In Belgium's Goyet Caves — an 820-foot gallery system — researchers reassembled 101 Neanderthal bone fragments into six individuals. Four were adult or adolescent females. Two were male children. All had been butchered with the same cut marks and breakage patterns used on hunted animal bones at the site.
DNA analysis showed the four women were unrelated to each other. Isotopic measurements confirmed all six individuals originated from somewhere else — they were not local to Goyet. The women were unusually short, with gracile long bones. They were outsiders.
Lead researcher Quentin Cosnefroy said the composition — four adult females and two immature individuals — was “too specific to be accidental.” This was selective exocannibalism: consumption of individuals from a different group, 41,000 to 45,000 years ago.
The bones are a census of exclusion. Not who lived at Goyet, but who was not permitted to. The butchery marks record social boundaries as precisely as any artifact. Who was eaten reveals who did not belong. The bones at the site do not describe the community that lived there — they describe the community's perimeter.
The researchers proposed two interpretations: the victims were targeted as weaker members of a competing group, or the killing served to reduce a rival population's reproductive capacity. Both readings assume the cannibalism was strategic rather than ritual. The butchery marks resemble animal processing, not ceremonial treatment. These six were processed as food, not as symbols.
What survives in the archaeological record is not a portrait of Neanderthal society. It is a portrait of its edge — the place where belonging ended and consumption began. Social structure is usually inferred from what a community built or kept. At Goyet, it is inferred from what a community destroyed.