Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History

by Bill Schutt

Cannibals prefer those who have no spines. —Polish aphorist and poet Stanislaw Lec, Holiday, 1963

“There’s something about bumping into each other that triggers the production of the cannibals.”

general characteristics regarding cannibalism is that immature animals get eaten far more often than adults.

species. In the most famous example of cannibalism-related disease transmission, the Fore people of New Guinea were nearly driven to extinction as a result of their ritualized consumption of brains and other tissues cut from the bodies of their deceased kin, kin who had themselves been infected by kuru, an incurable and highly transmissible neurological disease.

Goldschmidt’s suggestion (quite correct, it appears) that mutations can result in major changes during early development, and that these can lead to large effects in the adult phenotype.

After their first molt and after the trophic eggs have been consumed, black lace-weaver spiderlings are too large for their mother to care for, though they are in dire need of additional food. In an extreme act of parental care, she calls the babies to her by drumming on their web and presses her body down into the gathering crowd. The ravenous spiderlings swarm over their mother’s body. Then they eat her alive, draining her bodily fluids and leaving behind a husklike corpse.

In some snail species, cannibalistic young transform into vegetarian adults. In one food preference test, hatchlings from an herbivorous snail fed on conspecific eggs exclusively (even when offered lettuce); four-day-old individuals ate equal amounts of eggs and lettuce; and 16-day-old individuals preferred the veggies.

Cichlids, especially the African varieties, are extremely popular with aquarium keepers, as well as connoisseurs of tilapia—the Spam of gourmet fish.

Conspicuously missing from these lighthearted reports is the fact that parents holding a mouthful of eggs usually eat a considerable portion of them, and sometimes the entire brood. 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.

acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus). In this species, two female woodpeckers share a single nest and will even feed and care for each other’s young. But before that occurs, the nestmates may also destroy and consume each other’s eggs if one bird should lay an egg first. Presumably this is because the oldest hatchling would be the most likely to survive. To eliminate this advantage, the birds will keep eating each other’s eggs until they both lay their eggs on the same day, a process that can take weeks.

In France, par exemple, they’re known as prie-dieu and are said to point lost children homeward. The Khoi people of South Africa regard praying mantises as gods, while Arab and Turkish folklore holds that the insects direct their prayers toward Mecca. Always looking on the bright side, Americans once believed that praying mantises blinded people and killed horses,

Slim Newton’s song “Redback on the Toilet Seat” details one such encounter. “There was a redback on the toilet seat when I was there last night—I didn’t see him in the dark but boy I felt his bite.” The song reached #3 on the Australian pop record charts in August 1972, well ahead of artists like The Bee Gees and Elton John.

To stop cannibalism and prevent the loss of their valuable egg-laying hens, farmers routinely clipped off the tip of the bird’s beak, a reportedly painful process. In the 1940s, however, the National Band and Tag Company came up with a far more painless and fashion conscious method to deal with the problem of cannibalistic chickens. Their design team reasoned that if the birds couldn’t see “raw flesh or blood” then they wouldn’t cannibalize each other and so they came up with “Anti-pix”—mini sunglasses equipped with red celluloid lenses and aluminum frames.

The female hyena’s uniquely shaped external sex organs actually gave rise to a myth that these mammals are hermaphrodites. Although this is definitely not the case, the birth process is an extremely painful and dangerous experience for first-timers, and by now you may have guessed the reason. Large, full-term hyena fetuses must pass through the clitoris, which, if things proceed smoothly, causes it to tear open.

The problem was not in the presentation of Amstrup’s hypothesis, but the fact that many of the media reports that followed neglected to mention that cannibalism in polar bears was already known to be a naturally occurring event, with the first published report surfacing in 1897.

stories from non-scientific sources, including a short article by another non-scientist. This one warned of “GRAPHIC PHOTOS” and opened with the line, “Cannibalism is not part of the polar bears’ M.O.” As a result, a valid scientific hypothesis—Global climate change has led to a reduction in Arctic sea ice, and this may be causing increased incidences of cannibalism in polar bears—now takes a back seat to a distorted take on the subject as well as a deceptive but well executed argument by climate change deniers.

“The Grisly Folk,” an influential story written by H. G. Wells

But whether or not these strange savages had tails (and even if they were supported by trained fish and Amazonian girlfriends), plans were soon being formulated to pacify the Caribs, who were now being referred to as Canibs. According to scholars, the transition from Carib to Canib apparently resulted from a mispronunciation, although in light of stories describing locals as having canine faces, I agree with Yale professor Claude Rawson that “Canib” may also be a degenerate form of canis, Latin for “dog.” Eventually canib became the root of “cannibal,” which replaced anthropophagi, the ancient Greek mouthful previously used to describe people-eaters.

