Cannibalism: A History of People Who Eat People

Any shopper walking down the aisles of a modern grocery is spoiled for choice when it comes to food options. As of 2008, the number of products carried by the average supermarket stood around 47,000, according to Consumer Reports.

There is one particular item, however, that shouldn't ever appear in anyone's shopping cart, despite its place as a historical foodstuff, particularly during desperate times: human meat. Cannibalism strikes the human conscience like few other taboo acts, eliciting a mix of dread, disdain and plain old nausea. But as seen in this slideshow, humans eating other humans has been an inseparable part of our history.

Even before modern humans walked the Earth, human ancestors practiced cannibalism.

Homo antecessor, the last common ancestor between Neanderthals and modern humans, relied on cannibalism regularly, even when other food sources were available. These humans would sometimes hold cannibal feasts, with members of rival groups on the menu.

The remains of the victims were found alongside the bones of ancient bears, mammoths, foxes and other animals.

In the early history of our species, Neanderthals and humans coexisted. They lived together. They interbred. They ate together, and even ate each other.

During periods of starvation, Neanderthals supplemented their diets with cannibalism, according to a 2006 study on eight 43,000-year-old Neanderthal skeletons. The bones bore evidence of cut and tearing, indications that these individuals were butchered. The remains were excavated from an underground cave in El Sidrón, Spain.

The earliest humans in Europe 32,000 years ago practiced ritual cannibalism, according to a study published in 2011 in the journal PLoS One. The oldest evidence of cannibalism suggests that humans ate other humans not for nutritional purposes but rather as a part of funeral rites.

The advent of siege warfare more than 5,000 years ago set off an arms race between the invaders, who sought ever more damaging weapons, and the defenders, who built taller, stronger fortifications to fend off attack. Caught in the middle stood the entire population of a city or town, sometimes for weeks, months or even years. During that time, if cut off from outside supplies, city dwellers had to resort to extreme means of survival, including cannibalism. During the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., which ended with the destruction of the Second Temple and the sacking of the city, starvation and plague wore down the city residents, who resorted to cannibalism to stay alive.

The victims of a siege weren't always the ones who had to resort to cannibalism to survive. Following the Siege of Maarat in 1098, the victorious crusaders, short on supplies, turned to the dead bodies of the vanquished Muslims for their source of food.

Up until the Middle Ages, cannibalism was primarily practiced as a means to supplement nutrition. Starting around the 12th century, the practice of incorporating human remains into medical remedies was common practice.

The deceased who unwillingly donated their bodies to medical science were stolen from Egyptian tombs or abducted from Irish burial sites, according to Smithsonian Magazine. Treatments called for the use of bones, blood or fat for conditions as common as a headache.

Nevermind that consuming other humans could be detrimental to a person's health. Prion diseases spread by cannibalism can cause the brain to form sponge-like holes, condition known as "spongiform encephalopathies."

The use of "corpse medicine" started to fall out of favor in the 16th century, but remained in use until the late 18th century. In some parts of Africa, a similar but much more severe form of barbarism still occurs, with albinos in particular murdered and butchered for magical protections and remedies.

The Age of Discovery brought together civilizations that had no reference for one another, and culture clashes -- in addition to the many physical conflicts -- were inevitable.

When Jesuits encountered Iroquois, Mowak and other tribes, they noted with surprise and disgust that these Native American groups practiced cannibalism. Eating human flesh wasn't simply a gastronomic experience, as noted by the Colonial Williamsburg Journal; it was part of a ritual aimed at strengthening the tribe or humiliating an enemy.

The same held true for Central and South American tribes, such as the Aztec or the Inca, who engaged in cannibalism as part of a sacrificial religious rite.

A handful of Native American tribes weren't the only cannibals in the New World; some colonists themselves had to resort to desperate measures to stay alive.

As the first permanent English settlement in the New World, Jamestown opened the door of the New World to the British. Established in 1607, the colony endured even through the difficult period of 1609-1610, known as the "starving time," when three-quarters of the colonists perished.

The colony grew so desperate that they even resorted to eating the body of a 14-year-old girl, archaeological evidence suggests. Skull and bone fragments show patterns that "tentativeness, trial and complete lack of experience in butchering animal remains," Doug Owsley, a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., noted of the discovery.

The girl, who archaeologists named "Jane," likely arrived at Jamestown in August 1609, months before winter set in. According to the researchers, she likely wasn't the only one cannibalized by the 60 or so colonists that made it to spring.

Even before the discovery of gold at Sutter's mill set off a massive wave of migration to the West in 1849, American pioneers traveled by wagon train to the West to seek out better lives. The effort was grueling, over many hundreds of miles that included mountains and desert. As many as one in 10 migrants died, and the Oregon trail would become known as the nation's longest graveyard.

