What does human flesh taste like?
This question can be asked, in the cognition of ordinary people, it is already very perverted.
Because human beings claim to be high-level animals and have the most basic ethical bottom line, and "cannibalism" is an extremely barbaric behavior, which is shameful to the world.
However, you may find it hard to believe that in primitive societies, "cannibalism" may not be just a choice for livelihood, on the contrary, cannibalism is a very common phenomenon, so common that we eat a chicken leg and a steak today.
Isn't it a little uncomfortable just to listen to?
Eh, timid friends will avoid it today, bold friends, let's discuss today, the "history of cannibalism" that anthropologists are secret!
Evidence of cannibalism found by archaeology
In fact, it is the great archaeology that has shattered the elegant mask of human civilization and exposed this bloody "history of cannibalism" to the world.
At the beginning of the 19th century, archaeologist Dragutin excavated hundreds of ancient human bones in the sand of a rock shed in the Croatian town of Krapina in eastern Europe, which were identified as coming from more than 20 Neanderthals 130,000 years ago.
But what is the reason why more than 20 ancient humans died en masse in a short period of time?
War or plague? Neither! Because these Neanderthals were eaten by other ancient humans! On the vast majority of broken bones, there are deadly marks caused by stone tools smashed and cut!
Coincidentally, in 1994, six ancient human remains dating back between 80 and 1.2 million years were unearthed in the Grandolina Cave at the foot of Mount Atapurca in northern Spain, with a total of 92 bone fragments, mostly broken skulls and teeth. What is terrifying is that the skulls and long bones of the limbs here basically have traces of being slaughtered by stone tools, and some large bones have even been violently destroyed, and the destroyers seem to want to suck the bone marrow and brain inside, and from the sedimentary layers where the remains of these six bodies are buried, archaeologists have also found prehistoric prey such as deer, bison, and rhinoceros!
What does this mean?
It shows that these six ancient humans were slaughtered, skinned, and cut off as if they were prey, and finally eaten! What is even more unimaginable is that after analyzing the degree of wear and tear of the teeth in the bones, the archaeologists have come to an astonishing conclusion, that is, these bones most likely belong to children and teenagers, and are not more than 13 years old.
The archaeological finds in the Mora-Gursi cave on the banks of the Rhône in southeastern France are even more shocking, as there are at least six Neanderthal skeleton fragments scattered around a furnace!
There are even black marks of fire roasting on these scattered bones.
The most obvious piece of bone that has been roasted by the fire is a papilloid bone, which is located on both sides of the head, and we know it with our hands behind the ears, which is the area of the human skull that covers the least muscles and skin, so once the whole skull is roasted on the fire, the mastoid part is definitely the most damaged place, and it will appear obvious black.
In addition to Europe, archaeological evidence of prehistoric human cannibalism has been found on other continents.
In the southwestern United States, for example, archaeologists have discovered the Anasazi culture, which emerged in the 12th century BC.
Archaeologists have found a very strange phenomenon in the Anasazi culture, that is, the Anasazi people have their own funeral rites, and they are very respectful of the deceased, and will curl the remains of the deceased into the size of a child and bury them completely, and bury them with ceramic vessels with exquisite patterns and ornaments.
Strangely, archaeologists have also found piles of broken human limb bones that had been roasted before defleshing, and some of the long bones even had traces of polishing at the ends, exactly the same way the Anasazi people handled the bones of bighorn sheep, deer, and other prey!
At the same time, in some unearthed ceramic vessels, archaeologists have also found crushed human cancellous bones! Human flesh and bones have been put into bowls, I will not go into detail about what they are used for!
However, if you still don't believe me, I have more archaeological evidence of a "stone hammer", in the fossil feces of the Anasazi people, scientists have decomposed myoglobin, which only exists in human skeletal muscle and heart muscle, or has a very small probability of being detected in the blood, in short, there is no such thing in the digestive system such as the stomach and intestines, unless a person eats human flesh, digests it after 8-16 hours, and then excretes it from the body.
