News.Discovery.com now!

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