4 ms·

Human Relatives Were Butchering and Eating Each Other 1.45M Years Ago

4 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

pangolinja 3y ago
you definitely shouldn't read James Frazer's The Golden Bough. Absolutely no documented history of European aristocracy sacrificing and eating humans up to this century. Definitely no evidence that all the Egyptian mummies were EATEN by Victorian era Europeans. And then there's today's Rich...
defrost 3y ago
and also when I was a child ~ 50+ years ago. As Alpers, with Jerome Whitfield and other colleagues wrote in a 2008 paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: “If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased. By eating their dead, they were able to show their love and express their grief.” ... It was the women’s responsibility to eat the dead, grinding the bones and cooking the flesh, feeding their children the tastiest bits. Although small boys joined in, they were generally excluded after about age 10. ... Unhappy with the language used to discuss his finding – “you don’t like to call your friends cannibals” – Alpers invented a new term for the Fore ritual: “transumption”. It borrowed from the Catholic lexicon concerning the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. and much more at: https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/the-man-who-linked-kuru-to-cannibalism/ https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/the-man-who-linke... Some interesting spinoffs from Mike's work included the study of prion disease defences in human populations that indicated all humans have ancestors from not so long back that ate human flesh in sufficient quantities to develop defense against human forms of mad cow disease. IIRC Kuru in the Fore people arose from a prion varient that dodged two seperate evolved defences.

4 ms·

Human Relatives Were Butchering and Eating Each Other 1.45M Years Ago

4 points by isaacfrond 3y ago

pangolinja 3y ago
you definitely shouldn't read James Frazer's The Golden Bough. Absolutely no documented history of European aristocracy sacrificing and eating humans up to this century. Definitely no evidence that all the Egyptian mummies were EATEN by Victorian era Europeans. And then there's today's Rich...
defrost 3y ago
and also when I was a child ~ 50+ years ago. As Alpers, with Jerome Whitfield and other colleagues wrote in a 2008 paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: “If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased. By eating their dead, they were able to show their love and express their grief.” ... It was the women’s responsibility to eat the dead, grinding the bones and cooking the flesh, feeding their children the tastiest bits. Although small boys joined in, they were generally excluded after about age 10. ... Unhappy with the language used to discuss his finding – “you don’t like to call your friends cannibals” – Alpers invented a new term for the Fore ritual: “transumption”. It borrowed from the Catholic lexicon concerning the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. and much more at: https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/the-man-who-linked-kuru-to-cannibalism/ https://cosmosmagazine.com/science/biology/the-man-who-linke... Some interesting spinoffs from Mike's work included the study of prion disease defences in human populations that indicated all humans have ancestors from not so long back that ate human flesh in sufficient quantities to develop defense against human forms of mad cow disease. IIRC Kuru in the Fore people arose from a prion varient that dodged two seperate evolved defences.