There are also fossils of ape skulls unearthed in Zhoukoudian, Fangshan, most of these skulls have round-shaped strike marks, these traces are too regular, they cannot be naturally formed at all, and they are obviously drilled out or knocked out by people with stone tools and other tools, and the purpose of this is also very direct, that is, to take the bone marrow in the skull! Alfalu man ancient human fossils in Algeria, Africa, Angton man fossils in the late Pleistocene on Java Island, Indonesia, This phenomenon is also present in the German Paleolithic fossil of Mrs. Erlingstoween.
On the basis of this evidence, we can actually draw a very quick conclusion, that is, from Europe to South America, North Asia to Australia, almost the world's Paleolithic ancestors did have a dark "cannibal history", and they still ate people very thoroughly, knowing that the bones are still wrapped in edible bone marrow and brains!
Therefore, in fact, in the archaeological field, most experts have tacitly accepted the existence of "cannibalism", and the question they usually discuss is "why cannibalism occurs here", rather than "whether this counts as cannibalism".
However, cannibalism is always a thing that sounds very undignified and uncivilized, but we humans are usually arrogant, as a high-level animal, how can we have such a barbaric "black history"?
Therefore, archaeology is also under pressure from anthropology, that is, in the anthropological community, scholars will always find all kinds of reasons to refute the archaeological conclusion of "cannibalism". Especially in the last century, archaeology and anthropology have been almost-for-tat when it comes to the problem of "cannibalism". So, from an anthropological point of view, how did they deny this "history of cannibalism"?
Why does "cannibalism" not exist?
In fact, it was William Ahrens who first started the anthropological debate on whether cannibalism has a history, and in 1979 he published a book entitled The Myth of Cannibalism, in which he proposed:
Humans may eat their own kind, but that is also a sporadic phenomenon that only occurs under extremely difficult survival conditions, and there is no definitive evidence to prove that "man-cannibalism" existed as a habit of ancient human life.
Beginning with William Ahrens, anthropologists have traveled to almost every "cannibalistic" site excavated by archaeology, hoping to refute the "cannibal hat" that archaeology has attached to the heads of all mankind through various evidences.
For example, more than 100 years ago, archaeologist Dragutin found several scarred bones belonging to ancient humans in the Croatian town of Krapina in eastern Europe, even if the archaeological community believes that the reason why these bones are so broken is the result of "cannibals" cutting and smashing. However, in 1985, two anthropologists from the University of New Mexico, Eric and Trincauth, refuted that these broken bones were blown up by Dragutin using explosives during the excavation!
In 1987, Mary Russell, an anthropologist from Ohio, USA, also compared the scars on these broken bones with the reindeer bones unearthed at the Granar site in France. I was shocked by this statement, because the physiological structure of humans and deer is completely different, and it is reasonable that the position and length of the cutting and decomposition are different, so why is it used as evidence?
There is also an explanation for the notches on the skulls of ancient humans on the Greek island of Crete, anthropologists believe that this is caused by the relocation of the grave and the second burial, on the grounds that they found that there is not much flesh in the parts with the nicks, which shows that these scars are decomposed after death to expose the white bones, and then in the process of moving the grave, they were accidentally scratched by sharp weapons such as corpses~ But how violent is this burial, in order to make so many scars?
An even more bizarre rebuttal appears on the skulls of ten ancient humans from the Neolithic period more than 6,000 years ago in southeastern France, and the notches and breaks on these skulls are exactly the same as the animal bones unearthed next to them!
However, the Australian anthropologist Michael Pickering insisted that this is a joint burial custom of "scraping flesh and bones"! What is "scraping flesh and bones"? It is to first expose the body to full decay, then cut off the carrion, break the bones, and then bury it.
This strange funeral model does exist, but the problem is that this kind of funeral culture, which currently only exists in the Australian indigenous group, is it a bit too large to use it to explain the bones of ancient French humans thousands of kilometers away and separated by the entire Indian Ocean?
As for the most far-fetched rebuttal, it is the myoglobin in the fossilized feces of the American Anasazi man, which we mentioned earlier, the cannibal hammer evidence. Anthropologists have this attitude towards how myoglobin gets into human feces:
First of all, this piece of feces is not human at all, if it has to be human, then it can only belong to a patient with intestinal bleeding, that is, that person's own myoglobin is left in his feces and preserved!
