Conceding that yeah, things definitely got out of hand sometime thousands of years ago at a site in southwest England where the bones of dozens of individuals were found with human bite marks on them, researchers at Cambridge University allowed that maybe the bites were more of a ritual exercise than straight up consumption of human flesh for sustenance. The hefty benefit of the doubt from people not at all unlikely to have descended from these murderous savages takes up a considerable amount of space in a new report published by the Cambridge team on Monday.

“It is difficult to understand the human remains from [dig site] Horizon 2 in anything other than a context of extreme violence and systematic corporeal insult seemingly including anthropophagy.”

“While there are occasional examples of cutmarks on British and Irish Neolithic human remains, these are usually rationalised as the result of actions to hasten the transition to a fully skeletonised state and thus ‘ancestral’ status. There is no tradition of ritual dismemberment of the deceased for the British Early Bronze Age, nor would this explain the prevalence of cranial blunt-force injuries indicating that these individuals were killed beforehand. Differential mortuary treatment within the community, perhaps for those dying violent deaths, is also difficult to reconcile with estimates for the relatively short duration of deposition for Horizon 2. This does raise a question concerning the scale of the event, given the number of humans and animals represented,” says the research.

“Consumption of all individuals represented in the human and faunal assemblages from Horizon 2 in a single episode implies a substantial gathering and the complicity of potentially many hundreds of people. Whether some element of selection was involved, and its basis if so, is unknown. It is possible that the act of butchery was more important than the actual consumption, which may have been token. This requires further research and integration of faunal analyses,” the very blatantly wishcast-y report continued. Good luck finding more proof it was just locker room cannibalism.