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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
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
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)
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 07 2017, @08:11PM (6 children)
People have always sought patterns, causal connections between events, to understand the world. Of course burdened by vast ignorance, ancient peoples saw many patterns that weren't, made many quite ridiculous connections that weren't there, such as astrology. Superstition was rampant. They anthropomorphized everything. Actions that seemed to lead to bad events could quickly become taboo. Despite laboring under great ignorance, they did get a lot right.
Many dietary restrictions are based on observations of how safe particular foods were. Pretty well known that Jews do not eat pork. Pork was considerably more risky than beef or chicken, as pigs have more similarities with humans than those other animals, including similar parasites and diseases. It therefore has to be cooked more thoroughly and carefully. I've heard that pork is the meat that tastes most like human, and that cannibals refer to humans as "long pig". Human meat can't help but be higher risk than pork. For any animal, cannibalism carries the same risks. There are some diseases that afflict only cannibals. Primitive peoples could easily make the connection between the act of eating another human and being afflicted with those specific illnesses. Takes very little extrapolation to suppose that cannibalism displeases the gods, and for it to become very strongly taboo, even for those who are unmoved by humanitarian considerations.
So, no. Cannibalism is extremely rare. The meat of the losers of a battle was very rarely eaten by any other people, winners or bystanders, for the good reason that it was too risky. Mostly, cannibalism happens only when people are desperate and starving, for instance the Donner Party, and the S. American sports team whose plane crashed deep in the Andes in 1972. It's thought that the environments of islands were cannibalism has been practiced were lacking in ready access to critical nutrients, and that helped drive those peoples to do it.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday April 07 2017, @09:36PM (1 child)
I would also imagine that small island populations would have significantly reduced exposure to communicable disease.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 07 2017, @10:46PM
Rather, those that couldn't handle the existing diseases went extinct. Same for genetic diseases among American Indians. Too small groups breed with each others so inherited diseases wiped out a lot. But those that survived did well given enough generations. It should show up as a lack of dormant genetic diseases in Indians.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday April 07 2017, @10:51PM (1 child)
Humans and pigs looks very similar in the early stages of pregnancy so there are more similarities than a quick look may hint.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Saturday April 08 2017, @12:08AM
thus our -so to speak- meatspace name: long pig...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday April 07 2017, @11:01PM
Many dietary restrictions are based on observations of how safe particular foods were. Pretty well known that Jews do not eat pork.
While it's a nice argument -- and some scholars still make it as a justification for Jewish pork prohibition -- I don't buy it. The history of medicine shows that people are basically terrible at recognizing the actual causes of illness. And foodborne diseases are no exception. To this day, lots of people refuse to believe a lot of kitchen hygiene constraints advocated by food safety experts are unnecessary, claiming they've always done X [bad practice] and have "never gotten sick." Except that's often not true -- it's just that people only tend to associate food poisoning with food when the disease rapidly follows consumption, whereas actual food poisoning can come days later (or, in the case of things like parasitical diseases from pork, not showing up for weeks or months). And people believe in stuff like the "24-hour flu," which is generally a case of mild food poisoning instead... they just don't make the connection with food.
So, no, I don't think it's likely that people in the ancient world realized that pork was the cause of more disease and THAT was the main reason to ban it. In fact, we have no evidence (e.g., actual accounts of the cause of disease) that anyone made the connection between diseased pork and things like parasitical infections until... well, the 1800s actually. That's when scientists finally started actually realizing that parasites cause disease AND are often carried by food. It may seem obvious now, but it absolutely was not until really recent human history.
And then you'd have to explain why the Torah prohibits all the other stuff. In the same passages that ban pigs, they're lumped in explicitly with camels, hares, and a bunch of other stuff [wikipedia.org]. A lot of the rest of that long list doesn't have any connection to diseases.
What's up with pigs? Well, there are a number of other theories. One, based on recent archaeological evidence [smithsonianmag.com], has to do with the gradual importation of domesticated chickens into the Western Middle East. Pork had previously been a very popular domesticated animal there, but chickens were much more efficient protein sources to raise, produced eggs (even more food), and didn't require the resources pork does (e.g., lots of water and shade -- keep in mind when Leviticus was written the Jews were supposedly wandering around in a desert for 40 years).
Pigs, as anyone who has watched the movie Babe will recall, are pretty much useless on the farm except for eating. Other "good" mammals that Jews were eating (e.g., cows, goats, sheep) are easy to milk. Pigs are not. Chickens produce eggs. Pigs do not. So, they're a big investment of resources for relatively small return (and not a regular one, as you could get with milk or eggs from other animals).
All of those are good reasons why the pig populations declined rapidly in the Middle East after ca. 1000 BCE. But it doesn't yet explain the actual BAN on eating them. For that, I think you need to actually look at the Biblical text, which is all about classification systems. Keeping kosher in Judaism is about a complex set of rules of classification and separation of "clean" from "unclean." Pigs don't fit the standard definition of fit animals to eat (they have cloven hoofs but DON'T chew the cud), and they eat just about anything (including filth and refuse... and even meat, unlike the other "good" animals). Thus, they don't fit into the Levitical idea of strict rules at all. Keep in mind this is a religion that says if you use the same pot for meat and milk, you have to break the pot -- because you can't mix them. This is a religion that says you can't sow seeds of different kinds in the same field, and you can't wear clothes woven from two different kinds of fabric. And there are pages and pages dictating exactly when people are "clean" and "unclean" depending on what "time of the month" it is for women, etc. and exactly how to segregate those who aren't strictly "clean."
Now, look at the pig, who is happy to roll around in mud, who is happy to eat a mixture of anything (even stuff profoundly unkosher), and whose anatomy doesn't even make sense (all the other "split-hoof" animals are good... why doesn't the pig chew the cud? What is it hiding?). And let's not even get into the association of pig sacrifices with rival tribes of the Jews at that time.... Can you see why it might be obvious that it doesn't fit in with all the other laws about good, clean kosher living? Couple that with the fact that it was increasingly seen as wasteful as livestock with the introduction of the chicken, and why should Jews (supposedly lost in the desert) be struggling to keep these animals with them?
I know the main point of your post wasn't about pigs, so sorry to spend so much time on that. But I think without this -- and with the realization that for most of human history, people were REALLY bad about seeing associations between food and diseases that wouldn't appear for weeks or months later -- it seems somewhat unlikely that a taboo against cannibalism developed solely (or even primarily) on this basis. There's actually an ongoing debate among anthropologists about how common cannibalism actually was in early human cultures -- and we keep finding more evidence that it was likely more common (e.g., human bones that have been "processed" at more sites). Why it became a relatively widespread taboo is probably the greater mystery.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 08 2017, @03:19AM
Ahem...
http://www.hesperianpress.com/index.php/dollypot-articles/34-dollypot-articles/486-australian-aboriginal-cannibalism-an-eyewitness-account [hesperianpress.com]
There are also accounts, by a *sympathetic* anthropologist, of Abos routinely eating their own children.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.