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There's Only So Many Ways to Skin a Human - Ep 163
3.1k Plays1 year ago
On this episode of A Life in Ruins Podcast, Connor and Carlton dive deep into the topic of cannibalism in the past and present. They start out talking about what prompted them to dive down this rabbit hole. They define the terms associated with cannibalism and then discuss the earliest known evidence of cannibalism in the archaeological record. They then detail other examples of cannibalism in time and end the episode asking the important question “Is drinking blood considered cannibalism?”.
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Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/ruins/163
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MHuLH5pztT0
Links
- Evidence of Neanderthal Cannibalism Found in Spanish Cave
- Oumph! Plant Based Human Meat
- Oumph! presents: The Human Meat Plant Based Burger Advertisement
Literature Recommendations
- Early Pleistocene cut marked hominin fossil from Koobi Fora, Kenya by Pobiner et al
- Were Neanderthals responsible for their own extinction? by Jordi Agustí and Xavier Rubio-Campillo
- Archaeological Evidence for Cannibalism in Prehistoric Western Europe: from Homo antecessor to the Bronze Age by Palmira Saladié & Antonio Rodríguez-Hidalgo
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 163
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Welcome to Episode 163 of the Life and Friends Podcast, where we investigate the careers and research of those living life
Humorous Anecdotes about David
00:00:13
Speaker
and friends. I'm your host, Carlton Shill, Chief Gover, and I'm joined by my co-host, Connor Johnin. Connor, where's David? David is fighting a battle with a fan right now, which he's currently losing. The fan isn't even moving, but it's still winning.
00:00:30
Speaker
That's why it's winning because it's not on, it's not working. So David has, has taken his boss and is now in Laramie, Wyoming and living on Connor's curb. Land. My God damn land. Oh, did he park in the back? No, just kidding.
00:00:46
Speaker
No, it's public land technically. I just like to think of him as like a peon, you know, paying tribute to me. It's funny because I bet it's in the same place that I remember it being during Craig's wedding. It's not there currently, but it's on its way there.
Paleoanthropology and Neanderthal Cannibalism
00:01:02
Speaker
So, yeah, he's dealing with that. He'll hop on one of these episodes in the near future. But for now, on this lovely episode of 163, Carlton has been on a kick, you could say. I think you can kind of pick it up, seeing as like some of the stuff we talked about in our previous episodes. There's been a lot of, it's been pretty heavy paleo anthem.
00:01:24
Speaker
oldest burials. What else did we talk about? We talked about Naledi. I think that was the same episode, but we've talked kind of about that and we haven't really done that before in the past in our episodes because we are not paleoanthropologists. But Carlton sent an article today that really kind of spiraled us down and really put us in
00:01:47
Speaker
Carlton sent us an article today that sent us down a rabbit hole on a topic that we are not super familiar with, but we're interested in. And because we needed to record an episode today, I think you sent the article today just to unveil for folks how organized we are. You sent the article today, and then in the last 30 minutes, we made an outline
00:02:10
Speaker
Is that too much information? I think that sums up what happened. No, well I sent the article yesterday because like we were supposed to record yesterday. Oh, you said yesterday. So what did I record about? So like recently I'd just been going on like archeology news sites and like what interests me. And so we talked about, I haven't done paleoanthropology in a bit.
00:02:27
Speaker
I really do like paleoanthropology. We clearly don't know the goddamn fossils because we go over this every time, but like we did last time before the Dr. Koenig episode where we were like, let's take a topic. We did the same type of thing with that bow, the evidence for Neanderthals having the bow. We did that whole thing too. We know
00:02:48
Speaker
the human behavior and activity, how you find the archaeological record. And it's really interesting, especially when we're talking about human ancestors, when do we see these behaviors first began and how do we see them today? So I came across this article in Heritage Daily. In
Defining and Contextualizing Cannibalism
00:03:06
Speaker
the archaeology section, it is titled Evidence of Neanderthal Cannibalism Found in Spain.
