JAMESTOWN CANNIBALISM—SO, WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
When food became desperately scarce during the deadly winter of 1609, some Jamestown settlers began eating their dead. Horrifying news? Actually, no.
The internet and new media has been buzzing with the Smithsonian Magazine’s report of finding the cannibalized skeleton of a 14-year-old girl. Actually, we’ve long known from historical records that this occurred—and probably wouldn’t have been thought that unusual at the time.
According to Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? (Tucson: Galen Press), what the Jamestown settlers did is termed “survival cannibalism”. This is different, and still is accepted as a necessity, as long as the situation is dire and the “victims” are dead. This practice differs from gustatory cannibalism, when you eat humans because you like the taste or from ritual cannibalism during which people must eat part of their dead relative or leader. Note that the first prion disease (Kuru) was first recognized through its appearance after ritual cannibalism in Papua New Guinea in the mid-20th century.
At the time the Jamestown episode occurred, survival cannibalism was a (usually) unspoken event at sea when starving sailors, becalmed for weeks or months, resorted to it as a last resort. This practice exists even in modern times, with the Andean plane crash survivors being the best-known example.
So, let’s not look aghast at our forbears for surviving any way they could, and using a technique that some people in dire circumstances still employ today.
(http://bit.ly/10A8525)
The internet and new media has been buzzing with the Smithsonian Magazine’s report of finding the cannibalized skeleton of a 14-year-old girl. Actually, we’ve long known from historical records that this occurred—and probably wouldn’t have been thought that unusual at the time.
According to Death to Dust: What Happens to Dead Bodies? (Tucson: Galen Press), what the Jamestown settlers did is termed “survival cannibalism”. This is different, and still is accepted as a necessity, as long as the situation is dire and the “victims” are dead. This practice differs from gustatory cannibalism, when you eat humans because you like the taste or from ritual cannibalism during which people must eat part of their dead relative or leader. Note that the first prion disease (Kuru) was first recognized through its appearance after ritual cannibalism in Papua New Guinea in the mid-20th century.
At the time the Jamestown episode occurred, survival cannibalism was a (usually) unspoken event at sea when starving sailors, becalmed for weeks or months, resorted to it as a last resort. This practice exists even in modern times, with the Andean plane crash survivors being the best-known example.
So, let’s not look aghast at our forbears for surviving any way they could, and using a technique that some people in dire circumstances still employ today.
(http://bit.ly/10A8525)
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