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Ancient Cannibals Didn't Turn To Cannibalism Just For the Calories, Study Suggests (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: A new, slightly morbid study based on the calorie counts of average humans suggests that man-eating was mostly ritualistic, not dietary, in nature among hominins including Homo erectus, H. antecessor, Neandertals, and early modern humans. On average, an adult male human contains 125,822 calories of fat and protein, enough to meet the 1-day dietary requirements of more than 60 people. The numbers represent a lower limit, as Neandertals and other extinct hominins likely had more muscle mass than modern humans. Still, when compared with other animals widely available to ancient man like mammoths (3,600,000 calories), wooly rhinoceroses (1,260,000 calories), and aurochs (979,200 calories), it hardly seems worthwhile to hunt hominins that are just as wily and dangerous as the hunters, the researchers conclude. Some instances of cannibalism from nine Paleolithic sites, which date from 936,000 to 14,700 years ago, might be chalked up to starvation or not wanting to waste a perfectly good body that died from natural causes.
so, do we taste like gamy chicken?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Eating each other for dietary needs would seem self-limiting. Also any society that condones murder doesn't last long.
Witness the fools romping around the desert in Syria and Iraq. They might enjoy the killing but they aren't exactly growing.
right after you suck on my DAMN balls
There's head-hunters and there's opportunistic cannibalism. Like what happened in the Siege of Leningrad during WW2.
The local witch doctor, spiritual healer or prophet saw a new business opportunity and decided to expand their status in the community.
To become the gateway to the supply and demand.
That is why most normal religions ban such ideas.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
a Fark repost page now? This is REALLY pathetic.
Are they for real with this crappy article?
I'd rather eat Johnson
Have gnu, will travel.
50 years ago in his book Gluttons and Libertines...
What are Neandertals? Proto-editors? Autotrophs?
Cannibalizing makes it too easy to transfer parasites like Trichinosis. If a species Only consumes other species it forces the parasite to be viable in two species which is much harder for evolution to tackle. Odd the Science article does not even mention this parasite factor.
Yeahhh..... I'm sure the homosapiens compared the calories betweens species before hunting.
More seriously though, I find that this studies goes wayyyy to far in it's analysis of the situation. In my mind, for the decision of the prey to hunt, the quantity of food per individual fall pretty low in the decision process.
What's the season? How easy it is to hunt and what are the odd of success? How much experience we have hunting that prey? How far from the colony the prey is? How dangerous it is to hunt that prey? Is there additional benefit to hunt that prey (are they challenging our territory? Can I impress the village if I hunt this?)
Elok
They were just trying to make ends into meat.
Table-ized A.I.
You attack your enemy, and if successful take their land. So what do you do with the people? Either make them slaves or eat them. Simple.
This is exactly what had happened in New Zealand for centuries. But then the great chief Honga Hika realized the potential of muskets. He managed to go all the way to England, proportadly to help missionaries with a Mauri dictionary, but actually to get his hands on the "thousand thousand" muskets he heard were stored in a place called the tower of London. In that he failed, but he did manage to bring back sufficient muskets to eat many of his countrymen.
When the British came some years later they had two problems. Firstly, the Mauri were very used to fighting with Muskets and used them well. The second was that the "traditional" owner on a piece of land may only have owned it for a decade or so, having eaten the previous owner.
Tribal life was tough. If you lose a battle, you lose your land, and then you starve.
They need to take into account not just the calories contained in the person eaten, but also the calories that will no longer be consumed by the eaten, who having been themselves consumed no longer consume themselves, and those calories are thus available to the eater.
No seriously, some people really don't like abortion.
I'm imagining an alternate history version of this story, in a world where cannibalism is common. The same researchers, studying the same history, trying to figure out how the same practice started long ago, but from a different perspective.
Result: "Ancient Cannibals Didn't Turn to Cannibalism Just To Consume the Spirits of the Vanquished".
See that "Preview" button?
... replying to questions and comments that were never stated.
Seriously, how do you even get funding for this?
"I need money and time to research whether cannibals just eat people because coconuts are in short supply."
"Did someone say they did?"
"Sure. I've definitely heard that claim being made. Think I read it in a text book."
This is straw man research at it's best. Come up with an arbitrary claim and test it. It is crap published simply because you need to keep publishing to keep your position, and it takes money and time away from real, useful, research.