00:03:11
Speaker
And I remembered in University of Wyoming when we were doing the bio-anth theory course that the topic of cannibalism came up with Neanderthals. I was like, well, let's just talk about cannibalism. And really quickly, we started going down some really fucking crazy rabbit holes because there's a lot more evidence for cannibalism, not only just in Neanderthals, but atomic and modern humans, and homo-antecessor, that cannibalism.
00:03:36
Speaker
It's present. And then so, like, as you've heard me, Connor and David bitch about, like, how little evidence there is for shit in paleoanthropology, the fact that there's so much evidence of cannibalism is kind of startling, because it's like, we don't have that many fossils. And they're like, here's a dozen sites where people are definitely cut the fuck up. And it's like, whoa, OK. And what does this mean? And how do we see it today? And then also, as we were going through it, like, a recent article came out, like, today, and this is June 26th.
00:04:04
Speaker
It was co-authored by one from a professor at Colorado State University, Conner's alma mater. It just so happened that there was like, oh shit, there's more evidence of
00:04:16
Speaker
that article is titled A Case of Cannibalism. Smithsonian CSE researchers uncover how human relatives butchered one another 1.45 million years ago. Cannibalism is hot right now. Let's just say that. Cannibalism is hot in the news. I think, in my understanding of it, the common idea behind cannibalism is that we don't really see it until later.
00:04:37
Speaker
We're not seeing it with Neanderthals. We're not seeing it with Homo erectus. I think that's the common thing. You get really good evidence later in time that people are eating each other, obviously, with ethnologists and cultural anthropologists going out and studying people. You have evidence of cannibalism. You might have earlier stuff in Mesa Verde.
00:04:56
Speaker
It's rare to push it back, and I think obviously that has something to do with the limited record we are having, the limited sample size, et cetera. But it's exciting and interesting to get into this, and we'll see if this is kind of like challenging the common narrative about this. But I think we're going to start off because we don't always do this, but, you know, we are going to do something. We're going to define terms. We've got to define some
Historical Perceptions of Cannibalism
00:05:21
Speaker
shit.
00:05:21
Speaker
We're going to define some terms right now. Get your pencils ready and write this stuff down. Exactly. The first one we've got is cannibalism. Cannibalism is the cultural practice of eating human flesh.
00:05:37
Speaker
Yeah. So basically cannibalism is always practiced in groups and it's considered ritual. It's a ritual and social institution. So it is a cultural practice. So like in, in cannibalistic societies, cannibalism is a norm and it's not odd like it is in today's societies. Then we have ex-carnation.
00:05:55
Speaker
An incarnation refers to the practice of removing the flesh and organs of the dead before burial. Now, this is going to be critical as we talk about this evidence and how people are talking about cannibalism, especially in the past. So we have cannibalism, group practice of eating the dead, of eating human flesh.
00:06:12
Speaker
ex-carnation, the practice of de-fleshing and de-organing bodies before they're interred. No eating. There's zero eating in ex-carnation. And then we have... Oh, fuck.
00:06:31
Speaker
and throw po-phagee and throw po-phagee and throw po-phagee. Yeah. And throw po-phagee. I hate that. That middle piece. I can't do anthro po-phagee and anthro po-phagee. I'm sounding, I'm sounding like an idiot because like that's my redneck roots. This is how I have to say it or to pronounce it. Oh geez. What did I just do with that? What does anthro pay?
00:06:56
Speaker
anthropophagees. That's that's it's not so cannibalism is like the ritual and social practice of it anthropophagy is when it happens more incidentally or is just the act of eating human flesh. Yeah so that's it it's not a social institution or a ritual it is like one person
00:07:17
Speaker
eating human flesh within a society. So like Hannibal the Cannibal is actually Hannibal, the anthropophagist, or like the Donner party, like evidence of cannibalism today where it's like a bunch of people stranded out in the woods, all they, and like they have to resort to eating each other to survive. So think of, didn't we do a whole whaling episode too about this recently-ish? I think fairly recently. I don't know if we talked about cannibalism, but there were, I'm going to throw Alfred Packeter in there too, because Colorado,
00:07:47
Speaker
Oh yeah. And that is the name of the dining hall in Boulder. Oh really? Yeah. So actually this is kind of funny. So there was, there was a, they, when they redid the whole dining hall, they had a contest of who, what they should name it. And the South Park guys who are CU Boulder alums, they're the ones that put Alfred Packer's name up. So it's the Alfred Packer cafeteria named after, she's named after fucking Anthro Pofange.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, well, and they also, they wrote a whole, I think their first thing they actually wrote together was an Alfred Packard musical. So there's a whole musical that they wrote and was performed about Alfred Packard, which is something I want to watch.
