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Eating The Dead: A History of Cannibalism · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
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  Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. Welcome to the
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  Speaker 1: Occult Rejects. Today, we are getting into one of the oldest, darkest,
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  Speaker 1: and most misunderstood behaviors in human history. Cannibalism. This is
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  Speaker 1: a subject buried under mythology, religion, warfare, famine, medicine, colonial propaganda, archaeology,
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  Speaker 1: and some of the most disturbing survival stories ever recorded.
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  Speaker 1: Human beings have accused other human beings of eating the
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  Speaker 1: dead for thousands of years, but in some cases, the
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  Speaker 1: evidence shows that it really happened. and sometimes for reasons
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  Speaker 1: that are far more complicated than simple hunger. We are
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  Speaker 1: going all the way back into prehistory, looking at butchered
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  Speaker 1: hominin bones, Neanderthals, ritual consumption, funerary practices, enemy cannibalism, famine
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  Speaker 1: and siege, medicinal cannibalism in Europe, colonial accounts, shipwrecks, survival disasters,
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  Speaker 1: and documented cases that forced people across one of humanity's
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  Speaker 1: strongest taboos. But before we can talk about why human
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  Speaker 1: beings have eaten other human beings, we have to answer
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  Speaker 1: a much more basic question. How the fuck do we
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  Speaker 1: actually know somebody was eaten? A skeleton covered in knife
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  Speaker 1: marks is not enough, because human beings have cut apart
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  Speaker 1: bodies for burial, execution, embalming, trophy taking, anatomical study, punishment,
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  Speaker 1: religious ritual, and simple disposal. None of which automatically means
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  Speaker 1: anybody swallowed a piece of the corpse. Burned bones are
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  Speaker 1: not enough either, because cremation can expose human remains to
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  Speaker 1: temperature far beyond anything involved in cooking. A smashed skull
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  Speaker 1: does not prove somebody wanted the brain, and a missing
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  Speaker 1: limb does not prove it ended up in a stomach.
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  Speaker 1: If we are going to tell the history of cannibalism
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  Speaker 1: without turning every mutilated skeleton into a horror story, the
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  Speaker 1: first thing we have to understand is that archaeology has
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  Speaker 1: to prove consumption indirectly, through patterns left behind when a
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  Speaker 1: human body is treated like food. In 2025, Natural History
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  Speaker 1: Museum researcher Sylvia Bello published a major review in the
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  Speaker 1: Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory examining exactly this problem.
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  Speaker 1: Archaeologists looked for combinations of evidence. Cut marks where muscles
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  Speaker 1: and tendons were removed, disarticulation at joints, percussion damage from
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  Speaker 1: breaking fresh long bones to reach marrow, peeling and crushing
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  Speaker 1: produced while bones still contained organic material, human chewing marks,
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  Speaker 1: burning or other signs of cooking, and the under-representation of
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  Speaker 1: small or neutrally useful elements that may have been destroyed
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  Speaker 1: during processing. One of the strongest clues appears when human
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  Speaker 1: remains and animal remains from the same site have been
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  Speaker 1: butchered in essentially the same way. If someone skinned a deer,
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  Speaker 1: separated its joints, filleted its muscles, cracked its bones from marrow,
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  Speaker 1: and then performed the same sequence on another human being,
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  Speaker 1: the argument for cannibalism becomes much stronger. Even then, the
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  Speaker 1: bones usually cannot tell us why it happened. Survival cannibalism
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  Speaker 1: after famine can leave some of the same marks as
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  Speaker 1: ritual consumption of an enemy, while a funeral in which
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  Speaker 1: relatives consume the dead can result in the same basic
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  Speaker 1: acts of cutting and chewing as an episode of violence.
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  Speaker 1: Bellows' review makes an important point that will follow us
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  Speaker 1: throughout this entire story. Taphonomy can sometimes tell us that
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  Speaker 1: a human body was consumed, but the meaning of that
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  Speaker 1: consumption often has to be reconstructed from archaeology environment, history,
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  Speaker 1: and ethnography together. That distinction matters because cannibalism may reach
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  Speaker 1: almost as far back as the genus Homo itself. In 2017,
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  Speaker 1: paleoanthropologist Brianna Pabiner was examining hominin fossils at the National
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  Speaker 1: Museums of Kenya when she noticed something unexpected on a
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  Speaker 1: fossilized shinbone known as KNM-ER741. The tibia had been discovered
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  Speaker 1: decades earlier in the Cobi flora formation near Lake Turkana
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  Speaker 1: and is approximately 1.45 million years old. Its exact species
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  Speaker 1: remains uncertain. At different times, researchers have considered affiliations with
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  Speaker 1: Homo erectus, Homo habilis, or Paranthropus boisei. What mattered to
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  Speaker 1: Pobina was not whose leg it had been, but what
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  Speaker 1: somebody had done to it. Running across one side of
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  Speaker 1: the shaft was a series of narrow marks, Pobiner made
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  Speaker 1: molds of them, and with Michael Pant and Trevor Keevil,
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  Speaker 1: compared three-dimensional scans against an experimental database containing hundreds of
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  Speaker 1: known stone tool, tooth, and trampling marks. Nine of the
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  Speaker 1: 11 marks they analyzed classified as stone tool cut marks,
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  Speaker 1: several with very high confidence. Their position was especially suggestive
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  Speaker 1: because they occurred near muscle attachments in a place that
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  Speaker 1: would have been accessible if the larger muscles had been removed.
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  Speaker 1: leading the researchers to conclude that the marks were most
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  Speaker 1: consistent with the fleshing. That does not allow us to
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  Speaker 1: announce that a member of Homo erectus sat down 1.45
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  Speaker 1: million years ago and ate another member of Homo erectus.
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  Speaker 1: We do not know the species of the butcher, and
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  Speaker 1: we cannot prove that the flesh removed from his particular
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  Speaker 1: tibia was consumed rather than discarded. Pobiner and her colleagues
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  Speaker 1: were careful about that, and even if the flesh was eaten,
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  Speaker 1: Their analysis suggests an opportunistic and practical act of food
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  Speaker 1: acquisition rather than anything we could identify as ritual. More importantly,
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  Speaker 1: the fossil demonstrates that by 1.45 million years ago, someone
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  Speaker 1: wielding a stone tool had cut flesh from the tibia
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  Speaker 1: of another hominin, even though the evidence cannot tell us
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  Speaker 1: whether the cutter and the individual being cut belonged to
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  Speaker 1: the same species. That discovery did not appear in a
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  Speaker 1: world where meat cutting was unusual. because another animal's bones
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  Speaker 1: from the same broad geological formation show that hominins were
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  Speaker 1: already routinely using stone tools to dismember carcasses, remove flesh,
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  Speaker 1: and obtain marrow. Whoever cut KNM-ER741 possessed a technological behavior
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  Speaker 1: already used to turn animals into food, which leaves us
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  Speaker 1: with an uncomfortable possibility. Another hominin may simply have entered
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  Speaker 1: the same category. For the first strong answer, we have
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  Speaker 1: to move from East Africa to Northern Spain and jump
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  Speaker 1: forward more than a half a million years to the
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  Speaker 1: caves of Sierra de Ataperca. There, in a layer of Grandolina,
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  Speaker 1: known as TD6, archaeologists recovered the remains of an early
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  Speaker 1: human population generally assigned to Homo antecessor. These bones are
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  Speaker 1: roughly 800,000 years old, and unlike the solitary cut-marked tibia
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  Speaker 1: from Kenya, they appear inside an archaeological assemblage where the
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  Speaker 1: evidence repeats across multiple individuals. The human bones bear stone
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  Speaker 1: tool cut marks, chop marks, percussion damage, and fresh bone breakage,
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  Speaker 1: while some show a characteristic form of bending damage called peeling.