It may sound like a tongue twister, but it also proves that even the slightest chance of one in 10,000 that anthropologists will seize the opportunity to firmly oppose the "cannibal history" conclusions of archaeology.
However, perhaps the anthropological community also felt that these above refutations were a bit untenable, so they began to work on the question of "why do people eat people".
According to the popular understanding, ancient humans did not have the concept of society, ethnic group or even kinship, and the reason why they ate people was because they felt that people were the same as deer, elephants, fish, and birds, and could be food that could be used to fill the stomach and provide survival energy. Remember the phrase "human flesh provides energy", because it is precisely this that anthropologists want to refute! After some careful analysis, they have come to a conclusion, that is:
Human flesh is low in calories and inferior to other animals! So, why did ancient humans eat human flesh with such a low energy supply rate?
James Cole of the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom collected the average weight of each body part of four adult men, and then obtained the caloric value of fat and protein of each part of the adult male body through chemical composition analysis, forming a very complete template of human nutrition value.
According to the data shown in this template, we can find that a 65kg adult male has about 55kg of edible parts, which can provide up to 125,822.25kcal of calories. If calculated according to the basic consumption of 2000kcal per day of adult males, the body of an adult male can probably be enough for his own kind for about 60 days, but if you look at it according to the tribal cluster, this is only the ration of a small tribe of 60 people for a day.
Adult males are still the individuals who can provide the most nutritional energy in human beings, and if they are replaced by adolescents, children and even infants, the nutritional energy provided will be reduced, and teenagers can only feed 1 person of the same kind for 42 days, 20 days for young boys, and 12 days for infants.
In other words, if a small tribe of 60 people survives by eating only human flesh, it will eat at least 360 people a year, which is six times the total population of its own group! Therefore, anthropologists have come to the first conclusion:
If ancient humans really regarded eating their own kind as a habit, it is estimated that human beings have already been eaten and extinct!
Of course, these data are all from modern humans, and there may be some gaps with ancient humans, because judging from the bones of ancient humans unearthed so far, their muscles are obviously much more developed than ours, especially Neanderthals.
Therefore, it may be that the body of an ancient human will provide more nutrients and energy. However, ancient humans are still human beings after all, and even if there are differences with our modern humans, this difference will not be very large.
Cole also compared this human nutrition template with other foods of ancient humans, that is, the nutritional energy provided by some animals such as mammoths, wild boars, bears, fish, reindeer, goats, giant deer and other animals unearthed in the ruins.
It was found that the average nutritional value of human meat was far from that of common ancient human prey such as mammoths, bison, beavers, and wild boars.
In fact, the animals with the same nutritional value as human flesh are horses, deer, goats, and fish, but excluding fish, horses, sheep, and deer are much larger than humans, and the edible parts of their bodies are several times higher than those of humans, for example, the total nutritional value that a reindeer can provide is equivalent to that of five adult males! Therefore, according to the overall nutritional value provided, eating human flesh is really a very unwise choice, and if ancient humans really need nutrition, they can directly hunt animals, instead of pointing the finger at their own kind.
With this data, Cole came to a new conclusion:
The predation of human beings by primitive humans may not be purely due to the natural need for nutrition and energy, but is related to social needs such as tribal rivalry and religious superstition.
If you explain it in the vernacular, it is that our ancestors were not accustomed to or keen to eat their own kind, and they ate their own kind for a reason!
So, is this really the case?
The social factor of cannibalism
At present, the academic community has given five interpretations of the phenomenon of cannibalism, namely:
However, the difference between anthropology and archaeology is that archaeology feels that the vast majority of ancient human cannibalism is due to the natural needs of survival and nutrition, but anthropology feels that based on Cole's research, ancient human cannibalism is more like several other social needs, so the question is, which school is closer to the truth?
To discuss this issue, first of all, we need to make it clear that we are talking about ancient humans who lived thousands to more than 1 million years ago, in the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods. Therefore, only by restoring the environment in which these ancient humans lived at that time can we draw a relatively accurate conclusion.
