They were already branded cannibals. Now it appears that early Britons also enjoyed drinking out of cups made from their victims' heads.

The world's oldest-known skull cups – containers meticulously fashioned from human skulls – were abandoned in a cave in Somerset's Cheddar Gorge some 14,700 years ago, it was revealed last night. t is also possible that they were by-products of 'crisis cannibalism' – the resorting to human flesh when little or no other food was available, the journal PLoS ONE reports.