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  Speaker 1: Bones were fractured to gain access to marrow, flesh was removed,
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  Speaker 1: and most importantly, researchers found that the human remains had
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  Speaker 1: been exploited in broadly the same manner as the butchered
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  Speaker 1: deer and other animals recovered alongside them. The original investigators
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  Speaker 1: concluded that the Ensemblades represented consumptive activity rather than a
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  Speaker 1: recognizable mortuary ritual. By 800,000 years ago, the question is
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  Speaker 1: no longer merely whether one ancient hominin cut flesh from another.
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  Speaker 1: Somebody at Grandolina appears to have been processing human beings
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  Speaker 1: as carcasses. Once that happens, cannibalism stops looking like an
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  Speaker 1: aberration that suddenly appears late in civilization and becomes part
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  Speaker 1: of a much older, more uncomfortable question about human evolution.
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  Speaker 1: How long have members of our lineage occasionally looked at
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  Speaker 1: another human body and seen not only a person, an enemy,
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  Speaker 1: or a corpse, but food? By the time we reach
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  Speaker 1: the Neanderthals, cannibalism no longer appears as a single strange
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  Speaker 1: episode buried in one archaeological layer. It appears at multiple sites,
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  Speaker 1: across tens of thousands of years, and the difference between
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  Speaker 1: those sites immediately warn us against imagining one universal Neanderthal motive.
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  Speaker 1: One of the strongest cases comes from Moulin Gerci in
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  Speaker 1: southeastern France, a cave overlooking the Rhône that was occupied
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  Speaker 1: by Neanderthals roughly 120,000 to 100,000 years ago. Excavations recovered
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  Speaker 1: more than 100 human remains, representing at least six individuals,
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  Speaker 1: two adults, two adolescents, and two children, one only around
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  Speaker 1: four years old. The important thing is not simply that
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  Speaker 1: their bones have been cut. Researchers compared the human remains
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  Speaker 1: directly with butchered animal bones from the same archaeological layer
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  Speaker 1: and found the same basic carcass processing logic applied to both.
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  Speaker 1: Human skulls had been skinned and stripped of muscle before
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  Speaker 1: being fractured. Joints were disarticulated and marrow-bearing bones were systematically
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  Speaker 1: broken while bones without useful marrow were generally left intact Later,
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  Speaker 1: archaeozoological work found that the red deer from the lair
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  Speaker 1: had been processed and discarded in similar ways. In other words,
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  Speaker 1: the people at Moolah-Gersey were not merely mutilating corpses. They
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  Speaker 1: were extracting edible tissue from human bodies using techniques they
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  Speaker 1: also used on game animals. That finding mattered enormously when
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  Speaker 1: Album Delphor, Tim White, and their colleagues published the evidence
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  Speaker 1: in Science in 1999. Because Neanderthal cannibalism had been argued
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  Speaker 1: about for decades, and some famous examples had turned out
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  Speaker 1: to be far less secure than originally claimed. The classic
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  Speaker 1: cautionary case is Krapina in Croatia, when an enormous Neanderthal
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  Speaker 1: assemblage excavated around the beginning of the 20th century became
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  Speaker 1: one of the most frequently cited examples of prehistoric cannibalism.
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  Speaker 1: Fragmented bones, supposed cut marks, burning, and unusual skeletal representation
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  Speaker 1: were repeatedly interpreted as evidence that the dead had been eaten.
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  Speaker 1: In 1985, however, paleoanthropologist Eric Trinkhaus reexamined the entire argument
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  Speaker 1: and concluded that none of those features could be attributed
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  Speaker 1: uniquely to cannibalism. His analysis even suggested that at least
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  Speaker 1: some of the bodies had been buried or otherwise covered
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  Speaker 1: soon after death. Kropina does not prove that cannibalism never
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  Speaker 1: happened there. It proves something more important for us, that
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  Speaker 1: a famous cannibal story can survive for generations after the
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  Speaker 1: physical evidence stops being able to carry the claim. Moolagirsi
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  Speaker 1: is harder to explain away because the human and animal
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  Speaker 1: butchery patterns converge. Goyet Cave in Belgium takes us farther
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  Speaker 1: still because in 2016, Helene Rogier and an international team
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  Speaker 1: reported 99 newly identified Neanderthal remains from the Trois-Cimées Cavernes
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  Speaker 1: of Goyette, dated to roughly 40,500 to 45,500 years ago.
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  Speaker 1: Several had been butchered, long bones had been opened, and
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  Speaker 1: four human bones had subsequently been used as retouchers, tools
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  Speaker 1: for shaping or maintaining the edges of stone implements. A
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  Speaker 1: body could therefore move through several categories after death– person, Carcass,
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  Speaker 1: food source, raw material, tool. The Goyette assemblage became even
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  Speaker 1: stranger in 2025, when researchers combined ancient DNA, isotope chemistry,
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  Speaker 1: measurements of the bones, and structural analysis and concluded that
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  Speaker 1: the consumed individuals were not a random demographic sample. They
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  Speaker 1: identified at least six Neanderthals, including four adult or adolescent
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  Speaker 1: females and two immature males. The females were usually short
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  Speaker 1: and gristle, and isotope evidence suggested that the cannibalized individuals
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  Speaker 1: came from somewhere outside the local area. The authors therefore
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  Speaker 1: proposed that the Goyette may represent exo-cannibalism, the consumption of outsiders,
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  Speaker 1: and possibly targeted inter-group violence in which women and young
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  Speaker 1: individuals from another group were selected as victims. The precise
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  Speaker 1: motive cannot be recovered, and the researchers explicitly framed conflict
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  Speaker 1: territorial competition, and special treatment of outsiders as hypothesis rather
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  Speaker 1: than facts. But the result gives us something very different
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  Speaker 1: from a starving family reluctantly consuming its own dead. That
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  Speaker 1: distinction is going to matter throughout the history, because endocannibalism
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  Speaker 1: refers broadly to consuming members of one's own social group,
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  Speaker 1: while exocannibalism refers to consuming outsiders. Neither world tells us
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  Speaker 1: the motive by itself, since endocannibalism can be funerary, affectionate, religious,
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  Speaker 1: or desperate. Exo-cannibalism can be nutritional, martial, punitive, or symbolic.
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  Speaker 1: The same anatomical act can therefore carry almost opposite social meanings,
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  Speaker 1: which is why motive has to be reconstructed from the
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  Speaker 1: wider context rather than inferred from consumption alone. That distinction
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  Speaker 1: becomes unavoidable once our own species enters the story, because
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  Speaker 1: around 14,700 years ago, during the late Ice Age, Magdalenian
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  Speaker 1: hunter-gatherers used Go's Cave in what is now Cheddar Gorge
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  Speaker 1: in southwestern England. Archaeologists recovered the remains of at least
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  Speaker 1: six people, an infant, adolescents, and adults, mixed with butchered
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  Speaker 1: animal bones and tools. Their treatment leaves little room for
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  Speaker 1: arguing that the bodies were merely cleaned for burial. Human
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  Speaker 1: bones preserve extensive defleshing and disarticulation marks. Spongy bone was crushed,
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  Speaker 1: long bones were cracked from arrow, and many specimens contain
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  Speaker 1: unmistakable human tooth impressions showing that the people had chewed
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  Speaker 1: these bodies. Whoever processed the dead was doing something else
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  Speaker 1: at the same time, because three skulls were carefully transformed
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  Speaker 1: into cups. Sylvia Bellow, Simon Parfit, and Chris Stringer reconstructed
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  Speaker 1: the manufacturing sequence in a 2011 study. Soft tissue was
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  Speaker 1: meticulously removed from the head. Facial bones and the base
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  Speaker 1: of the skull were broken away in a controlled manner,
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  Speaker 1: and the remaining cranial vault was worked into a comparatively
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  Speaker 1: regular container. These remain the oldest directly dated human skull
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  Speaker 1: cups known, and a later analysis of the rest of
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  Speaker 1: the skeletons concluded that the entire mortuary process combined intensive
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  Speaker 1: consumption of edible tissue with deliberate ritual treatment of the skull.