Perhaps no cautionary tale from the trail resonated with pioneers quite so much as that of the ill-fated Donner Party. The groups spent the winter of 1846-87 snowbound in the Sierra Mountains in Nevada after making the unfortunate decision to attempt a new route to California called Hastings Cutoff. Many of the colonists froze or starved to death during the nearly four months between being trapped in November and the first relief group arriving in February.

The Donner Party left Independence, Mo., in 1846 with 87 members; they arrived in California with 48 survivors.

The 20th century ushered in an agricultural revolution that would allow modern civilizations to produce more than enough food to meet global demand. Unfortunately the Green Revolution could only increase food production, not necessarily food security.

Famine in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s claimed millions of lives and forced survivors to turn to cannibalism. The Great Leap Forward in China, which caused the Great Chinese Famine, similarly took a toll in the tens of millions and led many to rely on eating the dead for survival. When famine struck North Korea in the 1990s under the regime of Kim Jong Il, tourists visiting the Hermit Kingdom reported they witnessed instances of cannibalism.

The Korowai tribe is among the last known consumers of human flesh, known as "long pig" in cannibal folklore. According to Australian journalist Paul Raffaele, who spent time with the tribe in 2006, when a tribe member dies due to mysterious circumstances, most often disease, the Korowai believe that person to have succumbed to khakhua, a witch. In order to counteract the effects of the witch magically eating the deceased from the inside out, tribal custom dictates members have to consume the flesh of the dead as a kind of revenge.

That doesn't mean all cannibalism follows a natural death. Tribesmen also kill rivals and consume them in ritualistic fashion. In 2012, authorities in Papua New Guinea charged 29 members of one tribe with the deaths of seven witch doctors. The cannibals believed that by eating the witch doctors' organs, they would be imbued with supernatural powers, according to The Telegraph.
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Reference:

Al-Khatib, Talal. 2015. “Cannibalism: A History of People Who Eat People”. Discovery News. Posted: May 13, 2015. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/cannibalism-a-history-of-people-who-eat-people-150513.htm

Cremated human bones in pot found in Crossrail dig suggest gruesome ritual

Almost 2,000 years ago somebody neatly packed cremated human bones into an old cooking pot, put the lid on, and set it by the banks of a smelly little urban river, the Walbrook in London. The discovery has deepened the mystery of scores of Roman skulls found nearby, polished till they gleam by tumbling among the pebbles of the riverbed.

It had been suggested that the skulls ended up in the river – which vanished into culverts centuries ago – by accident, eroded out of a Roman cemetery and washed downstream until they came to rest at bends in the bank. The new finds suggest a grimmer explanation.

Jay Carver, Crossrail’s lead archaeologist on the site yards from the bustling commuters at Liverpool Street station, said the thrifty reuse of the old pot, and its deliberate placing by the river, will force archaeologists to look again at the skulls found in this excavation and generations of previous digs around the river. “We now wonder again if the skulls were deliberately placed on the banks. Certainly no river ever carried off the cooking pot with its cremated bones which was unquestionably deliberately placed here. And the horse skull we found with one of the skulls didn’t come out of some equine graveyard, that was clearly also placed there,” he said.

The finds are now beginning to suggest gruesome ritual deposits of skulls, set along the river bank as offerings and boundary markers. Scientific tests are continuing on both the cremated remains and the skulls, and may confirm an early theory that most are the heads of young men who may have been executed criminals and rebels. Some could even be from the major rebellion Boudicca, queen of the Iceni tribe, led in the first century of Roman rule.

“I think we now have to look back at earlier finds in this area – we have found 40 human and two horse skulls, but if you add them up over the last two centuries you’re talking hundreds of skulls in a very small area – and try and work out what is actually going on,” Carver said.

This one small site, part of a massive archaeology programme as Crossrail carves its route across the capital and through two millennia of its history, has produced a mass of Roman and medieval objects, as well as thousands of skeletons from a 17th-century burial ground which became the last resting place of thousands of victims of the last great plague of London in 1665.

Finds include 15 Roman iron horseshoes, more than from any other London site – expensive objects which the archaeologists assume were accidentally shed and then trampled into the surface of the road. “They would have been expensive to make and expensive to replace, but they were obviously clunky, clumsy affairs – and clearly they hadn’t perfected the technique of getting them to stay on,” Carver said.

