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Both Phoenix666 and takyon write in with the latest news on human cannibalism:

For Cannibals, Here's the Caloric Content of Humans—it's Just Meh

Phoenix666 writes:

ArsTechnica reports:

According to archeological evidence, the real Paleo diet included some human flesh now and then. But as Ars has reported before, deciphering exactly why our ancient relatives dined on their fellow hominins is tricky and up for debate—was it for rituals, other social reasons, or just good eats? A new study counting up the calorie content of a Paleolithic diet—and human flesh—suggests that cannibals were not thinking with their guts.

By rough estimates, eating all the skeletal flesh off a human—not including the organs—would provide about 32,376 calories. An optimally sized hunting group of 25 male Neanderthals or Pleistocene adults (anatomically modern human) could get about a meal out of that. But if the same group tracked down a boar or cow—which are less cunning and maybe easier to hunt—they'd have three days' worth of meals out of the skeletal flesh. The findings appear Thursday in Scientific Reports.

"On a nutritional level, hominins fall where expected, in terms of calorie content when compared to fauna [animals] of a similar body weight," the study's author, archeologist James Cole of University of Brighton, concluded. "However," Cole went on, when you compare them to the large animals we know our ancestors also ate, "the calorie returns of individuals and groups of hominins are significantly less" than going after that bigger game.

So eating grandma isn't really worth it.

Human Cannibalism is for Fun and Ritual, Not the Calories

takyon writes:

Human bodies don't contain enough calories to be worth eating as a regular meal, according to a study:

A new, slightly morbid study based on the calorie counts of average humans suggests that human-eating was mostly ritualistic, not dietary, in nature among hominins including Homo erectus, H. antecessor, Neandertals, and early modern humans.

Four adult male bodies that were chemically analyzed in two studies in 1945 and 1956 were found to have an average of 125,822 calories of fat and protein. Extinct hominins may have had more muscle mass and calories than today's humans, but far less than other animals such as woolly mammoths (3.6 million calories), woolly rhinoceroses (1.26 million calories), and aurochs (979,200 calories). Other hominins could represent just as much of a threat at would-be hunters.

Assessing the calorific significance of episodes of human cannibalism in the Palaeolithic (open, DOI: 10.1038/srep44707) (DX)

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2