‘Something horrible’: Somerset pit reveals bronze age cannibalism

It is unlikely that the violence was driven by resource scarcity or hunger.

Cattle bones were found alongside the human remains,
indicating ample food availability.
There is also no genetic proof of different groups living together at the site,
interpersonal tensions may have been at the centre of the conflict.
Blunt force trauma to the skulls indicates that the victims
were deliberately killed, and a lack of defensive injuries
suggests they were caught by surprise.

The violence may have been driven by theft — particularly of cattle —
or social disputes, such as perceived insults,
that escalated into murderous acts of revenge.
“The extreme violence seen here is unlikely to have
been an isolated incident,” Schulting says.
“There would have been repercussions as the relatives
and friends of the victims sought revenge,
and this could have led to cycles of violence in the region.”
This suggests that cannibalism appears to have been a deliberate
act of dehumanising the victims rather than
a means of sustenance.

LINK

“Cannibalism In Europe, Human beings were reduced to
simple biological matter equivalent to any other kind of commodity"

www.smithsonianmag.com...

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originally posted by: Scratchpost
I am saying we have no idea what the circumstance were at the time.
it could have been winter and food was very hard to find.
They may have had to eat the dead to live.

We know some of what the circumstances were. One of the circumstances that we know is that the bodies were dismembered or butchered either at the time of death or very soon after.

Most likely, they were incapacitated by the blow to the head before being butchered.

It could have been winter, food could have been hard to find but these people weren't eating the dead for survival, they were killing the living to eat them - maybe for survival or maybe, as the academics are suggesting for some other reason like political dominance or some such. Perhaps keeping them captive, eating them as and when they needed or wanted to but not because they were already dead. The deaths were not accidental, they were purposeful.

The paper makes a number of points about the time period the bones belong to. Populations at that time, available natural resources, I doubt even in a crop failure anyone needed to have starved back then. Not if they could also hunt, fish and fowl. Even the 4.2K event doesn't seem to have had much of an impact on England's green and pleasant lands. If anything, while the rest of Eurasia got drier and cooler, Britain, as Britain does best, just got wetter.

Temperate rainforest most of it until the combination of farming and metal working began eating into that, by the time the Romans got here it was significantly changed and they did some landscaping of their own.

There is no good reason that anyone should have been starving at that time.

Another point worth mentioning, which you may not be aware of if you haven't read the paper, is that two of the individuals were found to be carrying the plague virus. The paper makes the suggestion that this may be why the group was killed but that doesn't make sense to me - would you eat diseased food? It must be a coincidence surely? Or am I just projecting my sensibilities onto a situation that I am probably quite incapable of understanding?