LONDON: New evidence has shown that early Britons engaged in cannibalism, eating each other’s remains and using the skulls as cups.

Modern carbon-dating techniques have been used to investigate a system of caves in Britain’s Somerset. Remains in the caves date back to around 15,000 years ago.

The new information, compiled by a research team from London’s Natural History Museum and University College London, found that every single one of the bones found in the caves carries evidence of cannibalism, The Times reported.

Experts have been aware of ancient human remains at the caves since the 1880s, but have only investigated them recently.

“All the bones from the head down were heavily modified with chewing,” Silvia Bello, who led the research, told the newspaper. The skulls were the only parts of the skeletons that hadn’t been chewed, Bello said, adding: “They received special treatment … they were carefully broken to produce a skull cup.”

“It was a very careful process — they were really trying to create an object,” she said of the hunter-gatherers, known as Cro-Magnon or Magdalenians,

According to The Independent, “the vast majority of the remains had also been cracked so that the cavemen could get to the marrow inside, while scratches and bite marks suggested they used tools and their teeth to get to every scrap of human tissue.”

Simon Parfitt, an archaeologist from University College London, said that there was evidence from the period across Europe suggesting cannibalism took place.

“A recurring theme of this period is the remarkable rarity of burials and how commonly we find human remains mixed with occupation waste at many sites,” he said.

“Further analysis along the lines used to study Gough’s Cave will help to establish whether the type of ritualistic cannibalism practiced there is a regional phenomenon, or a more widespread practice found throughout the Magdalenian world.”

Professor Chris Stringer, an anthropologist, told the Mail Online that despite the differences with how they treated the dead, these early humans were physically “very like us”.