A little gilt bronze phallus, a valuable lucky charm, was probably lost when the ring holding it to a belt or garment broke, and a shackle just the right size to secure an ankle is a reminder that slavery was a pillar of the Roman empire. The road leading to the river was an excellent example of Roman engineering, part of what Carver describes as the North Circular passing all the main gates in the city walls. It was heavily used, regularly repaired, and completely resurfaced at least three times, preserving cart ruts several layers below the final surface. For more than 1,000 years the site was a grotty, smelly bit of working-class London outside the city walls, a place where no travellers on the Roman road would have wanted to linger. On Thursday, a digger punched through the floor of what was a 19th-century underground lavatory, releasing a pungent reek of marsh gas and Victorian sewage. The buildings were shoddy structures, probably workshops. Rubbish dumps yielded skiploads of evidence of medieval industries including leather tanning, a notoriously smelly trade.

The land became the gardens and orchards of a medieval monastery complex which became the famous Bedlam mental hospital, the oldest in the world. It was still open land when in 1569 a two-acre plot was bought for a new burial ground because the small city church graveyards were full to bursting. The Bethlem burial ground took its name from the hospital which had recently moved to nearby Moorfields and held not just poor unclaimed inmates of the asylum, but people of all classes from across the capital. It was in use from 1569 until 1738, and so eventually held thousands of victims of the great plague, the last major outbreak which devastated London in 1665.

The archaeologists from Museum of London Archaeology worked all the hours of daylight to excavate the remains, eventually recovering more than 2,500 skeletons, far more than expected from a swimming pool sized site. During the worst plague months, they found people were being buried seven or eight to each pit.

Volunteers are attempting to compile a complete burial list for the cemetery, but when the excavation began Carver was not optimistic about identifying any individuals, as the records were scattered across all the original parishes of the dead.

To his surprise they have found tiny nails from the decayed wood of several coffins which spell out initials and dates. Several broken tombstones have also been found reused in a Georgian wall, including that of Mary Godfree who died at the height of the plague in September 1665. One small section remains to be excavated this summer, so Carver has not given up all hope of finding two of the most famous people known to have been buried there, the Levellers and Cromwellian soldiers John Lilburne and Robert Lockyer. Lockyer was executed by firing squad in 1649 for his radical political beliefs.

“I’ve had to warn the Levellers Association that our site is only about 20% of the original burial ground. But if he was buried in our section, more than 4,000 people are said to have followed his funeral procession – I can’t believe he would have gone into his grave without something to identify his coffin. We might yet find him.”
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Reference:

Kennedy, Maev. 2015. “Cremated human bones in pot found in Crossrail dig suggest gruesome ritual”. The Guardian. Posted: Sunday 26, 2015. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/apr/26/cremated-human-bones-in-pot-found-in-crossrail-dig-suggest-gruesome-ritual

Cannibalism Confirmed Among Ancient Mexican Group

Eating humans "crucial" to spiritual life of the Xiximes people.

It's long been rumored that an ancient, isolated people in what's now northern Mexico ate their own kind, in the hopes that they'd be able to eat corn later.

Now an analysis of more than three dozen bones bearing evidence of boiling and defleshing confirms that the Xiximes people were in fact cannibals, archaeologists say.

The Xiximes believed that ingesting the bodies and souls of their enemies and using the cleaned bones in rituals would guarantee the fertility of the grain harvest, according to historical accounts by Jesuit missionaries.

The newfound bones prove that cannibalism, "was a crucial aspect of their worldview, their identity," said José Luis Punzo, an archaeologist behind the new research.

Eating Only Their Own

The mountains of what's now Durango state (map) were once home to some 5,000 Xiximes, as well as other indigenous groups.

It was only the Xiximes and the like-minded Acaxées who are said to have been cannibals, though no archaeological evidence for the practice has been found for the Acaxées, said Punzo, of the Durango office of the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

"Through their rituals, cannibalism, and bone hoarding, they marked a clear boundary between an 'us' and 'them,'" Punzo said—"us" being the Acaxées and Xiximes, and "them" being everybody else.

The two groups fought and killed members of other groups, he said. But the Acaxées and Xiximes ate only their own kind, specifically men. Other native groups and Spanish colonizers were apparently ritually worthless, according to historical studies.

Cave Cache of Boiled Bones

Some historians had derided the missionaries' reports of cannibalism as exaggerations. But the bones found in Cueva del Maguey—a hamlet built inside a huge, cliffside cave—should erase any doubts, Punzo said.

Tests showed that 80 percent of four dozen bones—found in houses dated to around 1425—bear marks and other evidence of being boiled and cut with blades of stone, Punzo added.

The bones had been relatively untouched for centuries—a godsend for scientists made possible by the isolation of Cueva del Maguey, deep in a pine forest and 8,530 feet (2,600 meters) above sea level.

Circle of Life

For the Xiximes, the planting-and-sowing cycle was intertwined with a cycle of cannibalism and bone rituals, according to the INAH report, announced at the 14th Archaeology Conference of the North Frontier this summer in Paquimé, Mexico.

