Cannibals just trying to diet ?

SPDUB

New study says if you are into a bit of cannibalism you aren't going to get fat

So anyone up for the cannibal diet ?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/counting-calories-of-going-cannibal-on-a-paleo-diet-human-flesh-is-just-meh/

By rough estimates, eating all the skeletal flesh off a human—not including the organs—would provide about 32,376 calories. An optimally sized hunting group of 25 male Neanderthals or Pleistocene adults (anatomically modern human) could get about a meal out of that. But if the same group tracked down a boar or cow—which are less cunning and maybe easier to hunt—they’d have three days' worth of meals out of the skeletal flesh. The findings appear Thursday in Scientific Reports.

ScumLord

I think they were just ruling out cannibalism being about food, which kind of matches up with cannibals still around today. It has nothing to do with nutrition and food and everything to do with rituals and attempts to control disease. Modern cannibals eat people that they think are possessed and they think eating them will cure their eternal soul. They don't even consider the person they're eating to be human anymore so they don't see it as cannibalism.

Humans had all sorts of macabre rituals back then like digging up dead bodies and removing the head to keep in the sitting room, so they could still be close to that loved one.

biko

Only Uruguayan rugby players eat people for food. And even then not always

King George VI

I reckon Serena Williams' legs are tasty as fúck.

Mr McBoatface

biko wrote: »

Only Uruguayan rugby players eat people for food. And even then not always

Argentinian ?

Wibbs

ScumLord wrote: »

I think they were just ruling out cannibalism being about food,

Which they failed to do. A good example of too many so called studies that get traction these days. It's not an either/or question for a start. Something they seem to have missed. There would be quite different external circumstances at play too. EG if we find cannibalised* human bones in an era where the climate was mild, game plentiful and evidence for undernourishment low(teeth are good markers for this), then you could hypothesise that it wasn't so likely as a food source. In an era of extreme glacial hardship and evidence of periods of starvation then it's more likely another food option, maybe from bodies felled by intense competition fights for local dwindling resources.

Secondly, while 32,000 calories may not be much for 25 grown men, it seems Neandertals lived in smaller family sized groups(we were different on that score), where such a calorie source could easily mean the difference between life and death among such a group.




*defleshed doesn't mean cannibalism as a given. It may well have been a ritual like a "sky burial".

The_Valeyard

Would eating your own snots make you a cannibal? Or just disgusting.

Cannibalism, or at least stripping a corpse of it's meat leaves very particular de-fleshing marks on the skeleton and there are very few examples of what might be cannibalism in the fossil record, and those that do exist are assumed to be either cultural practice or episodes of starvation, as mentioned in that article.

The point seems to be to compare the calories available from a human vs various animals, worded to spark controversy.

Danny Vendramini, a theatre director who now describes himself as an evolutionary detective, published a book claiming that Neanderthals were in fact a cat-eyed, black furred, aggressive and cannibalistic species of humans who preyed on homosapiens and killed and ate them on a regular basis. Somehow leaving just a smattering of bones bearing the marks of de-fleshing. He's pretty much on his own with this lark.

It's a theory with no real merit behind it and there are few people who would propose that cannibalism was anything other than an infrequent and culturally motivated practice or a last resort in starvation scenarios.

Esel

What's the definition of trust?

















Getting a blowjob from a cannibal.

Capt'n Midnight

Cannibalism carries two big risks.

First is that your prey has the same capabilities you have. So without trickery or numerical advantage it's an even match and going 50:50 every meal isn't good odds.

Second is that you get a feedback loop. That's how Kuru is transmitted. It's a 100% fatal disease. But you only catch it from eating infected human brains, and incubation time can be year and years so you don't turn into a zombie anytime soon.