Silvia Bello, Simon Parfitt and Chris Stringer from the Department of Paleontology, The National History Museum (London, UK) recently reported the discovery of the earliest Ice Age cups made from human skulls.
     Such macabre cups and bowls are known at least since the 5th century BCE, when ancient Greek historian Herodotus portrayed the Scythians as people who drank from the skulls of their enemies, and similar traditions have been described by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian in the 1st or 2nd centuries BCE.
     Still, archaeological evidence of how skull cups were made is extremely rare. Bello, Parfitt and Stringer discovered three skull cups in England that are roughly 14,700 years old, the earliest ones that researchers have confirmed ages for and the only ones known so far from the British Isles. In a site known as Gough's Cave in Somerset (England), skull fragments from at least five people were found - a young child about 3 years old, two adolescents, an adult and an older adult. There were signs that their lower jaws had the marrow sucked out, suggesting cannibalism occurred. Cut marks and dents on the bones suggest they were scalped and scrupulously scraped clean of skin and flesh with flint tools shortly after death. The crafters then removed the face bones and bases of the skulls from the adults and the 3-year-old, meticulously chipping at the broken edges of the resulting cups, possibly to straighten their rims.
     "Possibly the most surprising thing is how skilled at manipulating human bodies these early humans were," Bello said. "It was a very meticulous process that just proves how technologically advanced this population was. It also demonstrates a very complex funerary behavior." Chris Stringer added: "It's impossible to know how the skull cups were used back then, but in recent examples, they may hold blood, wine or food during rituals." A precise cast of the skull cup from the adult individual will go on display at the Natural History Museum in London on March 1 for three months.

Edited from PLoS One (February 2011), MSNBC, LiveScience (6 February 2011)