Etymology Of cannibal

Unlike his first voyage, which consisted of three ships and 120 men, Columbus’s second visit to the New World had the look of a military occupation force. Accompanying him were 17 ships and nearly 1,500 men, many of them heavily armed. Although he had begun to look at slave raiding as a means to finance his voyages, his prime directive was to find gold—lots of it. To facilitate the collection of what Columbus assumed would be a massive treasure, he levied tribute on those living in regions like El Cibao in what is now the northern part of the Dominican Republic. His orders stated that every male between 14 and 70 years of age was to collect and turn over a substantial measure of gold to his representatives every three months. Those who failed at what quickly became an impossible task had their hands hacked off. Anyone who chose to flee was hunted down—the Spaniards encouraging their vicious war-dogs to tear apart any escapees they could track down.

In 1503, this bloodthirsty new take on the exploration of the New World got a significant boost when the self-proclaimed Admiral of the Ocean Sea received a royal proclamation from Queen Isabella. In it she stated that those locals who did not practice cannibalism should be free from slavery and mistreatment. More significantly, though, she also instructed Columbus and his men about what they could do to them if they were determined to be cannibals: If such cannibals continue to resist and do not wish to admit and receive to their lands the Captains and men who may be on such voyages by my orders nor to hear them in order to be taught our Sacred Catholic Faith and to be in my service and obedience, they may be captured and are taken to these my Kingdoms and Domains and to other parts and places and be sold.

Pope Innocent IV decreed in 1510 that not only was cannibalism a sin, but that Christians were perfectly justified in doling out punishment for cannibalism through force of arms. What happened next was as predictable as it was terrible. On islands where no cannibalism had been reported previously, man-eating was suddenly determined to be a popular practice.

In the end, tall tales, especially those with bestial or cannibalistic angles, effectively dehumanized the islanders. Not only did this serve to justify Spain’s rapidly evolving slave-raiding agenda, but it also established a mindset toward the locals that came to resemble pest control. Leaving behind neither pyramids nor stone glyphs, the indigenous cultures of the Caribbean have all but disappeared.

In his 1557 book, True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America, Stadin, who reportedly spent a year in captivity before escaping, described raids in which the Tupinambá killed and ate everyone they captured (except, apparently, him).

incident of starvation-related exocannibalism was the Chichi Jima Incident, in which Lt. Gen. Yoshio Tachibana ordered his starving men on the island of Chichi Jima to execute a group of downed American airmen who had been captured after carrying out a bombing raid. Medical orderlies were then instructed to cut the livers from the bodies, and the organs were cooked and served to the senior staff. Tachibana and several others were arrested after the war, but since cannibalism was not listed as a war crime, they were actually convicted and hanged for preventing the honorable burial of the prisoners the officer and his men had eaten.

an American submarine had recovered one of the nine downed fliers, thus saving him from a similar fate at the hands of the starving Japanese. The lucky man’s name was Lt. George H. W. Bush.

“Wari’ are keenly aware that prolonged grieving makes it hard for mourners to get on with their lives.” With the corpse being the single most powerful reminder of the deceased, the Wari’ believed that consuming the body eradicates it once and for all. Beliefs or not, though, they were forced by missionaries and government officials to abandon their funerary rites and to bury their dead in what these strangers believed to be the civilized manner. Conklin said that this was a ritual the Wari’ found to be particularly repellent, since they considered the ground “cold, wet and polluting” and that “to leave a loved one’s body to rot in the dirt was disrespectful and degrading to the dead and heart-wrenching for those who mourned them.”

Sir Walter Raleigh wrote about some indigenous peoples having their heads located within their chests and their feet pointing backwards, the latter a characteristic that made them “very difficult to track.”

Eat Thy Neighbor, authors Daniel Diehl and Mark Donnelly

when a HHRD dog detects the scent of decomposed human remains, it responds with a trained action (like sitting) called an alert.

their hunger-wracked bodies would have begun to consume themselves. At first, carbohydrates stored in the liver and muscles would have been broken down into energy-rich sugars. Fat, an energy-packed connective tissue (which also functions as an insulator and shock absorber in places like joints and around organs like the kidneys), would have been metabolized next. Depending on the individual, these fat stores could have lasted weeks or even months. Finally, proteins, the primary structural components of muscles and organs, would have been broken down into their chemical components, amino acids.

