More recently, the digestive action of a healthy adult male obliterated everything but 28 bones (out of 131) belonging to a segmented shrew swallowed without chewing. (Debunking Fletcher wasn’t the intent. The study served as a caution to archaeologists who draw conclusions about human and animal diets based on the skeletal remains of prey items.) The shrew, but not the person who ate it, was thanked in the acknowledgments, leading me to suspect that the paper’s lead author, Peter Stahl, had done the deed. He confirmed this, adding that it went down with the help of “a little bit of spaghetti
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