I’ve done loads of posts on human cannibalism, which might bring about some self-disgust for our species. Would it cheer you up to know, then, that it’s not just us moderns who’ve a legacy of eating each other?.
Turns out, humans have a very long history of self-consumption, stemming back a million years to the species Homo antecessor, where evidence from Spain shows clear evidence of anthropophagy.
The evidence shows up on bones — where tendon joints have been deliberately cut to filet muscles, intentional cracking of the longest bones in the legs and arms to get at human marrow, and human teeth marks all demonstrate the gruesome practice.
Homo Neanderthalis also ate each other — Spain again provides evidence of a possible family of 12 (using matching mitochondrial DNA) from 49,000 years ago that had likely been killed and then eaten.
But why did our ancestors dine on each other — was it starvation, or for ritualistic purposes? Anthropologists today still ask such questions relating to our own Homo sapiens species (with the current answer heavily leaning towards ritual vs nutritional explanations), and a couple of recent papers highlight the two sides concerning our earlier human cousins.
On the one hand, a paper published in _Scientific Reports_ from 2017 analyzed the caloric and protein values of various parts of a human. The author James Cole found that kilo per kilo, humans have much less value than, say wild horses, bears, and boars (like, by a third), suggesting to him that it would have been more trouble to eat a fellow human and thus would have been done for special purposes (similar to reasons for more modern cannibalism).
On the other hand, argues a study from 2019 on the Homo antecessor population from Spain, if you evaluate the cost to benefit ratio of obtaining a human versus another animal for consumption, the evidence swings the other way — “when compared with other prey, a lot of food could be obtained from humans at low cost,” argues Jesús Rodriguez, one of the authors.
Whatever the reason, anthropophagy has been in our blood for a long, long time.
Sources: P.s. the gene for withstanding prion-disease caused by human cannibalism was discovered in 2003, and it shows up 500,000+ years ago. Ulp. “Genes suggest cannibalism common in human past,” www.abc.net, Fri 11 April 2003, Danny Kingsley. “For early humans, cannibalism more than just a meal (update)”, _phys.org_, Marlowe Good, April 6, 2017. “Neanderthal family found cannibalized in cave in Spain,” Neil Bowdler, BBC news, 21 Dec 2010. “Cannibalism was profitable for Homo antecessor,” by CENIEH, _Phys.org_, May 7, 2019.