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  Speaker 1: Then researchers found something even more intimate on a human
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  Speaker 1: forearm bone. The radius had first been filleted and chewed,
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  Speaker 1: But before it was finally broken open for marrow, someone
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  Speaker 1: deliberately engraved a zigzag pattern into its surface. The engraving
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  Speaker 1: therefore occurred during the processing of the corpse rather than
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  Speaker 1: centuries later, suggesting that symbolic action and consumption formed parts
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  Speaker 1: of the same event. This makes the cave extraordinarily difficult
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  Speaker 1: to fit into the simple categories we instinctively want to use.
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  Speaker 1: The people there certainly extracted calories from human bodies. Marrow
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  Speaker 1: and other tissues were consumed. Yet the careful production of
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  Speaker 1: skull cups and engraving of an already chewed human bone
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  Speaker 1: are difficult to explain as emergency hunger alone. Researchers led
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  Speaker 1: by Bellow have therefore argued that the evidence is the
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  Speaker 1: best understood as ritualized funerary cannibalism, where eating the dead
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  Speaker 1: and transforming portions of their skeleton were culturally meaningful parts
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  Speaker 1: of dealing with death. Ghost Cave may not have been
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  Speaker 1: some isolated community doing something bizarre. A 2023 study by
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  Speaker 1: William Marsh and Sylvia Bellow surveyed the late Upper Paleolithic
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  Speaker 1: European sites and found a broader pattern among populations associated
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  Speaker 1: with the Magdalenian culture tradition. Of the sites where researchers
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  Speaker 1: could determine mortuary behavior, 13 contained evidence interpreted as cannibalism,
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  Speaker 1: 10 contained primary burial, and 2 combined both. Skullcups and
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: other post-mortem modifications appeared repeatedly, and when those practices were
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: compared with ancient genetic ancestry, the authors proposed that funerary
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  Speaker 1: cannibalism may have belonged to a wider Magdalenian mortuary tradition
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  Speaker 1: that eventually declined as populations carrying different ancestry and different
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: burial customs expanded across Europe. That possibly changes the history completely,
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  Speaker 1: because we are no longer asking only whether desperate prehistoric
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  Speaker 1: people occasionally ate each other. We are asking whether, for
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: some communities, eating a human body was one of the
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  Speaker 1: recognized ways to deal with the dispose of the dead.
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  Speaker 1: The development of farming societies did not make cannibalism disappear.
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  Speaker 1: If anything, some Neolithic sites become harder to interpret because
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  Speaker 1: permanent settlements, ritual enclosures, warfare, and increasingly elaborate mortuary customs
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  Speaker 1: all begin leaving different kinds of human remains in the
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  Speaker 1: archaeological record. And one of the most disturbing examples appears
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  Speaker 1: around 5000 BCE at Herxheim, in what is now southwestern Germany.
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  Speaker 1: Herxheim belonged to the final phase of the Linear Pottery Culture,
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  Speaker 1: or LBK, one of the earliest major farming traditions of
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  Speaker 1: Central Europe. Archaeologists uncovered elongated pits forming an enclosure around
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  Speaker 1: the settlement, but those pits were filled with something far
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  Speaker 1: stranger than ordinary domestic refuse. Enormous quantities of deliberately fragmented
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  Speaker 1: human bone alongside pottery, stone tools, and other objects. Some
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  Speaker 1: of that pottery originated hundreds of kilometers away, suggesting that
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: people or ritual materials were reaching Herxheim from across an
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  Speaker 1: unexpectedly large area of Europe. The human remains had undergone
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: systematic processing in which bodies were dismembered, flesh was removed,
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: bones were broken while flesh and skulls were deliberately manipulated,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: with some cranial vaults prepared in ways that researchers have
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: compared with the skull cup tradition we already encountered at
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Go's Cave. Researchers Bruno Bollestin, Andrea Z. Blans, and their
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: colleagues argued in Antiquity that the overall pattern provided strong
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  Speaker 1: evidence that cannibalism formed part of the ritual activity at Herxheim.
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  Speaker 1: The scale makes simple emergency starvation difficult to sustain as
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: an explanation. because the remains appeared to represent repeated events
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: involving large numbers of individuals during the final crisis of
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: the LBK world. Exactly what those events were remains debated,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: with later interpretations considering warfare, captive-taking, human sacrifice, and the
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: deliberate ritual destruction of bodies and objects. With Andrew Azeeb
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: Lanz proposing a scenario in which captured people may have
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: been brought to Herxheim and subjected to extreme processing. We
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  Speaker 1: cannot recover the motive with certainty, but the site makes
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  Speaker 1: one point extremely clear. By the Neolithic, cannibalism could exist
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: inside complicated ceremonial and social behavior rather than functioning only
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: as the final response of starving people. Another crucial case
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: comes from Fontbregoire Cave in southeastern France, used repeatedly during
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: the 5th and 4th millennia BCE. When Paula Villa and
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: her colleagues published their analysis in Science in 1986, they
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: began from a problem that should already sound familiar. Prehistoric
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: cannibalism had been claimed so casually from damaged skeletons that
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: later investigation often destroyed the argument. Their solution was comparative,
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: meaning that instead of asking whether human bones looked violent
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: in isolation, They compared them directly with the wild and
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: domestic animals recovered from the same cave. What they found
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: was uncomfortable. Human and animal remains displayed closely parallel patterns
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: of butchery, breakage, and disposal. Flesh had been removed, marrow-bearing
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: bones had been fractured, and the researchers concluded that the
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: people were probably butchered and eaten in a manner closely
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: resembling the process of wild and domestic animals. The study
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: became important far beyond this one cave. because it helped
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: establish a methodological principle that still shapes the archaeology of cannibalism.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: If someone treats a human body in the same technological
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: sequence used to turn animals into food, the consumption hypothesis
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: becomes considerably harder to explain away as an unusual burial practice.
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  Speaker 1: Yet even Fontbregois cannot tell us whether the dead were relatives, enemies, captives,
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: or victims of some emergency. Archaeology can sometimes recover the
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: meal without recovering the reason for it, including carefully modified
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: skull cups that are known from Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, and
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: Bronze Age contexts, including Go's Cave, Herxheim, and several Iberian sites.
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  Speaker 1: What emerges is not evidence for one enormous European cannibal culture,
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  Speaker 1: but something much stranger. Different populations, separated by thousands of years,
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  Speaker 1: repeatedly discovering that the human corpse could become food, ritual material,
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: an object of transformation, or several of those things simultaneously.
