The Mesolithic period, during which Cheddar Man lived, is not the oldest phase of human occupation at Gough’s Cave. The cave contains human remains that are approximately 14,700 years old — the product of an entirely separate occupation, roughly five thousand years before Cheddar Man’s time, during the Palaeolithic period. These much older remains represent a different population, a different culture, and a dramatically different set of behaviors.
The Palaeolithic remains at Gough’s Cave tell a striking story. Multiple individuals — including at least one teenager and a child approximately three years old — are represented by fragmentary bones bearing clear evidence of processing. Many of the bones show cut marks where soft tissue was removed. Long bones and ribs were cracked open to extract marrow and fat. Three skulls were carefully shaped into cups or containers — the earliest directly dated skull-cups known anywhere in the archaeological record. A human forearm bone bears zigzag engravings, making it the oldest known engraved human bone.
The horses whose bones are abundant in the same archaeological layer were, it seems, being processed and consumed as food — there is ample evidence of ordinary butchery and consumption of horse meat at the site. The human processing, by contrast, shows evidence of more deliberate and unusual practices. Dr. Silvia Bello of the Natural History Museum, who has studied the Gough’s Cave Palaeolithic material extensively, described the evidence as pointing to “a sophisticated culture of butchering and carving human remains,” adding that whether the practices were carried out to revere dead kin or for some other purpose “we simply don’t know.”