00:08:28
Speaker
So, normally today when we talk about cannibals, we're actually talking about anthropophagists, because cannibals, that is a group social activity. So, some of those groups that are in the Malaysian islands, I think that Rockefeller kid got eaten by cannibals.
00:08:46
Speaker
Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I do want to throw two other terms in there. They're not going to be as important to what we're talking about today, but it's, it's good to know. I guess we are a learning podcast or a teaching podcast. I don't, that's debatable sometimes, but, uh,
Cut Marks and Evidence from Kubifora
00:09:07
Speaker
In this case, there's two different types of cannibalism in reference to people or in-group cannibalism and out-of-group cannibalism. So exocannibalism is when you take victims or take people from other groups or enemies that are killed in combat or prisoners of war and eat them with the aim being to take revenge or assimilate such virtues as their strength or courage. So this is found in the Fiji Islands. Also in Wyoming.
00:09:36
Speaker
You know, have you ever been by Crowhart Butte? No. Out near Lander? So there's this Butte out in the Wind River Reservation. It's close to Lander. And it was a site, so like Shoshone's, hashtag Team Shoshone's, versus Crow's. Shoshone Chief Brave, I don't know. A Shoshone warrior killed a Crow, took out his heart, climbed up Crow's Butte and ate it while the battle was raging. That's how it's got the name Crowhart and like the Crow's dipped out.
00:10:05
Speaker
If we had a soundboard clip for That's So Metal, that's where it would be right there. We don't have it. Oh, here it is. According to legend, following a five-day battle for rights to the hunting grounds in the Wind River Range, Chief Washakie of the Shoshone and Chief Big Robber of the Crow agreed to a duel, with the winner gaining the rights to the Wind River hunting grounds. Chief Washakie eventually prevailed, but he was so impressed with the courage of his opponent that rather than scalp him, he instead cut out his heart and placed it at the end of his lance.
00:10:31
Speaker
Oh, I thought he ate it. I mean, it's a legend anyways. I like my version. He got up top and ate it. Yeah. All right. And there's also endocantalism, which is the ritual consumption of the deceased from one's own social group. And that in some cases is to guarantee that the dead person's spirit would remain amongst the living.
00:10:50
Speaker
kind of in order to perpetuate their presence or maintain continuity between life and death. This is also called funerary cannibalism. So there is, there's kind of a big study and there's a diversity of cannibalism or anthropophagy or, you know, all the, fuck that word, fuck that word.
00:11:08
Speaker
Can we just call it, uh, can we just call it Alfred Packer? You can't put a P in the middle of a word and then put a second P right after it and make it a pH too. God damn English is stupid. What is called Donnering. Yeah. Donnering. I like that.
00:11:31
Speaker
So yeah, so that's kind of the definitions from there. And this neanderthal that was found in the Spanish cave has, there was, they found a neanderthal, juvenile, skull, fragments of a collarbone, et cetera. And there were several cut marks kind of indicating that they were processed by other neanderthals or possibly eaten by
00:11:55
Speaker
their relatives. And this is something I think we can bring up now or we can talk about later, but the evidence for cannibalism in the past usually is one thing and one thing only, and that's cut marks, right? Yeah. Everyone assumes that there's cut marks, so that equals cannibalism, and that's kind of been the common
00:12:20
Speaker
just the common thought that there isn't maybe not deflashing, there might not be ex-carnation or anything like that. It's always jumped to cannibalism as like the first explanation for these things.
00:12:31
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, I think that's originally like those old school 20th century interpretations, but as we move to the 21st century, like it's definitely got a little bit more complex. That's why I wanted to talk about that ex-carnation is that there's plenty of human burial practices across the globe that come in a variety of ways. So either deflushing intentionally or even like we talked about Skype burials two episodes ago, that's ex-carnation, but right. But when we see cut marks, this is where it can get pretty fun because
00:12:57
Speaker
One thing I really like about zoarchaeology is especially cut mark analysis and how you can tell how intense people are harvesting flesh and species like bison, for example. You can tell by where the cut marks are on the bison bone to figure out what cuts of meat people are procuring.