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: Once writing appears, the evidence changes, because for the first time,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: cannibalism enters history in two forms at once. We begin
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: receiving written reports of people supposedly eating other people, but
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: we also begin seeing how useful the image of the
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: man-eater could be for deciding who counted as civilized and
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: who did not. Herodotus gives us some of the clearest
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: early examples, because writing in the 5th century BCE, he
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: describes people beyond the familiar Greek world whose funerary practices
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  Speaker 1: supposedly included consuming their own dead. The Isidones, according to Herodotus,
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: held a feast when a man's father died. Livestock was slaughtered,
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: the father's corpse was cut apart, and the meats were
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: mixed together and consumed. Afterward, the dead man's head was
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: stripped and cleaned. The skull was gilded and preserved as
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: a sacred object. If that report preserves a genuine practice,
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: we are not looking at hunger at all. We are
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: looking at mortuary endocannibalism, where consuming a relative and preserving
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: part of his body belong to the funeral itself. Herodotus'
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: description of the miscegeny is even more unsettling, because he
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: claims that when somebody reached extreme old age, relatives gathered together,
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: killed the elderly person along with livestock, boiled the flesh,
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: and consumed everything in a feast. This was supposedly considered
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: the happiest possible death, while somebody who died naturally from
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: illness was instead buried and mourned because they had been
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: denied the preferred ending. That account completely reverses our instinctive interpretation.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: To us, being killed and eaten by our family sounds
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: like the ultimate betrayal of kinship, while in the world
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Herodotus describes, not being eaten was the unfortunate death Elsewhere,
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: he places the Androphagoi, literally the man-eaters, near the distant
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: margins of the Scythian world. That geography matters because Greek
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: ethnographic literature repeatedly becomes stranger as it moves away from
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: the Mediterranean center. Unfamiliar sexual customs, unusual funerals, bizarre diets, monsters,
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: one-eyed peoples, and cannibals begin accumulating near boundaries of what
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: Greek writers understood as the inhabited world. We should not
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: conclude from that, that Herodotus simply invented everything he encountered.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: Some of his ethnographic descriptions preserve extraordinary information about actual
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: peoples and customs. But his cannibalism stories no longer come
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: with broken femurs, tooth impressions, or skull cups excavated from
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: controlled archaeological deposits. They reach us through travelers, intermediaries, and
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: literary tradition, and food itself becomes one of the measurements
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: by which Greek authors construct cultural differences. That creates a
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: second history running alongside the physical history of cannibalism. Because
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: human beings really did sometimes eat human beings, but almost
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: as soon as people began writing about one another, calling
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: somebody a cannibal became a way of saying that they
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: were not like us. And eventually that accusation would become
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: every bit as historically consequential as cannibalism itself. By the
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: Roman imperial period, the idea of the cannibal had become
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: useful for something archaeology could never show us by itself.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: destroying the reputation of another group. One of the clearest
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: examples is especially ironic because the people being accused were
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: early Christians. Christian communities gathered privately, called one another brothers
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: and sisters, celebrated communal meals, and spoke openly about consuming
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: the body and blood of Christ. To insiders, the Eucharist
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: carried a theological meaning rooted in the Last Supper, and
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: although it is difficult to prove exactly how much Eucharistic
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: language generated or reinforced hostile rumors, outsiders could easily present
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: the vocabulary in a far darker form. By the 2nd
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: and 3rd centuries, pagan accusations against Christians included stories of
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: incestuous gatherings, infanticide, and secret feasts in which babies were
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: murdered and consumed. The Christian writer, Minucius Felix, probably writing
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: in the second or third century, preserves one of the
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: most graphic versions in his dialogue, Octavius. The accusation describes
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: a novice being tricked into killing an infant concealed beneath flour,
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: after which the gathered Christians supposedly consume its blood and
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: flesh before extinguishing the lights and engaging in sexual chaos.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: The important part for us is that Felix does not
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: admit this behavior. He presents it as a defamatory story
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: and later explicitly argues that Christians had once been falsely
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: believed to devour infants and participate in incestuous banquets. Other
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: Christian apologists, including Tertullian and Athena Goris, respond to similar accusations.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: What survives is therefore not evidence that Christians practiced cannibalism,
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: but evidence that cannibalism had become one of the most powerful,
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: imaginable accusations against a secretive religious minority. That pattern will
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: recur throughout this history. Because if you want to portray
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: another community as fundamentally outside civilization, you accuse them of
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: violating the boundaries everyone considers most sacred. Incest, child murder,
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: desecration of corpses, and eating human flesh. Once somebody becomes
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: a man-eater, ordinary political or religious disagreement is replaced by
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: something much easier to hate, a monster. Yet while Christians
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: were being falsely accused of cannibalistic feasts, actual Europeans could
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: still cross the line under circumstances that had nothing to
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: do with ritual or religious identity. Famine is one of
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: the most consistent pressures capable of doing that, and medieval
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: European chronicles contain repeated descriptions of people consuming human flesh
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: during catastrophic food shortages, although each account has to be
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: treated carefully because medieval chroniclers often described famine as using
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: biblical and apocalyptic language. Reports of parents eating children, corpses
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: being dug from graves, and travelers being murdered for food
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: sometimes function as moral images of a world collapsing under
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: divine punishment as much as straightforward journalism. Even so, the
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: recurrence of cannibalism in famine literature reflects a historical reality
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: that later European writers often preferred to associate with distant peoples.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: When food systems collapsed far enough, Europeans were no more
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: biologically protected from survival cannibalism than anyone else. The First
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: Crusade gives us one of the strongest medieval examples because
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: cannibalism is reported from inside the crusading tradition itself. In
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: late 1098, crusading armies advancing through Syria captured the town
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: of Ma'arat al-Numen, usually shortened in the sources to Ma'ara.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: The crusaders had already endured enormous shortages during the campaign.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: and after the city's fall, their supply situation deteriorated further.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Several Christian chronicles written in the aftermath of the First
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: Crusade acknowledge that some crusaders consumed human bodies there, making
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: the broad event unusually difficult to dismiss as Muslim propaganda
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: against Christian invaders. The anonymous Gesta Francorum, written by someone
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: associated with the crusading expedition, gives the episode its most
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: straightforward explanation. HUNGER According to the account, extreme deprivation led
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: some men to cut flesh from dead bodies, cook it,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: and eat it. Other Latin chroniclers repeat versions of the event,
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: while later writers make the imagery considerably more grotesque. Ralph
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: of Caen, writing from testimony gathered among crusaders, describes adults
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: being boiled in cooking pots and children being roasted on spits.
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: The exact details, timing, and participants differ from chronicle to chronicle.
