Vengeance Erasure and Feedback Inversion: Failed Governance Modes in Early Hominin Social–Ecological Systems

This paper advances a falsifiable systems-level hypothesis—Feedback Inversion and Vengeance Erasure (FIVE)—to explain the patterned evidence of hominin cannibalism at Gran Dolina TD6 (Atapuerca, Spain), the earliest widely accepted European site documenting systematic anthropogenic processing of Homo antecessor remains. Rather than treating cannibalism as a primarily nutritional, episodic, or symbolic phenomenon, the study reframes the TD6 assemblage as a material signature of governance failure within an early hominin social–ecological system. Drawing on established frameworks from resilience theory, complexity science, and cooperation dynamics, the FIVE model proposes that corrective social feedback mechanisms were not merely weakened but actively inverted—such that stabilizing agents (e.g., regulators, lineage carriers) became targets for elimination. Cannibalistic processing in this regime functions as ontological declassification, transforming persons into prey-equivalent entities rather than serving subsistence or ritual ends alone. The analysis integrates published taphonomic, demographic, spatial, and sedimentological data to evaluate five discriminating predictions generated by the FIVE framework: (1) behavioral recurrence, (2) procedural parity between hominin and faunal processing, (3) non-random demographic targeting, (4) spatial organization indicative of coordination, and (5) absence of corrective recovery signatures. The convergence of these signals at TD6 is shown to be poorly explained by famine-based, opportunistic violence, or purely ritualized models, but consistent with a stabilized regime of feedback inversion. By operating explicitly at the level of system dynamics rather than inferred motive or symbolism, this work maintains methodological rigor while offering a parsimonious explanation for long-standing anomalies in the TD6 record. More broadly, the paper situates TD6 as the earliest currently legible archaeological configuration consistent with a loss of social–ecological coherence—one later human cultures may have encoded symbolically as a “fall from harmony.” The FIVE framework is presented not as mythic narrative, but as a diagnostic model with implications for understanding governance failure, collapse dynamics, and repair in both deep-time and modern systems.