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Apr 6, 2017 · But in real life, cannibalism hasn’t just been practised by bloodthirsty psychopaths. Common motivations for eating human flesh include periods of starvation, warfare and ritualistic...
Dec 9, 2022 · Despite such claims, when we actually looked into it we found that the website is a performance art project, not a real experiment to see if cannibalism can save the world.
Feb 22, 2017 · But Bill Schutt's newest book, Ca nnibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, reveals that from a scientific perspective, there's a predictable calculus for when humans and animals go cannibal. And...
- A Natural Phenomenon
- Medicinal Cannibalism
- Terror and Ritual
- Transgression
- The Ultimate Taboo?
In the natural world, over 1500 species have been recorded as engaging in cannibalism. This tends to happen in what scientists and anthropologists describe as ‘nutritionally poor’ environments, where individuals have to fight to survive against their own kind: it’s not always a response to extreme food shortages or similar disaster-related conditio...
A little-talked about part of our history, but an important one nonetheless, was the idea of medicinal cannibalism. Throughout medieval and early modern Europe, human body parts, including flesh, fat and blood, were treated as commodities, bought and sold as remedies to all kinds of illnesses and afflictions. Romans supposedly drank the blood of gl...
For many, cannibalism was at least in part an act of power play: European soldiers were recorded to have consumed the flesh of Muslims on the First Crusadeby multiple different eyewitness sources. Some believe this was an act of desperation because of famine, whilst others cited it as being a form of psychological power play. It’s thought that in t...
Some of the most famous acts of cannibalism today have been acts of desperation: faced with the prospect of starvation and death, people have consumed human flesh in order to survive. In 1816, the survivors of the sinking of the Méduse resorted to cannibalism after days adrift on a raft, immortalised by Gericault’s painting Raft of the Medusa. Late...
In 1972, some of the survivors of Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes, consumed the flesh of those who didn’t survive the disaster. When word spread that survivors of Flight 571 had eaten human flesh to survive, there was a huge amount of backlash despite the extreme nature of the situation they had found themselves in. From rituals and war to d...
- Sarah Roller
Jun 18, 2021 · Cannibalism is known to have taken place throughout human history in most corners of the globe, from the Amazon to Australia. The cultural significance and meaning of cannibalistic acts,...
Dec 14, 2022 · Cannibalism in human history is rarely just about eating. It even became a justification used by Western imperialists to explain the enslavement of millions.
Apr 17, 2015 · The real paleontological history of this cave reads like some over-the-top horror movie, in which people hide in dark corners, snapping open the bones of fellow humans to feast on the marrow,...