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: But historians generally treat the occurrence of some cannibalism at
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: Ma'ara as chronic. because it appears across numerous Christian accounts
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: rather than only in the writings of their enemies. The
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: motive is more difficult to isolate, because some accounts portray
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: starving soldiers secretly consuming corpses when there was almost nothing
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: left to eat. Others transform the behavior into a public
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: spectacle directed against Muslims, suggesting intimidation or religious hatred alongside hunger.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Later legends especially associate the acts with the poorest and
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: most fanatical elements of the army. What probably began as
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: an episode of desperate consumption therefore entered historical memory as
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: something larger. evidence that participants in a supposedly holy expedition
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: could become the very kind of monstrous man-eater Christian civilization
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: normally imagined somewhere beyond its borders. There is an uncomfortable
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: symmetry here. A few centuries earlier, Christians had defended themselves
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: against stories claiming they murdered children and ate human flesh
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: in secret, while at Ma'ara, Christian chroniclers themselves were forced
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: to record Christians eating the bodies of their defeated enemies.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: The difference between accusation and action matters enormously. Since the
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: accusations against early Christians tell us about prejudice, rumor, and
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: the social power of the cannibal image, Ma Arad tells
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: us what hunger, warfare, and social collapse can actually make
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: people do. But together, they reveal something that will become
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: central once Europe begins crossing the Atlantic. Cannibalism is powerful
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: not simply because eating another human body horrifies people, but
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: because whoever controls the story gets to decide who the
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: cannibal is, and beginning at the end of the 15th century,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: that power would become entangled with conquest, slavery, and the
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: invention of the so-called savage. When Christopher Columbus entered the
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Caribbean at the end of the 15th century, Europeans already
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: possessed ancient stories about anthropophagi, monstrous races, and people living
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: beyond the boundaries of civilization who supposedly consumed human flesh.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: What changed after 1492 was not the European discovery of
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: the idea of cannibalism, but the word Europeans increasingly used
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: it for. During Columbus's first voyage, reports circulated among the
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: indigenous peoples he encountered about feared enemies whom the Spanish
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: rendered as Caribes, Canibes, or related forms. The terminology was
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: unstable from the beginning, filtered through European ears in several
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: indigenous languages, but the linguistic trail is important because Columbus's
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: rendering of the name supplied the root from which the
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: European word cannibal developed. Before this, educated Europeans could speak
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: of anthropophagy from Greek terminology referring to human eating. After
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: the Caribbean encounters, cannibal increasingly became the name not merely
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: for an act, but for a kind of person. That
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: transformation had consequences almost immediately, because the peoples European grouped
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: together as caribs, Today, more appropriately, disgust caninego and the
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: complicated indigenous societies of the Lesser Antilles were described by
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: Spaniards as aggressive warriors who raided neighboring islands and ate
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: human captives. Whether how often and under what circumstances anthropophagy
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: actually occurred among these communities remains debated. The historical record
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: is badly entangled with conquest because the people most readily
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: branded cannibals were also among those resisting Spanish expansion. The
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: accusation therefore cannot be treated as neutral ethnography, especially because
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: by 1503 the distinction had entered Spanish imperial policy. Queen
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: Isabella issued a decree permitting the capture and sale of
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: indigenous people classified as cannibals when they resisted Spanish authority
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: and evangelization, creating an enormous incentive to expand a category
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: that now carried direct legal and economic consequences. Once carib
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: and cannibal could help transform a legally protected indigenous population
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: into an enslaveable enemy, the question of who counted as
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: a cannibal was no longer merely linguistic or theological. It
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: could determine who could be captured, transported, and sold. While
• 34:01
  Speaker 1: later crown authorizations continued targeting Kalinigo and other populations represented
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: as aggressive cannibals, and historians of indigenous slavery have shown
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: how labels of rebellion, warfare, and anthropophagy became intertwined with
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: legal arguments for enslavement. This does not mean every report
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: of indigenous cannibalism in the Americas was fabricated. That conclusion
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: would repeat the same mistake in reverse, because European colonizers
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: unquestionably had political reasons to exaggerate anthropophagy among some indigenous societies,
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: particularly in coastal Brazil. The point is that actual practices
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: and colonial representations existed at the same time, and separating
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: them requires following each source rather than deciding in advance
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: that every report must either be completely true or completely invented.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: No case demonstrates that problem better than the Tupinamba, because
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the 16th century, the German gunner
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: Haas Staden was serving with the Portuguese in Brazil when
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: he was captured by Tupinamba enemies of the Portuguese. He
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: remained among them for roughly nine months and returned to
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Europe convinced that he had repeatedly come close to being
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: killed and eaten. In 1557, he published a book now
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: generally known in English as Hans Staden's True History, one
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: of the earliest extended European eyewitness accounts of indigenous life
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: in Brazil and one of the foundational texts in the
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: history of cannibal imagery. Staden describes enemy captives being incorporated
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: into Tupinamba communities for a period before eventually being killed
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: during highly organized ceremonies. The execution was not presented simply
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: as slaughter for meat, because captor and captive exchanged words
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: concerning earlier killings, revenge, and the expectation that vengeance would continue.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: After death, the victim's body was processed and portions were
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: distributed for consumption. The captive could die proclaiming that his
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: own relatives would avenge him, while those killing him understood
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: the act as a repayment from members of their community
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: previously killed by the enemy. This is crucial because the
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: Tupinamba case shows how barely the word cannibalism can flatten behavior.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: Eating the body mattered, but the larger system revolved around warfare, captivity, memory,
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: and vengeance. The enemy was not hunted primarily because human
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: flesh solved the nutritional shortage. Ritual consumption belonged to a
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: cycle in which one death demanded another. An anthropological scholarship
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: drawing not only on stating but also on Jesuit accountants
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: strongly supports the existence of Tupinamba anthropophagy as an important
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: element within the system of ritual warfare. Staden's book nevertheless
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: created another object entirely, the European cannibal spectacle, and its
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: famous woodcuts show naked indigenous people cutting, cooking, and consuming
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: human bodies, images reproduced for audiences who would never travel
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: anywhere near Brazil. The book appeared inside the religious conflicts
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: of Reformation Europe, in the imperial rivalry between Portuguese, French,
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: and other Atlantic powers, meaning that Staden's personal story of
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: providential survival was also being transformed into European knowledge about
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: what supposedly separated Christian civilization from the New World. Other
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: 16th century observers complicated that picture, because André Thevet and
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: Jean de Laray also described Tupinamba anthropophagy while Jesuit missionaries
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: who lived among Tupi-speaking peoples repeatedly discussed the practice with
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: horror and tried to suppress it. Modern scholarship comparing these
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: independent traditions make it difficult to dismiss Tupinamba ritual cannibalism
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: as a fantasy invented by Satan alone. At the same time,
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: those accounts remind us that everything reaching European readers passed
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: through missionaries, captives, colonists, and theologians who interpreted what they
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: saw through their own ideas about savagery, sacrifice, religion, and civilizations.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: The historical irony is enormous, because by the 16th century,
• 38:07
  Speaker 1: Europeans had taken the name of the indigenous Caribbean people
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: and turned it into the general word cannibal. That label
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: could help justify indigenous enslavement and conquest, while illustrated books
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: filled European imaginations with spectacular scenes of American bodies being
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: roasted and eaten, making the new world cannibal one of
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: the defining images of supposed savagery. And yet, at almost
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: exactly the same moment, Europeans themselves were developing an extensive
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: medical trade in human blood, fat, skulls, flesh, and powdered corpses,
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: meaning that the culture helping to create the modern image
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: of the cannibal was also consuming human remains of its own.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: This was not merely a peasant superstition hiding at the
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: edge of respectable medicine. Historian Richard Sugg has shown that
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: corpse medicine was integrated into early modern therapeutic therapy and
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: was used in Britain, France, the German lands, and Scandinavia
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: by patients ranging from ordinary people to aristocrats. The substances
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: included human blood, fat, flesh, skull, bone, moss growing on skulls,
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: and most famously, mummy. The story of mummy medicine begins
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: with a linguistic and pharmacological confusion. Medieval Arabic medicine used
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: the term mumia for a rare medicinal pitch or asphalt
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: associated especially with Persian. Over centuries, the same term became
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: attached to the dark, resinous material found in embalmed Egyptian
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: corpses and then eventually to the preserved bodies themselves. By
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: the later Middle Ages, European pharmacology was therefore selling mumia
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: not simply as a mineral drug, but as a material
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: obtained from human mummies. When demand exceeded the supply of
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: ancient Egyptian bodies, historical sources describe merchants substituting recently dead
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: corpses prepared to resemble genuine mummy material. This already sounds
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: grotesque to modern ears, but the logic was not simply
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: dead people are magical. Early modern medicine contains several overlapping
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: systems for explaining why human remains might heal another human body.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: Galenic and humoral medicine could treat bodily substances as pharmacological materials,
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: where Paracelsian medicine added a more explicitly spiritual and alchemical dimension.
