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Basically, the party line was that cannibalism, when it did occur, was either the result of starvation or the stresses related to captive conditions.
A fair assumption to make, I suppose.
Immature animals get eaten more often than adults; 2) Many animals, particularly invertebrates, do not recognize individuals of their own kind, especially eggs and immature stages, which are simply regarded as a food source; 3) Females are more often cannibalistic than males; 4) Cannibalism increases with hunger and a concurrent decrease in alternative forms of nutrition; and 5) Cannibalism is often directly related to the degree of overcrowding in a given population.
Also destined for the digital equivalent of the cutting room floor are shots showing male cichlids fertilizing the eggs in the females’ mouths, always a difficult topic to explain during family TV time.
“The supposed aggressiveness of the female spider toward the male is largely a myth,” said spider expert Rainer Foelix. “When a female is ready for mating, there is little danger for the male.” Foelix did add that all bets were off if a male mistakenly showed up in the web of a hungry female.
Ronald Chase believes that Cupid, the Roman version of the Ancient Greek god Eros, had his origin in land snails and their love darts.
Biological nomenclature is full of misleading scientific names. Vampyressa, Vampyrodes, Vampyrops and Vampyrum are all bat genera, but none of them feed on blood. There are also bad puns, like Apopyllus now (a sac spider) and Ittibittium (a tiny mollusk), as well as rude sounding names, like Pinus rigida (the pitch pine) and Enema pan (a scarab beetle).
Large, full-term hyena fetuses must pass through the clitoris, which, if things proceed smoothly, causes it to tear open.
The implication is that if animal and human bodies were processed in the same manner, and if the remains were discarded together, it is reasonably certain that cannibalism took place.
“Resistance” and “cannibalism” became synonymous, and anyone acting aggressively toward the Europeans was immediately labeled as a cannibal.
Stannard believes that by the end of the 16th century, the Spanish had been directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of between 60 and 80 million indigenous people in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America. Even if one were to discount the millions of deaths resulting from diseases, this would still make the Spanish conquest of the New World the greatest act of genocide in recorded history.
Other host-conspiracy buffs suggested that the villains were using the Savior’s blood to rid themselves of the foetor Judaicus (“Jewish stink”).
T’ao Tsung-yi, a writer during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), wrote that “children’s meat was the best food of all in taste” followed by women and then men.
popular was this practice that public executions routinely found epileptics standing close by, cup in hand, ready to quaff their share of the red stuff.
Perhaps the most famous example of European medicinal cannibalism was the curious custom of pulverizing mummies to produce a substance known as mumia.
“The main thing that we found during our studies turned out to be an opiate-enhancing property,” Kristal said. He explained that placenta consumption by new rat moms appeared to increase the effectiveness of natural pain-relieving substances (opioid peptides) produced by the body.
Briefly, the central nervous system, pituitary gland, digestive tract, and other organs secrete pain-blocking peptides like endorphins, enkephalins, and dynorphins, which have been used to explain terms like “runner’s high” and “second wind,” as well as the phenomenon in which gravely wounded individuals report feeling little or no pain.
The term “long pig” has become the most popular reference point to describe the supposed porklike taste of human flesh. The oldest reference I could find comes from a letter written by Rev. John Watsford in 1847, describing the practice of ritual cannibalism practiced by the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands, a group of approximately 15 Polynesian islands located around 850 miles northeast of Tahiti. But while the letter does represent the translation of a Polynesian term for the use of human flesh as food, there is no real mention of how it tasted.
It tasted very much like the chicken gizzards we’d fried up as college students. “It’s very good,” I told the assembled Rembis clan and they responded with a chorus of moans, groans, and giggles.
They settled on “the laughing death” and alternately, “laughing sickness,” at a time when being called “politically correct” meant you had voted for the guy who won.
Generally, the Fore believed that it was better to be consumed by your loved ones than by maggots and, that by eating their dead, relatives could express their grief and love, receive blessings, and insure the passage of the departed to kwelanandamundi, the land of the dead. For these reasons, transumption was the funerary practice favored by the Fore.
According to the accounts obtained by Whitfield’s team, the Fore ate everything, including reproductive organs and feces scraped from the intestines.
He coined the name “prion” (pronounced “PREE-on”) to describe an aberrant form of protein, which he claimed was responsible for the suite of neurodegenerative disorders known as Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). Prusiner claimed that, unlike viruses, prions were not biological entities, but they could be infectious—transmitted orally or through contact with infected material. They could also be inherited or spontaneous in origin.
But although it’s unclear to me the extent to which atavistic urges are involved, there is no doubt that we are, and seemingly have always been, fascinated by cannibalism. We need look no further than the popularity of novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Our language is filled with cannibal references: a woman who uses men for sex is a man-eater, while in the 1920s and 1930s a cannibal was “an older homosexual tramp who traveled with a young boy.” To “eat someone” is a popular term for performing oral sex.
Since cannibalism is a completely normal response to severe stress, especially during times of famine and warfare, how much of a surprise would it be if the butchery of humans for food becomes commonplace in drought-ridden and overpopulated regions of the near-future Earth? According to sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, famine-related cannibalism occurred 11 times in Europe between 793 CE and 1317 CE, as well as in “ancient Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, Persia, India, China and Japan.”
History would suggest that it was more normal than what we'd all be comfortable (admitting).