00:13:18
Speaker
So just like saying, if you go to a butcher at your local grocery store, you can see the cut marks, what pieces of meat they're eating. So you can actually tell like, oh, how intensively are they butchering these animals to get meat? And we see if especially like in the archaic, they're really getting prime cuts of meat because there's so much more bison, they're cutting, running them off cliffs. Whereas we get closer to time, especially during the reservation era where bison are being systematically hunted by United States government or not even hunted, killed.
00:13:44
Speaker
indigenous cultures across the Americas are like intensively trying to take as much meat and oafel off of these animals for nutrients. And so when we look at, as Connor was mentioning, we see cut marks in hominids and that's like, what the fuck? Like, why are they cutting up? And the scissors we talked about in two episodes ago, like we talked about like the first evidence of burial practices, right?
00:14:08
Speaker
is like this, what we're seeing with like Homo antecessor or what's happening at Kubifora, is this actually like an earlier type of ritual practice regarding the dead on this deflection, right? And that's where it gets fun. And that's like, cannibalism is such a hot and heavy topic, especially in today's society. That's why it gets all the heat it does. Cause that, that has so much weight to it. And like for us and Western societies,
00:14:32
Speaker
Cannibalism is a fucking no-no. We don't do that. I mean, that is extraordinarily taboo. You know, I guess like since it's cannibalism isn't, it's not necessarily taboo because it's not a practice, but definitely fucking. Donoring. Yeah. Donoring. That's fucking taboo. Like sometimes it happens like with whalers, it was actually, but I mentioned earlier, I went on a whole podcast thing about Moby Dick. That's where this is all coming from.
00:14:57
Speaker
the story it's based off of. It was actually common for whalers, especially ones that were lost at sea. It was just like, oh yeah, no, you had to do what you do to survive. The captain that was the based Moby Dick off of, when they found him, he had killed his nephew and
00:15:12
Speaker
And when they found him in the fetal position in a boat, sucking on the metatarsals, sucking on his finger bones for Meryl. And they were trying to get him off the boat. And he was trying to protect his nephew's bones that he was eating on. And they're like, oh, yeah, shit happens. They've been lost at sea for like six months. It was a, what else did you do? But if it's cultural practice of whalers, then I guess it's cannibalism. So now we're getting to fun vocab work. I guess cannibalism was fine if there was nothing else left.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And was that the Essex? Is that the... Yeah, the Essex. Yeah, yeah. And the Heart of the Sea is a great book on that that kind of details that. And they have the movie, which is kind of okay. I think that's good. But yeah, yeah. I mean, that's something super interesting, is that in certain cases, it's like excused. It's given, okay. That's like shouldn't happen. Yeah. Well, and I think it's also like, it's an othering for us. So like as Western culture,
00:16:08
Speaker
as people go out and study other things, you think cannibalism only exists in other cultures, like primitive cultures. You kind of associate them with that. And I think you could also put that into the past. So you kind of put them away and you say that, oh, it's just other people. It's not what we do. But there is kind of like a stigma and judgment from us about everyone else in the past. So I think that's where this is coming from.
00:16:36
Speaker
I think on that point, we'll, we'll take a little break and poo and we'll, we'll dive deep into this, uh, early Pleistocene cut marks hominin fossil from Kubifoura, Kenya. Right. Kubifoura. Welcome back to episode one 63 of a life of his podcast. We are talking about humans eating flesh and we had teased that we're going to talk about some cut marks at Kubifoura.
Critique of Academic and Media Portrayals
00:17:01
Speaker
But my question is why aren't they talking about Kubi after? Uh,
00:17:08
Speaker
That's the worst dad joke. Yeah. Send your groans. It's pretty good. I mean, I, when you said it in the interim, I was like, you have to repeat that because it's fucking gold. Yeah. Delivery could work, but also send me all your groans to my Instagram, play them as loud as possible. I appreciate that. You know, you should join that clown college that David did during COVID and that should be your set piece. That'd be good.