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: Paracelsus and later Paracelsian physicians imagined the human body as
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: a microcosm linked to the larger universe and argued that
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: natural substances possessed hidden virtues that could be extracted, concentrated,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: and transferred. Human remains could therefore become medicine because the
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: body itself contained powers that survived death. The manner of
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: death could matter as much as the body part. A
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: corpse taken from someone who died suddenly and violently could
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: be regarded as especially potent because the person's vital force
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: had supposedly not been exhausted gradually by disease or old age.
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: Execution grounds therefore became pharmacies of a very literal kind,
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: with executioners, gravediggers, merchants, and physicians all participated at different
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: points in the trade in human materials. And in parts
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: of continental Europe, executioners themselves developed reputations as healers because
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: their work gave them unusual access to bodies and practical
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: knowledge of anatomy. Fresh human blood became one of the
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: strangest treatments because blood taken from executed criminals was sometimes
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: consumed as a remedy for epilepsy, a disease that early
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: modern medicine struggled desperately to control. Human fat could be
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: rubbed onto wounds or painful joints. while powdered skulls were
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: prescribed for disorders of the head and nervous system, while
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: preparations made from skull moss appeared in remedies of the period.
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: The logic repeatedly followed a principle that feels almost like
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: sympathetic magic. Substances associated with a particular body, organ, life force,
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: or manner of death were believed to carry a corresponding
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: therapeutic virtue. And these practices reached some of the most
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: respected people in 17th century science and medicine. Sugg's research
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: identifies the neurologically important physician Thomas Willis and the experimental
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: natural philosopher Robert Boyle, among those who recommended remedies made
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: from human bodies. Boyle recorded medical uses of human blood,
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: while Willis prescribed preparations involving human skull for conditions including epilepsy.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: Charles II of England was likewise associated with medicinal preparations
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: involving the human skull. Whatever we call these treatments now,
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: The people using them did not usually imagine that they
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: were violating civilization's rules by behaving like the savages described
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: in colonial literature. They imagined themselves taking medicine. That distinction
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: is one of the most revealing parts of the entire
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: history of cannibalism. Early modern Europeans often found the idea
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: of consuming human flesh as food disgusting, yet medical authority
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: could move the same material into another category. Once a
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: corpse became an ingredient measured, powdered, distilled and sold by
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: an apothecary, the human body had been conceptually transformed from
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: person into drug. Recent scholarship on medieval English medicine make
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: the same point for an earlier period. Medical texts could
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: recommend human flesh and bodily substances without abolishing ordinary disgust
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: because medicine temporarily changed the category in which those substances belonged.
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: The boundary could become stranger still when ingestion was necessary
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: and And from the 18th into the 19th century, people
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: in England sought the touch of the hand of a
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: freshly executed man as a cure for swelling and other disorders.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: Historian Francesca Mattioni has shown that this dead hand cure
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: survived alongside changing execution practices and drew upon the older
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: belief that bodies, especially violently dead bodies, could retain healing
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: power after death. By this point, the contradiction becomes impossible
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: to ignore. because Europe had spent centuries constructing the cannibal
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: as one of the ultimate images of barbarism, and colonial
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: powers had used the accusation against indigenous populations while describing
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: themselves as representatives of a civilized religion and medicine. Yet
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: the same civilization could import Egyptian corpses, grind human skulls,
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: collect fresh blood at executions, and purchase human fat as medicine.
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: The question was never simply whether Europeans consumed human bodies.
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: because they demonstrably did. The more revealing question is what
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: cultural category made that consumption acceptable? Call it cannibalism, and
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: it belonged to the savage, but call it medicine, and
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: a king could swallow it. The history of cannibalism changes
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: again when there is no ritual to interpret, no enemy
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: whose body is being dishonored, and no physician claiming that
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: powdered skull will cure disease. Sometimes people eat human flesh
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: because every other source of food has disappeared. And survival
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: cannibalism forces perhaps the most uncomfortable question in the entire subject.
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: If a person consumes someone who is already dead because
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: the alternative is dying themselves, has the oldest taboo in
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: human society actually been broken in the same moral sense?
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: The English colony at Jamestown gives us one of the
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: clearest early modern examples because documentary history and forensic archaeology
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: eventually converged. The English colony at Jamestown gives us one
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: of the clearest early modern examples because documentary history and
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: forensic archaeology eventually converged. During the winter of 1609 to 1610,
• 45:45
  Speaker 1: remembered as the Starving Time, disease, drought, deteriorating relations with
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: neighboring Powhatan communities, and the failure of supply systems drove
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: the colony toward catastrophe. George Percy, who governed Jamestown during
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: part of the crisis, later described settlers eating horses, dogs, cats, rats, mice,
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: and even leather before digging corpses from graves and consuming them.
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: For centuries, accounts like his left historians debating how literally
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: the most horrifying details should be taken. That documentary record
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: became harder to dismiss when archaeologists found the remains now
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: known as Jane. Smithsonian forensic anthropologist Douglas Owsley and his
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: colleagues identified cuts and chops on the jaw, face, and skull,
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: consistent with an experienced person trying to remove flesh and
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: gain access to the brain. The evidence could not determine
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: how Jane died, and there is no reason to assume
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: she was murdered for food, but her body had clearly
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: been processed after death for consumption. Nearly four centuries after
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: Percy described colonists eating corpses, archaeology demonstrated that at least
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: part of his account was true. Jamestown is important because
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: the sequence of desperation is visible. Colonists did not arrive
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: planning to eat one another, but exhausted culturally acceptable foods,
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: then animals they ordinarily avoided, then leather and vermin, and
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: finally human remains. Survival cannibalism often appears in precisely that
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: kind of progression. The taboo does not simply vanish. Necessity
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: gradually narrows the available choices until the dead body is
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: reclassified for something that must never be eaten into one
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: of the last remaining stores of calories. Maritime disasters produced
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: the same problem so frequently that 19th century sailors developed
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: an infamous expression for it, the custom of the sea.
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: One of the most famous cases began in 1820 when
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: the Nantucket whale ship Essex was rammed and sunk by
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: a sperm whale in the Pacific. The survivors crowded into
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: small boats with limited provisions and began a journey of
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: thousands of miles. As men died, some of their bodies
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: were consumed and eventually one boat reached an even darker
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: decision and drew lots to determine who would die so
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: others could live. The fatal lot fell to 17-year-old Owen Coffin,
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: the young cousin of Captain George Pollard. Coffin was shot
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: and the remaining men consumed his body. Contemporary accounts of
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: the Essex disaster preserve both the drawing of lots and
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: the killing, even though Coffin was in Pollard's boat rather
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: than the boat commanded by first mate Owen Chase. The
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: distinction between eating somebody who has already died and and
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: deliberately killing somebody for food became one of the central
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: legal questions of survival cannibalism later in the century. In 1884,
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: after the yacht Mignonette sank, Thomas Dudley and Edward Stevens
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: killed the severely weakened 17-year-old cabin boy, Richard Parker, and
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: fed upon his body. When the survivors returned to England,
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: the resulting case, R v. Dudley v. Stevens, established a
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: famous principle of English criminal law. Necessity did not excuse
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: the intentional murder of an innocent person simply because killing
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: him might save others. Starvation could explain the act, but
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: it could not make homicide lawful. Between those two maritime
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: cases lies perhaps the most famous American overland disaster. During
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: the winter of 1846 to 1847, members of the Donner
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: Party became trapped by deep snow in the Sierra Nevada.
