The skull-cup cannibals were modern humans; they were Magdalenians. Magdalenians were partly ancestral to Mesolithic Europeans like Cheddar Man, but 5000 years is a pretty long time- 5000 years before us, English and Sanskrit were the same language, Egypt was just unifying, and penis sheaths were the hot fashion in the Levant. Things have changed since then, and things changed between the time of the Magdalenians and Cheddar Man.
That the Magdalenians were cannibals isn’t a slander against them. Early Modern Europeans practiced medicinal cannibalism even as they decried cannibal “savages” elsewhere. Magdalenian finds are most consistent with endocannibalism, also called funerary cannibalism, where members of a social group are partly eaten when they die. It’s smart when you live on the Malthusian margin, and in their culture would have been a sign of respect for the dead. However, even if it was in the context of warfare, I will say that killing someone and then eating them isn’t that much worse than killing someone and not eating them. If Magdalenians warred, that’s not exactly a unique flaw of theirs.
But also, the Magdalenian culture* is also responsible for some of the most iconic artistic achievements of, well, all human history.
*Magdalenians were genetically homogenous, but existed over a wide range of time and space, and so probably spoke many languages and comprised many peoples, who nonetheless shared certain cultural characteristics in common.
(some of these are reproductions, as the moisture from our breath can damage paintings)(I chose a lot of bison ones because i like the bison paintings)
In France and Spain, Magdalenians had a tradition of magnificent cave art. Magdalenians weren’t the only prehistoric Europeans to make cave art; cave art in Chauvet cave is as much older than the Magdalenians as the Madgalenians are than us. But many famous caves like Lascaux are Magdalenian. Looking at their cave art literally brings me to tears. It’s so beautiful, so sensitive to aesthetic quality, to nature, and to a sort of “spiritual” sense.
The leading hypothesis is that Magdalenian art was made in the context of a shamanic spiritual framework, but since Magdalenians left no written records, we can’t know. Whatever the purpose, these paintings were meant to be viewed by lamplight in the dark of a cave, so they were made to swirl and flicker from the darkness. And so the (perhaps illusory) naturalism is sometimes abandoned, for something altogether more impressionistic and emotive.
This is to say that Magdalenians were cannibals, but they were people, and their practice of cannibalism doesn’t detract from their humanity. Also, even non-modern humans like Neanderthals, while they had simpler art and material cultures, were still people, who loved and laughed and cried and had hopes and dreams. The apparent poverty of their culture may have been due to their bands being more isolated from each other, so cultural ideas didn’t spread as well as they did in early modern humans. Even if Neanderthals were “dumb”, like, they’re people, don’t dismiss them as orcs or something.
(for what it’s worth, Magdalenians also had dark skin and black hair, but uniformly had brown eyes, unlike Mesolithic Europeans who were mostly light-eyed. No modern person has more than a small bit of Magdalenian ancestry, though through Western Eurasia it’s present. Magdalenians weren’t any race recognized now because race is a social construct and the Magdalenians lived in a different social context)
(I referred to Cheddar Man as Cheddar Man because, while determining sex from bones is famously iffy, he’s had his genome sequenced, and though it’s not published it seems that he was genetically male. Most XY people are men, so I referred to him as “Man”. That said, it is not impossible that Cheddar Man is inaccurate, since we have many cases across human prehistory of people buried with grave goods indicative of a gender that doesn’t correspond to their genetic sex. So though we can’t ask Cheddar Friend their pronouns, OP might be right and I might be wrong)
(also, Cheddar Friend/Man may have spoken a language without gendered pronouns, so even if you asked their pronouns you might not find out their gender from the answer!)
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