Britons Drank From Human Skulls
“I think the production of the skull-cups is ritualistic. If the purpose was simply to break the skulls to extract the brain to eat it, there are much easier ways to do that. If food was the objective, the skull would be highly fragmented. But here you can really see they tried to preserve most of the skull bone; the cut marks tell us they tried to clean the skull, taking off every piece of soft tissue so that they could then modify it very precisely. They were manufacturing something.”
— Paleontologist Silvio Bello, on research that indicates that 14,700-year-old human skulls found in Gough’s Cave in Somerset, England were used as drinking cups. This would make them the oldest such example of such craftsmanship ever discovered. And also, kind of miraculous that they were never smashed into shards and used to stab anybody, which I guess they would have called “skulling.”