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New Evidence in Historical Cannibalism Debate
An anonymous reader writes "ScienceNOW is reporting that a team of scientists led by Geneticist Jaume Bertranpetit has called into question findings from an earlier study of human prion diseases. The first study, led by John Collinge of University College London, stated that the existence of a gene that codes for prions was a result of a "balancing act" that had kept it in the gene pool for so long. The balancing act was supposedly due to widespread cannibalistic practices in human history. The new report suggests that their results were skewed because of low frequency variations known as 'ascertainment bias.'"
Few taboos are stronger than cannibalism. It's no surprise then that a study published 2 years ago created quite a stir by claiming that modern humans harbor a genetic signature suggesting our ancestors engaged heavily in the practice.
I don't see why. Just because something is taboo now doesn't mean it always was. I wouldn't be bothered too much if I found out for certain that my ancestors were cannibals. It's not like that reflects poorly on me or my society. Every culture used to do some weird/nasty/mean things at some point.
...because they consider the idea of human cannibalism to be "distasteful" (pardon the pun).
I don't know if cannibalism was as widespread as has been claimed, but I do know that many people will continue to deny that it ever happened, simply because they don't like the ideas of it.
What next: we are descended from apes? When will tese outrageous and shameful claims ever cease?
Culinary perversions? Are you saying you never ate brains? Brains are a delicacy in many cultures. Well, not human brains, but lamb and calves' brains and such. The French eat them, the Arabs do too, and many such mediterranean and mideastern cultures. I ate them when i was a kid, they tasted good, though now i wouldn't. Many cultures still preserve their rural traditions from times of ancient scarcity, for example, in England they still eat this thing made of congealed pigs' blood, called black pudding. Now that is something I could never stomach. It's part of that incredibly unhealthy, clot-inducing concoction called a Full English breakfast.
Yeah, I'm trolling within my own thread. What purpose would that serve? The moderators are on crack.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Nevertheless, perhaps we'll see an article in the future to see the conclusion after more comparisons between the two papers and further research. It's an interesting topic, to say the least.
Fun Zoid RPG
Because taboos are mostly irrational attitudes, the ways each culture chooses to be irrational are different and varied.
That is not to say that some taboos may not be rooted in some practical fact, but more often than not they are nonsense.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
By the by sometime poeple ate people for because otherwise their diet would lack proteins and other important nutrients, ancient American tribes for instance (think Aztecs, Toltecs or Maya's)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Infocom managed to implement it to run in such tight memory constraints because they designed all their games to run in a virtual machine (the Z-machine), and provided it with the ability to page in and out sectors of data from disk. They then compiled the code from a high level language Lisp-ish language on a nice big mainframe, and only had to code directly on the various microcomputer platforms enough code to run the virtual machine. Thats why Infocom games can consistently across so many platforms, despite widely varying architectures and space contraints.
They didn't view themselves as having 64k to work with which in the C-64 case they had to share with 16k of roms and a display buffer, etc. They viewed themselves as simply paging data out of a much larger virtual machine. Even Zork 1 images weigh in between 94k and 123k IIRC. Some later Z-machine images were considerable larger.
This is also why all those silly little 'write your own Zork in BASIC' games that people published in Compute's Gazette, etc. never were as cool as Zork. They just didn't have the architecture to scale that well.
Yes, this is off-topic.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Given the fact that some of our distant relations, e.g. Chimpanzees, still kill and eat humans if they can, it doesn't surprise me that early humans might have done this as well. It probably was never a food of choice but was a 'meal of opportunity' so to speak. In addition, there could also be another reason behind the cannabalism: ritual. Many primitive cultures had rituals in which they eat animal parts in order to obtain some of that animal's powers and it isn't much of a stretch to assume ritualized cannabalism of vanquished enemies was practiced as well by early humans. We certainly know men have been killing each other for a long, long time and show no signs of developing a distaste for it (no pun intended). Even today, some Asians consume tiger genitalia and other animal parts for certain perceived benefits which probably has an origin in those rituals. The patterns seem clear enough, but it isn't very politically correct in the most religious of industrialized nations to point out man's animal orgins so I expect significant resources will be brought to bear to dissprove this even if fabrication is necessary.
Enslaving people with no souls cannot possibly be a sin, can it? Therefore there existed an incentive to find all sorts of evidence of cannibalism among tribes in distant lands.