In fact, a lot of geological evidence has been able to prove that in the long evolution of life on Earth, there have been at least four ice ages with sudden temperature drops, the last of which occurred 3 million years ago and ended 11,000 years ago, during that time, the Earth's environment was much worse than it is now, the average global temperature is only minus 8 °C, and the extremely low temperature will cause most of North America and the northern part of Eurasia to be covered with ice and snow, the sea level is very low, and the land is mostly barren and dry.
This glacial period was also the stage when ancient humans and orangutans and other animals parted ways and gradually entered the Paleolithic Age. It can be said that in order to survive in this long period of harsh climate, ancient humans must have gone through an unimaginable and arduous process. So, what about their productivity then?
Throughout the early and middle Paleolithic Age, the tools that ancient humans had were only stone tools and wooden tools, long-range composite hunting tools - bows and arrows have not yet been created, birds flying in the sky can not shoot down at all, such as mammoths, wild boars, rhinoceros and other large, strong attack beasts running on the ground are even more difficult to hunt, if you want to eat fish, you can only catch them with your bare hands, because fishing nets and hooks do not yet exist, wild fruits, rhizomes of wild plants can be fed, but don't want to eat food, because at this time the planting industry has not even sprouted.
In this environment, what ancient humans lacked most was meat and protein, especially the lack of protein, which limited the development of ancient human minds and stagnated for nearly 1 million years.
In fact, these facts can completely overturn the conclusion made by Cole that "ancient humans should hunt animals rather than eat human flesh", because obtaining prey was really a very difficult thing at that time.
To put it more bluntly, from the perspective of modern productivity, to question why ancient humans didn't hunt, this is a bit of a "why not eat minced meat" taste~
However, if we don't consider the problem of evolution, don't eat meat, just eat natural plants and fruits, ancient humans can still insist on survival and reproduction, but the problem is that the stability of these natural food sources is not guaranteed, especially in winter, if they eat up the food stored in advance, what awaits them is hunger and cold.
In addition, as we mentioned earlier, the ability of ancient humans to hunt at this stage is not strong, so it is not difficult for us to understand why cannibalism frequently appears in ancient human sites around the world, because "people" is almost the simplest and easiest "food" they can obtain!
Moreover, let alone ancient humans, even in modern times, some tribes with low productivity still have to rely on cannibalism to survive. Like the Indian Hobbies in Arizona, USA, they are in a primitive agricultural civilization, and the living environment is much better than that of ancient humans, but in the face of lack of food, they still have to be ruthless to the old, weak, sick and disabled kinds, killing and eating them.
Based on the above, we can actually feel that the cannibalism of ancient humans was more for the natural need of "survival" rather than the so-called social need.
However, as we mentioned earlier, anthropologists have also come to the conclusion that "if humans cannibalize for a long time, they will eat themselves alive!" In fact, this concern is not unreasonable, but it is too extreme, because the Tutili people, a primitive people living on the border of Brazil, have already overturned this view with their actions.
Scientists have found that the Tutili people used to have the habit of eating people, they not only eat their enemies, but also eat their own people, and their desire for human flesh is very strong, in 1925, there were more than 2,000 people in this tribe, but after 20 years, there are only 180 people left in this group! 90% of their fellow people were eaten alive, which is really terrible!
However, it is shocking that when they found out that their race was about to be wiped out, the Tutili people miraculously stopped cannibalism! This shows that human beings are actually rational and can control their seemingly cruel cannibalism within a certain range!
Therefore, we can actually believe that the extermination of the tribe may have happened among ancient humans, but the vast majority of ancient humans must have been able to control their behavior like the Tutili.
Based on this information, it is likely that ancient humans have experienced a long "history of cannibalism", during which cannibalism is a common habit. After surviving the difficult ice age, the weather became warmer, and primitive agriculture and animal husbandry began to develop, human beings evolved from relying on natural food to the era of food production.
Of course, the above content is also speculated by some archaeologists based on archaeological results, and as for the facts, more favorable evidence is still needed.
What do you think about this, and do you think the above speculation is reliable?