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.'"

Comments

The other white meat

[i_should_be_working]

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.

Re:The other white meat

[zakezuke]

Every culture used to do some weird/nasty/mean things at some point.

While every culture has things in the past it's done it's not proud of, cannibalism may not be as horrid as it sounds. If for example the society becomes sustainable it would make sence that something would need be done about it. Could be no more than self-sacrifice, some form of lottery, or simply the need to waste nothing. Or it could be one fell on a tribal hunt, the beast got away, and the wish of the fallen comrade was for the tribe to survive the winter. You might think it would be less cruel to for example eject individuals from your tribe for the sake of the whole, you would have to know the conditions of the outside enviroment and their perception of it to judge whether they were being cruel or kind. If we are talking a pre-copper age culture, I think I would rather die at home quickly than being left half eaten beign picked apart by the crows. If we are talking the copper/bronze ages expelsion might have been a kinder solution. At least a person could have some basic armor and a weapon, even a horse. It's silly to put things into moral context when no one needs morality when there isn't enough to eat.

Cannibalism is a total taboo today, we are wise enough to understand it's not a typicaly healthy habbit. But in it self it's neither evil or immoral. We probally get this belief from those who discovered this age old taboo was simply unhealthy and assumed some sky-god / earth-god was punishing us.

Re:National Geographic Article

[johansalk]

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.

Re:Zork

[quokkapox]

I'm replying to my own parent modded Troll.

Yeah, I'm trolling within my own thread. What purpose would that serve? The moderators are on crack.

It's good to know

[ddx Christ]

It's good to know that research was carried out and the findings were against the first team's concerning cannibalism. If anything, it'll spark a bit of competitive research to further analyze the results and perhaps bring us closer to what the genes and their variations really represent. According to the article, there could be bias present because the first team didn't analyze all 22 variations, which is fairly important in the context of evolution.

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.

Re:Zork

[Edward Kmett]

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.

Cannibalism as a pretext for slavery

[mangu]

There was a theological argument that cannibals had no souls. The reasoning went like this: since on Judgement Day everyone will arise from their graves, their body parts which have decomposed will come together again. Since cannibals' body parts come from other peoples' bodies, they won't be able to reconstitute their own bodies. Therefore, cannibals don't have souls, because they can't ressurect on Judgement Day.

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.