To get a PhD you need to show your research is: A) new; b) substantial; and C) useful. While this research may be new, it hardly satisfies the other two criteria. I would suggest that perhaps our peer review system starts valuing the qualities B and C more. Not so much as is required for a PhD, but certainly more than this.
To say it was a ritualistic is missing the mark. The truth is that they ate people with "poko" (exceptional traits). Tribes would disseminate lists of exceptional traits they needed to acquire to advance within the hierarchy of their tribes. The quest to advance to the tribe leader has been succinctly described as, "Pokoman: gotta eat 'em all."
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
There are exactly three reasons why we go after animals:
It's fun
They're pests
They're tasty
Usually, we only hunt humans for the former two. But why not add the last one to the mix?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But in the summary they assume that mammoths and others were readily available prey.
I really don't get that point. Humans have always been opportunistic eaters. There are no constantly available easy sources of food, starvation was a constant part of our past. So the idea that it wasn't worth it to kill humans because there are easier for sources available just makes no sense.
I think I read somewhere that a load of jizz is single-digit calories at best. There's no way it could augment the diet in any significant way.
Pretty sure is a movie out there with a 100+ calorie serving...
http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html]
Still, don't let science and facts get in the way of your programming - just blindly carry on doing something "because everybody else is doing it"...
The reports from people who engaged in cannibalism, (like the survivors of the Donner party or people interviewed in Papua New Guinea) say that human flesh is not all that tasty.Though gorilla meat is sometimes sold is bush meat in Africa, chimp meat is not common. Our flesh is likely to taste like chimp meat, we have split from chimps just 3 million years ago. So ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They hunted food, now here's another piece of easy prey, why not eat it? Why the assumption (the article doesn't point to evidence) that it was ritualistic? This is a very poorly written article for a "Science" site. We eat all kinds of animals that have fewer calories, WTF does that have to do with it?
The submitter should have linked to the original article that Science linked to at http://www.nature.com/articles...
Recent studies of Palaeolithic cannibalism6,9,11,12,13,14,53 have done much to illustrate that the motivations and social contexts behind episodes of cannibalism go beyond the simplistic ‘nutritional’ or ‘ritual’ label
And the Conclusion of the Nature article doesn't agree either...
Undoubtedly, each episode of Palaeolithic cannibalism would have had its own specific cultural context and reason for consumption. In some instances, this may represent a more practical or opportunistic approach to food procurement, for example, the consumption of individuals who die of natural causes within the social group. Such an interpretation cannot be entirely dismissed given that the nutritional value of the human body is not particularly high, and hominins regularly exploited faunal remains that were lower in calories with no cultural influence.
Just another day in Paradise
This is straightforward if you fully consider the consequences of hunting other humans.
Other humans most likely live in tribes just like you. By hunting one of them, you are declaring war on the entire tribe, who have good reason to fear that they are next. So they will fight very viciously against you. You may win in the end, but likely not without casualties. Even in the best case, you'll have to constantly watch your back rather than doing productive things. All this for the calories from a single person.
This is a question that comes up in utilitarian theory. It's frequently asked, shouldn't utilitarianism allow you to find a lonely old woman, and kill her in order to save the lives of ten people awaiting organ transplants? In the short term, this might save lives and increase overall human happiness. But in the long term, every slightly-vulnerable person would wonder that they are next. This would cause an overall decrease in human happiness.
Early humans have been on the quest for things that have great taste and are less filling. This is not exactly news.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Maybe they just liked the way humans taste. After all humans apparently taste a lot like pork. Ribs anyone?
No, I don't believe that other hominids were necessarily "...just as wily and dangerous as the hunters..." - those are the ones you'd leave alone.
But the gullible, defenseless "sure come share our fire and our all-vegan porridge, I won't assume you're dangerous" naive ones? Yeah, pretty sure we'd eat THOSE.
That's why Liberals took so long to evolve. They kept getting eaten.
-Styopa
"During war" - also known as the most difficult time for a tiger in a war zone to acquire normal food ?
Eh - we're not supposed to climb mountains, jump off cliffs, or go snowboarding. But I'm going to keep doing it anyway.
Well kids and infants die too don't they? Also wouldn't this practice encourage murder by those that prefer the taste of human flesh?
"Tigers have always been the primary victims of war."