The biochemical explanation of starvation

The Cannibal Within, Lewis Petrinovich

As rumors of cannibalism swept the city, so too did reports of kidnappings. It was said that children were being seized off the streets “because their flesh was so much more tender.” Women were apparently a popular second choice because of the extra fat they carried. “In the worst period of the siege,” a survivor noted, “Leningrad was in the power of the cannibals.”

According to numerous survivor accounts, meat patties made from ground-up human flesh were being sold as early as November 1941.

After dynamiting the frozen ground, “[the men] noticed as they piled the corpses into mass graves that pieces were missing, usually the fat thighs or arms or shoulders.” The bodies of women with their breasts or buttocks cut off were found, as were severed legs with the meat cut away. In other instances, only the heads of the deceased were found. People were arrested for possessing body parts or the corpses of unrelated children.

In 2004, the official reports made right after the war by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) were released.24 They revealed that approximately 2,000 Leningraders had been arrested for cannibalism during the siege (many of them executed on the spot).

in a demonstration that the crew of the Peggy had lost none of its well-honed survival skills, they tossed their mate’s body overboard, fearful of the harmful effects of consuming a crazy man.

Because uncooked bones would not have been preserved in the acidic soil of the conifer-dense Sierras, there would be no human bones for archaeologists to uncover. Therefore, the absence of calcined human bones from the Meadow Hearth only proves that human and animal bodies were not processed in the same way.

Reay Tannahill, a British historian who wrote both fiction and nonfiction, was perhaps best known for her books Food in History and Sex in History. In 1975 she wrote Flesh and Blood, the first scholarly study of cannibalism accessible to the general public.

Herodotus was also the first writer to document the practice of drawing lots during crises, with the person holding the short straw killed and eaten by his starving comrades.

According to Herodotus, among their many strange customs, the Scythians enjoyed smoking marijuana and eating their enemies.

instead of gobbling down the old woman whole (so that she can later emerge, Jonah-like, from the wolf’s bisected belly), the werewolf murders the old woman and cuts her up—storing pieces of Granny meat in the cupboard, along with a bottle of her blood. When Red Riding Hood arrives, the creature directs her to the cabinet, saying, “Take some of the meat which is inside and the bottle of wine on the shelf.” After unknowingly eating her own grandmother and drinking her blood, Red strips and the wolf tosses her clothes into the fire (“You won’t be needing those anymore,” he tells her). She then gets into bed with the hirsute granny, and after a famous bit of dialogue, Red escapes after convincing the creature that she needs to go outside for a pee

Original "Red Riding Hood"

Margaret Mead (1901–1978), who was famously quoted about some of the Pacific Islanders she was studying, “The natives are superficially agreeable but they go in for cannibalism, headhunting, infanticide, incest, avoidance and joking relationships, and biting lice in half with their teeth.”

I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation, from what I have been told, except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practices; for indeed it seems that we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and pattern of opinions and customs of the country we live in. — Michel de Montaigne, Of Cannibals, 1580

during a war between the states of Ch’u and Sung in 594 BCE and occurred in the Sung capital city. It was also notable because it was apparently the first time that starving Chinese began exchanging one another’s children, so that they could be consumed by non-relatives—a practice made permissible by an imperial edict in 205 BCE.

The greatest number of cannibalism-related deaths in China came as a direct result of Mao Zedong’s “The Great Leap Forward” (1958–1961), a disastrous attempt at utopian engineering.

author Key Ray Chong provided a list of circumstances that might lead to an act of learned cannibalism. These were “hate, love, loyalty, filial piety, desire for human flesh as a delicacy, punishment, war, belief in the medical benefits of cannibalism, profit, insanity, coercion, religion, and superstition.” Some of these, Chong asserted, were uniquely Chinese.

Key Ray Chong devoted a 13-page chapter to “Methods of Cooking Human Flesh” with a subheading entitled “Baking, Roasting, Broiling, Smoke-drying, and Sun-drying.” And rather than an emergency ration consumed as a last resort, there are many reports of exotic human-based dishes prepared for royalty and upper-class citizens.

Another of Mao’s brainstorms led to war being declared on sparrows, with the subsequent success of farmers’ efforts reflected by a concurrent increase in crop-munching insect populations.

Since Galen believed that blood was the most important of the humors, bloodletting, usually initiated with a blade called a lancet, was prescribed to treat everything from fever and headaches to menstruation. Some of this blood, though, ended up back in the patient, where it was consumed to treat epilepsy. So 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.

Richard Sugg, author of the 2011 book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine