Ken Springer
It’s what’s for dinner, and I don’t mean beef
A brief history of cannibalism
A husband says to his wife, “It’s time to eat, Karen,” or, did he say, “It’s time to eat Karen.” Punctuation matters!
Cannibalism: For some, this will be a repugnant, possibly disturbing topic, but humans eating other humans, for reasons that we’ll discuss in some detail, is a reality of the human condition. Considered taboo in most advanced societies, the practice extends back tens of thousands of years, according to archaeological evidence.
Few of us have ever been in the circumstance of having to eat a fellow human being to stay alive. However, some of us have considered what we would do if we found ourselves in a situation where eating a deceased person was necessary for survival. The truth is that we cannot know how we would respond. In the annals of history, few individuals in such a situation, in which it is eat human flesh or die, chose to die.
Before we venture into the many examples of voluntary Cannibalism, or, if you prefer, anthropophagy, it is essential to examine the many forms of Cannibalism.
Endocannibalism is when humans eat the flesh of those within their own community or tribe; whereas exocannibalism is eating the flesh of outsiders or enemies. These two types of Cannibalism exemplify that found among tribes and places such as Papua, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, where Cannibalism is a facet of mourning and war, and has been documented in the 21st Century. Similar forms of ritualistic Cannibalism, albeit extinct now, are found among the M?ori of New Zealand and Fiji.
In the southern Americas, we see the Aztecs and Wari practicing endocannibalism as rituals of sacrifice and, alternatively, as a sign of respect by consuming dead relatives.
In North America, the Iroquois would often consume their enemies to terrorize them. Cannibalism in North America is not limited to the Iroquois; archaeological evidence supports the suggestion that the Ancestral Puebloans practiced ritual endocannibalism.
Cannibalism in Asia and Africa was driven by many of the same reasons as that found in the Americas. The feared headhunters of Borneo may have shrunk the heads of victims, but the meat du jour was the rest of the body, while the Batak of Sumatra is reputed to have dined on executed criminals.
Moving on to prehistoric Europe, Cannibalism there has at least one unique twist. Archeologists have found evidence in the UK’s Gough’s Cave that refined butchering of humans was part of funerary rites. Neanderthals, our hominin cousins, likely cannibalized to survive. As late as the 17th Century, some medical practitioners in Europe advised the consumption of particular body parts as medicine.
The incidence of ritualistic Cannibalism is quite rare today, due in large part to the globalization of the planet. Now, let’s move on to other forms of Cannibalism, starting with survival-driven Cannibalism.
Probably, the most famous case of survival cannibalism in the U.S. is that of the Donner Party in 1846 and 1847. Along with thousands of other emigrants heading west to California, where the streets were said to be paved with gold, a presumption that was purely metaphorical, the Donner party, made up of families from Independence, Missouri, lined up their wagons and headed west for a brighter future.
It was their great misfortune to meet a man named Lansford Hastings, who convinced them not to take the usual route through the Sierra Nevada Mountains into California, but to take instead a shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff. What Hastings didn’t reveal to these trusting pioneers was that he had only been on parts of this trail and only on horseback, rather than in wagons pulled by horses and oxen.
The Donner Party parted from the other wagon trains and headed up into the Sierra Nevadas. In early November, the heaviest snowfall ever recorded at that time hit the mountains, causing avalanches and snow as deep as 20 feet, bringing any forward movement to a complete stop. The Donner Party was totally stranded with little hope of rescue, given the conditions.
Of the 81 men, women, and children stranded in two locations on Truckee Lake, only 47 were eventually rescued when a small volunteer party, called the “Forlorn Hope,” reached California and summoned help that took several months to reach the remaining people at Truckee. During this time of desperate starvation, the emigrants ate hides, bark, belts, and, eventually, they resorted to eating their dead.
Author’s Interjection: In understanding why humans turn to Cannibalism of the dead in desperate situations like that of the Donner Party, one must understand how starvation works physiologically. You can go up to two months without eating if you have access to water.
When your body has exhausted its energy from foodstuffs, it begins to get its nutrition from the liver, muscles, and fat and other organs, literally cannibalizing itself before transpiring. One hale and hearty rugby player in the next segment of this article dwindled to 50 pounds before dying.
In our next segment, we will examine the tragic crash of Uruguayan Flight 571, on October 13, 1972, with 45 people on board, which was carrying rugby players from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Santiago, Chile, for a match.
Unfortunately, the Fairchild FH-227D was vastly underpowered to cross the 25,000-foot peaks and may have exceeded its load limits. Add to that the fact that the pilots scuttled the original flight plan and, consequently, lost their bearings, flying directly into the heart of the mountains.
Attempting to fly through a pass, the plane hit solid rock, tearing the plane apart. The fuselage bobsledded down a steep glacier until it came to a stop. The pilot died upon impact, and the copilot died shortly thereafter. Altogether, twelve people died in the crash.
The survivors used the fuselage as shelter and futilely searched for food, finding only a few chocolate bars. If their predicament wasn’t dire enough, a massive avalanche buried the fuselage under several meters of heavy snow, essentially entombing the survivors for several days until they could dig their way out.
Unknown to them at the time, but assumed by the survivors, search efforts were called off after eight days.
The consumption of the dead victims began approximately four days after the crash, starting with the pilots. It wasn’t an easy decision to cannibalize their comrades; they discussed it among themselves before they crossed that line. Remember, Cannibalism, as far as a cultural taboo, was right up there with bestiality and incest, and there were religious implications.
As a desperate measure, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa left the remaining survivors behind and set off on a treacherous 10-day hike through the mountains to find help. The party dropped into a deep valley where they found signs of humans and soon came across a gaucho on horseback who summoned help, leading to the rescue of the remaining 14 survivors.
Initially, the media covered the story as a miracle, but soon the same media began focusing on Cannibalism. This was a blow to the survivors after the hell they had endured.
I take issue with how the Uruguayan media treated the survivors in the aftermath of the crash. The survivors were publicly and privately criticized for eating the corpses of their dead teammates. It took a Catholic priest to step forward and openly tell the survivors that they had done nothing wrong to halt the lambasting of the victims.
As for the critics, I can’t help but believe that if it were one of their children who was stranded and dying in the Andes, and that eating the flesh of their deceased comrades would have allowed them to return home alive, their opinion would be vastly different. Some of those who knew they were about to die encouraged their starving friends to eat them.
The will to live is primal in all living things, and in humans, takes precedence over usual qualms. Exceptions to this rule include cases where heroics involve giving one’s life to save another. We cannot possibly know, from our armchair deliberations, how we would react in a dire situation until we are confronted with it.
OK, let’s move on to other forms of anthropophagy unrelated to survival. If the gruesome description of a crime scene is offensive to you, read no further.
On July 22, 1991, Milwaukee Police entered the apartment of Jeffrey Dahmer. To their horror, police found four severed heads of young men, seven skulls, and other body parts in the refrigerator and freezer, as well as three partially dissolved torsos in a 50-gallon tank of acid.
As they parsed through items in the putrid apartment, the police found saws and knives as well as photos of the victims, both alive and during their dismemberment: Dahmer’s apartment was, as the police report said, a killing factory.
Dahmer was a serial killer, a sexual predator, a necrophiliac, a laundry list of other psychological disorders, and a cannibal. Although very rare, there have been several thousand of this type of serial killer worldwide.
Let’s now move away from the darkness of the Dahmer story and move on to a type of Cannibalism only somewhat less disturbing: famine-induced Cannibalism.
China, particularly the People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong’s failed policy known as the Great Leap Forward, has endured several severe famines, the most notable being the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. Collectivization of farms led to poor harvests for several years, leaving millions of Chinese in a state of famine; over 50 million died in the three-year famine.
Eventually, word got out that there was rampant Cannibalism, but only of the deceased. I met an older gentleman in a small mountain village in Zhejiang Province in 1988. Among some of the famine stories he told me was one about a mother, unable to feed her young child, would cut strips of flesh from her own arms, stomach, and thighs to feed her youngster.
This type of behavior is commonly referred to as auto-cannibalism. It is generally associated with a mental condition in which people inflict damage on themselves as a way of coping with emotional stress.
The old Soviet Union under Stalin was responsible for at least two famines in the 20th Century. What sets the famine of 1932-1933, called Holodomor, apart from that of China and North Korea is that it was likely premeditated to crush Ukraine, with millions dying. (History really does repeat itself, eh?) Stalin, a ruthless autocrat, was more than willing to let his own people starve to death to punish an enemy.
Finally, I’m sure you’re all fed up with the topic of Cannibalism about now, so to speak. But, I am tentatively going to explore one more aspect of eating human flesh that most stories avoid, so please don’t tar and feather me in response.
I have heard this discussed on several occasions; what does human flesh taste like? And don’t immediately think of the cliched “chicken.” It is variously described as tasting like pork or veal, only sweeter; cannibals of the Fiji Islands call human meat “puaka balava,” meaning long pig.
“Oink”
Ken Springer
Ken1949bongo@gmail.com