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: Survivor testimony leaves little doubt that some people consumed the
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: bodies of those who had died, yet archaeology gives us
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: a useful warning about demanding the same kind of evidence
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: from every historical event. Excavations at the Donner family's Adler
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: Creek camp recovered more than 16,000 highly fragmented bones and
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: and found evidence that cattle, horses, and small animals were
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: intensively processed and boiled for grease, but researchers could not
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: conclusively identify human tissue among the remains. The written record
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: supports cannibalism within the larger disaster, even though one excavated
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: campsite has not supplied butchered human bone. The Lost Franklin
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: Expedition shows the reverse process. Oral testimony was doubted until
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: physical evidence began vindicating it. Sir John Franklin left Britain
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: in 1845 with Erebus and Terra in an attempt to
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: navigate the Northwest Passage. Both ships became trapped in Arctic ice.
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: Franklin died and the surviving crew eventually abandoned the vessels
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: and attempted to escape southward. Inuit witnesses later told explorer
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: John Ray that the starving men had resorted to cannibalism.
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: But Victorian Britain reacted with outrage, partly because the idea
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: that disciplined Royal Navy officers could have eaten one another
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: seemed intolerable. The bones eventually answered the argument when human
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: remains associated with the expedition were found bearing cut marks
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: consistent with defleshing and later examination identified deliberate breakage and
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: areas of polishing on broken bone edges. Researchers tentatively interpreted
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: that pattern as pot polish. consistent with bones having been
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: heated or boiled in water so that marrow and grease
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: could be extracted after the more accessible flesh was gone.
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: This was end-stage processing, when almost every remaining calorie had
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: become valuable. The Inuit testimony that Victorian commentators had found
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: too degrading to accept turned out to have described the
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: basic reality. These disasters exposed something brutally simple beneath all
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: of the religious, ritual, and political meanings we have followed
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: so far, The human body contains fat, protein, and marrow,
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: and when every ordinary category of food disappears, people who
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: would otherwise consider cannibalism unthinkable have sometimes crossed the boundary.
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: But survival cannibalism also demonstrates that even at the edge
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: of starvation, how the flesh becomes available still matters. Eating
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: someone who had died naturally is not morally identical to
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: murdering a weaker companion. Drawing lots is not the same
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: as desecrating a grave. just as sharing the body of
• 52:02
  Speaker 1: a dead expedition member is not the same as killing
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: an enemy and consuming him as revenge. Cannibalism describes what
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: enters the mouth, but it does not, by itself, tell
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: us what happened before the meal. By the 20th century,
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: Western anthropology began encountering forms of cannibalism that did not
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: fit comfortably into the categories European history had made familiar.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: These were not starving sailors eating companions who had already died,
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: physicians grinding corpses into medicine, or warriors consuming defeated enemies.
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: In parts of Amazonia and the highlands of Papua New Guinea,
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: anthropologists documented societies in which consuming a dead relative could
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: form part of mourning itself. And the closer researchers looked,
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: the harder it became to maintain the assumption that eating
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: the body necessarily expressed contempt for the person who had
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: occupied it. Among the worry of Western Brazil, Mortuary cannibalism
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: continued until approximately the 1960s. Anthropologist Beth Conklin, who spent
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: years reconstructing worry memories of the practice, argued that older
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: explanations had often misunderstood it by reducing cannibalism either to
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: nutrition or to an abstract symbol. For the worry, what
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: happened to the corpse was entangled with grief, memory, the
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: social meaning of the body, and a larger cosmology in
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: which humans existed. Animals and the dead were involved in
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: cycles of transformation and reciprocity. The body of a loved
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: person could become painful precisely because it remained recognizable after
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: the person was gone, and destroying that body helped the
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: living begin separating memory of the deceased from the physical
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: form they had known. That produces one of the deepest
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: reversals in this entire history. In much of the modern West,
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: respect for the dead normally means preserving the corpse temporarily,
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: placing it in a coffin, burying it underground and allowing
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: decomposition to occur out of sight. To the worry, leaving
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: a loved one to rot could itself be emotionally horrifying.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: Mortuary consumption did not necessarily mean that the deceased had
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: ceased to matter. Under a different cultural logic, the treatment
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: of the body could express the seriousness of mourning. Conklin's work, therefore,
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: forces us to confront a problem that the word cannibalism
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: often conceals. Two societies can perform radically different acts toward
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: a corpse while both believing that they are treating the
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: dead properly. The four and neighboring peoples of the eastern
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: highlands of Papua New Guinea give us an even more
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: extraordinary case because mortuary consumption eventually collided with modern medicine.
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: Among the South Four, the practice is often described in
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: the scientific literature as transubtion, emphasizing the incorporation of the
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: dead person's body into into living relatives during mortuary rites.
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: Later ethnographic work describes the practice as having deep eschatological
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: significance and being carried out within rules determined by kinship, age, sex,
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: and local custom. Researchers investigating the practice concluded that the
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: body was consumed not simply because human flesh was regarded
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: as food, but within a funeral system in which eating
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: the dead could be understood as an act of kinship
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: and love. The consequences became horrifying when people began dying
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: from Kuru, which medical researchers began systematically investigating in 1957.
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: The disease was already occurring at epidemic levels among the
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: four and neighboring communities. Victims developed tremors, progressively lost coordination
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: and control of movement, became unable to stand or walk,
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: and eventually died. In the first five years of intensive investigation,
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: roughly 1,000 Kuru deaths were recorded. Some villages suffered such
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: extreme mortality among adult women that their demographic balance was
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: profoundly distorted. The demographic pattern contained the clue, because Kuru
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: disproportionately affected women and children, while adult men were much
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: less frequently affected. That did not make sense for a
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: conventional inherited disorder or an ordinary infectious disease circulating evenly
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: through a population, but it closely followed participation in mortuary feasts.
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: In many South Fork communities, Women, girls, and young boys
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: were the people most heavily involved in consuming dead relatives,
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: while males generally participated much less after about 6 to
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: 8 years of age. Once researchers mapped social behavior against disease,
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: the apparently strange demographics began making terrifying sense. Kuru turned
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: out to be transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, part of the same
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: family of disease that includes Jacob disease, ending cattle, bovine
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: spongiform encephalopathy. The infectious agent was eventually understood not as
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: a bacterium, virus, or parasite, but as a prion, an
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: abnormally folded form of a normal host protein capable of
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: including other versions of that protein to adapt the pathological shape.
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: The result is a chain reaction of protein misfolding and
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: catastrophic neurodegeneration. Cannibalism had therefore exposed the four to a
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: biological danger almost impossible to imagine before modern molecular medicine.
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: A corpse could transmit a fatal disease through the structure
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: of a protein. The epidemic also provided an extraordinary natural
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: experiment because mortuary transumption was suppressed during the 1950s and
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: had largely ceased by the early 1960s. Kuru did not
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: disappear immediately. Instead, cases became progressively older as the last
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: exposed generations aged. and some people developed the disease after
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: incubation periods exceeding 50 years. That delay helped demonstrate just
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: how unusual prion diseases are, because exposure during childhood could
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: remain silent for decades before the nervous system began collapsing.
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: The story then became evolutionary, because genetic studies found that
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: variation in PRNP, the gene encoding the prion protein, influenced
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: susceptibility to Kuru. In particular, people carrying different variants of
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: codon 129 showed relative resistance, and elderly survivors who had
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: experienced repeated exposure at mortuary feasts were disproportionately represented among
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: these heterozygotes. Later work also identified the protective 127V variant
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: concentrated in the region of the greatest Kuru exposure, strengthening
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: the conclusion that the epidemic had imposed an unusually powerful
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: episode of of recent natural selection on a living human population.
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: There is an important warning here, because an early genetic
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: argument went even further and suggested that protective prion variation
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: around the world might indicate that cannibalism had been common
• 58:50
  Speaker 1: enough throughout human prehistory to shape the human genome globally.
