Humans have been using skulls as cups for thousands of years to toast friends-or enemies. Now a team analyzing bones from Gough Cave in Somerset, United Kingdom, has found what it claims to be the earliest evidence for the practice. Led by paleontologist Silvia Bello of the Natural History Museum in London, the team studied three skulls previously found in a cave layer radiocarbon dated to 14,700 years ago, during the Ice Age when the Magdalenian culture thrived there. The pattern of cutmarks and abrasions on the skulls suggests that the cranial vaults were carefully preserved while the rest of the faces were smashed off, the eyes gouged out, and the lower jaws carefully removed.
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