00:17:29
Speaker
I should have called it Cloud College, but David really did a stand-up workshop, and he did an online Zoom performance with the comedy seller, like a famous thing. Yeah, like a big name thing. Cloud College is not quite that. That's comedian school, I think. I think it's literally for clouds.
00:17:51
Speaker
But yeah, so I was really looking this up. I realized like a recent science article dropped today and are not science article shit. I have way too many tabs open. Like, like we've gotten to the weeds when it came to
00:18:05
Speaker
this cannibalism stuff, because it's everywhere, dude. It's a hot topic. So it isn't scientific reports, which is published by nature. That's right. And you guys know how we feel about nature. They want us to do the standard spiel. We'll do the airline. It's like, be careful when you read archaeology and nature, because that's how you get sorority.
00:18:30
Speaker
you know, usually it's like a brilliant publication outside of that, but whoever's running the archeology division, I mean, granted they, and I, and I, I love Steve Holland. Like he's a really good guy, but like they drop some highly controversial things. And at the end of the day, it gets the field talking. So I guess they're doing their job because like we talk about it and we reflect on the field a lot. And it spurs a lot of people to action to talk about these hot button topics. So
00:18:53
Speaker
Yeah. And you hope that that creates publishing and stuff to counter those things. And that's what happens. So I don't completely hate it. I don't completely hate it, but I do hate it a little bit just because I think it gets disseminated so much. Then like the larger audience, it misses like the rebuttals and the later publications that are like, nah, fam, this isn't what's going on. So that's my, that's my only beef. You heard it before. We're a broken record, but
00:19:18
Speaker
Hey again. So this is early Pleistocene cut mark, commented fossil from Kubifora, Kenya by Brianna Pobaner et
Cannibalism in Prehistoric Western Europe
00:19:26
Speaker
al. This is a scientific report. So we came across it because the news media is buzzing with it. And of course, like they did with our goddamn horse paper, twisting it. And like Mike Ponte, who's a co-author, one of Connor's former professors at CSU,
00:19:40
Speaker
says like, it's not necessarily cannibalism. He says that like repeatedly. They're like, they're eating each other. And he's like, no, they're not. Um, so I think it's evidence like in the title, they don't say like, they don't come out swinging, saying cannibalism is practice. It's just like, there's a cup mark here.
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah. What does that mean? We don't know. Then they're definitely cut marks. So what they have is one shin bone by a species that they're not quite sure what it is. Originally, it was uncovered by Mary Leakey of the famous Leakey family back in the day. So the bone, the shin bone is 1.4 million years old.
00:20:17
Speaker
It's a left shin bone. It was originally described as Boise eye. And then later it was changed to something else. And nowadays they're like, it's unidentifiable. We know it's genus homo. We know that for sure. It's a bipedal hominid. We don't know which one. And thank God they did that because fuck paleoanthropology trying to identify things. But what they have here, they
00:20:38
Speaker
ultra scan the shit out of this shin bone and they use 3d models of the marks to identify them. And sure as shit, there are multiple vertical and horizontal cut marks on the shin bone parallel, which is really interesting too.
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah. So these definitely aren't marks from carnivores nine or rodents or any sort of bioturbation or which means like basically after the thing's deposited roots or whatever fuck with it. This, they're very much cultural marks made by another hominin and they're towards the, I don't know, skeletal lingo, but they're towards the knee part of the shin bone.
00:21:17
Speaker
I think that's because distal is away from the center of the body. What's the upside? Proximal? Proximal. I think it's the proximal end of the we're probably wrong. Tell us we're wrong. Tell us you're wrong. But yeah, so it's near the knee bone like you would be cutting off the calf almost, right? It looks like it because it's towards
00:21:39
Speaker
the back end. So the calf end, fuck, we really got to go through it. So it's in the back. So it's where your calf would be, right? That's like, when you're doing leg curls, it's that part of the shin bone gets caught on. So it's like in a very, like it's not in the middle of the bone. It's in the back towards the meaty bits. So like they're carving through some bipedal calves.