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: Later work challenged that sweeping interpretation and showed that the
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: genetic evidence could not support such a universal conclusion. Among
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: the four, however, The selective pressure associated with Kuru remains
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: strong evidence for evolution happening on an Omo. historical timescale.
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: The worry and foe therefore bring us back to the
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: central problem we started with, but from the opposite direction.
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: Archaeology can show us bones that were cut, cracked, and
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: eaten while leaving the motive obscure. Here anthropology gives us
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: the motive. Epidemiology reconstructs who consumed whom. and molecular biology
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: identifies what passed from the dead into the living. Cannibalism
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: did not merely leave marks on bones. In the case
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: of Kuru, it left a measurable signature in recent human evolution.
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: Before we end this history, there is one archaeological controversy
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: we have to return to, because it brings nearly every
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: problem in this episode together in one place. Around the
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: 12th century CE, several sites in the Four Corners region
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: of the American Southwest produced disarticulated human remains bearing cut marks,
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: percussion damage, burning, and breakage patterns that some archaeologists argued
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: were consistent with food processing. These communities belong to the
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: people archaeologists now generally call the Ancestral Pueblos, although the
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: older term Anazazi still appears throughout the literature. The most
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: famous case is Cowboy Wash in southwestern Colorado, occupied around
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: 1150 A.D. Excavators recovered the remains of seven people whose
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: bodies had been dismembered and heavily processed. Long bones had
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: been broken, some remains were heat altered, and the overall
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: assemblage resembled other southwestern sites that had already been interpreted
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: as evidence of cannibalism. Yet critics correctly point out that
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: butchered-looking bodies are not automatically eaten bodies. Warfare, post-mortem, mutilation,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: unusual mortuary treatment, and the ritual execution of suspected witches
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: had all been proposed as alternative explanations. The argument became
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: more dramatic when researchers analyzed the human coprolite recovered from
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: the site. In 2000, Richard Marlar and colleagues reported in
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: Nature that an immunological assay detected human myoglobin, a muscle protein,
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: and they interpreted the result, together with the processed skeletons
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: and other biochemical findings, as direct evidence that somebody at
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: Cowboy Wash had consumed human tissue. The controversy did not disappear, however,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: because critics challenged aspects of the osteological, contextual, and biochemical interpretation,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: while Pueblo scholars and archaeologists also objected to broad claims
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: about Anasazi cannibalism and emphasized the long colonial history of
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: portraying native peoples as savages. Those objections matter because evidence
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: from several violent sites cannot justify turning an entire civilization
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: into the cannibals of the Southwest. The strongest conclusion is narrower.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: At Cowboy Wash, there is unusually compelling evidence that human
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: tissue was consumed during an episode of extreme violence, while
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: the social meaning of the act, hunger, intimidation, warfare, witch execution,
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: or something else remains much harder to reconstruct. That uncertainty
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: makes Cowboy Wash almost a perfect case study for this
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: entire subject. Archaeology can sometimes get us all the way
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: to the stomach and still fail to tell us what
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: the meal meant. The modern world supplies an equally disturbing
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: example in which hunger was clearly not the central issue.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: During the violent phase of China's Cultural Revolution in 1968,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: reports emerged from Wushun County in Guangxi that people identified
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: as political enemies had been killed and portions of their
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: bodies consumed. Historian Donald Sutton's study of the episode emphasizes
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: that the cannibalism occurred within fractional political violence and functioned
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: as a ritualized expression of hostility toward those labeled counter-revolutionaries
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: rather than as a response to starvation. When official investigators
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: finally examined the events in the early 1980s, they compiled
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: lists of victims and participants. 15 people were jailed and
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: 130 party members and cadres were disciplined. Wushuang matters because
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: it destroys another comforting assumption. Cannibalism does not belong only
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: to prehistory, isolated societies, or moments when starvation reduces people
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: to biological desperation. A modern political movement could turn the
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: consumption of an enemy's body into an act of ideological degradation,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: showing that the ancient relationship between eating and domination had
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: not disappeared at all. Only four years later, the survivors
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 gave the world the
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: opposite modern image. Sixteen people survived more than two months
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: in the Andes after their aircraft crashed in 1972, eventually
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: acknowledging after rescue that they had eaten portions of passengers
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: who had already died. There was no victorious enemy, no
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: medicinal theory, and no ritual humiliation. They were starving, and
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: the dead became the only available source of food. Within
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: four years, then, the 20th century produced cannibalism as political
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: terror and cannibalism as desperate survival. The physical act was similar,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: while almost everything that gave the act meaning was different.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: Within four years, the 20th century produced cannibalism as political
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: terror and cannibalism as desperate survival. The physical act was similar,
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: while almost everything that gave the act meaning was different.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: More than a million years ago, somebody took a stone
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: edge to the flesh of another homonym. Hundreds of thousands
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: of years later, early humans at Grandolina processed members of
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: their own genus in the same basic sequence used on animals.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 1: Neanderthals butchered other Neanderthals, Ice Age people cracked human bones
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: from marrow while carefully shaping skulls into cups, and Neolithic
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: communities left behind bodies whose treatment still forces archaeologists to
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: decide where violence ends and consumption begins. Once writing enters
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: the story, the problem becomes even stranger because cannibalism develops
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: two histories at the same time. People continue eating people,
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: but societies also discover how useful it is to accuse
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: somebody else of doing it. Greeks place man-eaters at the
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: edge of the known world, Romans accuse Christians of murdering
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: and consuming infants, medieval hunger produces real episodes of anthropophagy,
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: and the European expansion transforms cannibalism into a colonial category
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: that can help turn an indigenous enemy into something supposedly
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: less human. European expansion transforms cannibal into a colonial category
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: that can help turn an indigenous enemy into something less
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: than human. Dem boundaries collapse as Europeans who condemn human
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: consumption overseas grind mummies and skulls into medicine. Shipwrecked sailors
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: eat their companions. Arctic explorers boil shattered bones for the
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: last traces of grease. and the Wari in 4 remind
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: us that consuming relatives can belong to mourning rather than hatred,
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: while Kuru reveals that a funerary practice can leave consequences
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: not merely in memory or bone, but in proteins, epidemics,
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: and natural selection. That is why the history of cannibalism
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: cannot be reduced to the question of whether human beings
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: have eaten human flesh. They obviously have, across enormous spans
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: of time and under circumstances so different that placing them
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: all beneath one word can become misleading. The deeper question
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: is what a human body becomes when the person inside
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: it is gone. Depending on the place and the moment,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: that body can become food, ancestor, enemy, medicine, sacred remains,
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: political warning, forensic evidence, or the last available source of calories.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: Every society draws boundaries around the dead, and those boundaries
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: can feel so natural that we forget that they are
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: cultural until somebody else crosses them differently. The horror of
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: cannibalism therefore tells us something not only about appetite, but
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: about personhood itself. Because eating a human body forces us
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: to decide whether the corpse is still somebody, whether it
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: can become something else, and who has the authority to
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: make that transformation. The archaeological record cannot always answer those questions,
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: because sometimes it gives us cut marks, broken bones, and
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: teeth marks without motive. Sometimes history gives us accusations without bodies,
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: while anthropology sometimes gives us the meanings, but arrives only
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: after the practice has nearly disappeared. So the history of
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: cannibalism is also a history of uncertainty, of trying to
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: distinguish meals from funerals, monsters from enemies, medicine from magic,
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: survival from murder, and actual human consumption from the stories
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: civilizations tell about the people they fear. Humans have been
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: eating humans for an extraordinarily long time, so the mystery
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: is no longer whether we did it, but what we
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: believed we were doing when we did. that's the end
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: of another occult rejects hope you all enjoyed and until
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: the next one