While in the modern day most people either bury or cremate their dead, some of our ancestors did things a little differently.
The remains of human bones with cutmarks, breaks and human gnawing marks found across northern Europe show some human groups living around 15,000 years ago were eating their dead not out of necessity, but as part of their culture.
They were processing the bodies of their dead, removing the flesh from the corpse, eating it, and in some cases modifying the remaining bones to create new objects such as skull cups, suggesting some thought was being put into the cannibalism.
Rather than as a means to survival, it appears this late Upper Paleolithic era behavior was just what was done when someone died. In context, it can be seen as different in practice, but perhaps not meaning, to cremations, burials or mummification.
Even as more and more archaeological digs along northern Europe show the eating of humans was quite widespread, we don't yet know what kind of beliefs led to funerary cannibalism, and it's possible we may never know.
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