After each corn harvest, Xiximes warriors were deployed to hunt for enemies—and their flesh.

Most of the time the Xiximes would prey on lone men from other villages working in the fields. Other times, the Xiximes would engage small groups in forest battles, according to the historical record.

The warriors would bring the dead victims back to the village, where Xiximes would rip the bodies apart at the joints, taking care not to break the bones. In cases when carrying a whole body was impractical, the head and hands would be removed and brought back to the village, according to INAH's research.

Body parts were cooked in pans until the bones emerged clean. The flesh was then cooked with beans and corn and eaten in a type of soup—part of an all-night village ritual, complete with singing and dancing, according to missionaries' reports.

After the feast, the bones were stored for months in treasure houses. Then, in the run-up to the annual planting season, the Xiximes would hang the bones from roofs and trees—enticements to the spirits to help the crops along.

"For these practices," Punzo said, "they were called by Jesuits the wildest and most barbarian people of the New World."
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References:

Valle, Sabrina. 2011. "Cannibalism Confirmed Among Ancient Mexican Group". National Geographic News. Posted: September 30, 2011. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/news/2011/11/110930-cannibalism-cannibals-mexico-xiximes-human-bones-science/

Genocide Wiped Out Native American Population

Crushed leg bones, battered skulls and other mutilated human remains are likely all that's left of a Native American population destroyed by genocide that took place circa 800 A.D., suggests a new study.

The paper, accepted for publication in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, describes the single largest deposit to date of mutilated and processed human remains in the American Southwest.

The entire assemblage comprises 14,882 human skeletal fragments, as well as the mutilated remains of dogs and other animals killed at the massacre site -- Sacred Ridge, southwest of Durango, Colo.

Based on the archaeological findings, which include two-headed axes that tested positive for human blood, co-authors Jason Chuipka and James Potter believe the genocide occurred as a result of conflict between different Anasazi Ancestral Puebloan ethnic groups.

"It was entirely an inside job," Chuipka, an archaeologist with Woods Canyon Archaeological Consultants, told Discovery News.

"The type of event at Sacred Ridge is on the far end of the conflict spectrum where social relations completely melt down," he added, mentioning that the Sacred Ridge "occupants were targeted to take the blame."

Chuipka and Potter analyzed objects excavated at Sacred Ridge, which was a multiple habitation site of 22 pit structures, some of which may have operated as communal ritual facilities for a population that extended beyond the immediate site inhabitants. This suggests the residents at one point exerted some social control in the area.

The unearthed bones and artifacts indicate that when the violence took place, men, women and children were tortured, disemboweled, killed and often hacked to bits. In some cases, heads, hands and feet appear to have been removed as trophies for the killers. The attackers then removed belongings out of the structures and set the roofs on fire.

"I think that the major event was preceded by social stress within the community that may have been exacerbated by a period of drought," Chuipka said. "The scale of the mutilations suggests that it was planned and organized in the preceding days or weeks, and that the violence took place in a relatively short period of time -- a few days."

"All evidence points to a rapid event, which is only possible with coordination and complicity within the community," he added.

The researchers ruled out other possible explanations, such as starvation cannibalism, traditional preparation of the deceased, and even individuals targeted for practicing witchcraft. Cannibalism, for example, usually involves bone marrow processing. Witch roundups tend to affect a relatively small number of victims.

In this case, a large group of people was dispatched at one time.

For a separate study, John McClelland, lab manager of osteology at Arizona State Museum, analyzed teeth from human remains within the Ridges Basin region, including Sacred Ridge.

He found that the population at Sacred Ridge in the early 800s was distinct from others in the area.

"The individuals at Sacred Ridge whose remains were disarticulated and processed were not a random selection from among the overall population of Ridges Basin," McClelland determined. "In addition to the biological differences, they appear to have had a somewhat different diet and may have experienced a higher level of juvenile growth disruption."

At least two other separate studies have come to similar conclusions, suggesting the genocide victims at Sacred Ridge belonged to an ethnic group that was different from that of other nearby populations.

Given basic established patterns from more recent ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Rwanda, the researchers think political structures that had been keeping ethnic conflict at bay probably broke down at Sacred Ridge.

"What we can learn from Sacred Ridge is that archaeological sites are not simply piles of rock and refuse, but that they were occupied by people that were involved in complex webs of social relations," Chuipka said. "Sacred Ridge is a case where social relations melted down and the solution chosen was absolute and shocking."
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References:

Viegas, Jennifer. 2010. "Genocide Wiped Out Native American Population". Discovery News. Posted: September 20, 2010. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/genocide-native-americans-ethnic-cleansing.html