00:22:01
Speaker
to get there. And that's where it gets, and they're all in like, they're pretty centered in one part of the bone too. And I guess like the verticality and horrors, like they're, they're clearly in the same spot. So it's very much fucking intentional. And that's kind of, I think where they leave it, which is kind of really interesting.
00:22:20
Speaker
that they just say, and they have like a sentence at the end that's like, oh, this could be this, this could be that, but they are, they're really not calling it either or right now, which I have a ton of respect for doing. It's just saying like, this is, this is the evidence they're cut marks. We need more to study to find if this is actually like a ritual practice.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah. And they're very clearly like, listen, there's uncontested evidence for cannibalism with Neanderthals like much later. This is fucking weird. We're not saying it's necessarily cannibalism or anthropophagy. It could be because at this point there's still like several species of genus Homo running around. Maybe it's another genus of, I mean, it has to be right. Like we're the only ones carrying fucking tools. So it could be another group of genus Homo coming in and eating them. Is that cannibalism? I don't,
00:23:09
Speaker
Now we're getting back in the goddamn paleo. Is that so cannibalism then? I guess that's the cons. But I guess that the assumption with that is that they're all humans and they're all of the same species. Or were they just hungry or was that just Sunday dinner? I don't know. What are we going to call it? Right. Like are they, like the Donners, is there something going on where like they can't eat anything else?
00:23:33
Speaker
and they're eating their body who's already dead. I don't know. But it could also be a ritual practice of defleshing their body for burial. We can't leave them here to rot. It's one shin bone. I don't know. Where's the rest of the skeleton?
00:23:50
Speaker
Is there more of the skeleton? I imagine if there's more of the skeleton, they'd be like, nah, there's no more cut marks. Yeah. And it might be just that- Oh, dude, we were fucking right. This fossil specimen is nearly complete proximal tibia with the proximal end, proximal shaft, and mid-shaft present. So we said the right
Modern and Ethical Considerations of Cannibalism
00:24:06
Speaker
words. Yeah, sometimes.
00:24:10
Speaker
Yeah, well, and we'll see. They did they did some other kind of scientific stuff. But when we really are seeing better evidence like this is this is very much a one off.
00:24:22
Speaker
kind of thing. I think we're not really seeing 1.4 million years ago, maybe even 500,000 years ago. We're not really finding good evidence of human bones being deflashed, I guess. Maybe I think there's one in 600,000 years, Homo sapiens bones from Ethiopia. I don't know. I'll have to double check that, but we're going to gloss over that for now and we're going to jump to Neanderthals.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah. So going to like who we know is actually fucking eating each other and it's homo sapiens andrytholensis. And then also anatomically modern humans are doing it too. Like something weird happened 30,000 years ago. So like everyone's kind of doing it, but it's like mostly in Europe and Asia, like central Asia at a time when Neanderthals are kind of on their way out and like initial anatomically modern humans are coming in. So like maybe there's this like, well,
00:25:17
Speaker
There's not many Neanderthals around and they're not having a good time. Maybe it is they're eating each other to fucking survive. And maybe these anatomical modern humans who aren't familiar with the landscape as like initial colonizing populations are fucking eating each other to survive. Yeah. I'd also be interested to see if it is like, um, we can call it a modern bias. So people in Europe or people who are studying sites in Europe
00:25:38
Speaker
are taking these kind of approaches where you're doing microscopic kind of analysis of cut marks, et cetera. And maybe that's not done in other places because of what not. But I would be interested to see how many like actual studies are being done in other places to see if that is like, maybe it is like a homo sapiens thing or maybe it's just specific to this where two human groups are nearby. I don't know. That's a good question. But we definitely have evidence
00:26:06
Speaker
Like super, super good evidence of Neanderthals cutting their homies up and eating them. Yeah. So like well-documented. So it's not just cut marks, but also seeing like human tooth marks or chewing marks. So not only are they being cut, they're being gnawed on like you would at fucking famous Dave's and you've got a full slack of Dave at ribs. That's the kind of like human bone marks we got on these bad boys. So it's like very clearly like people are eating these people.
00:26:32
Speaker
type of stuff. So it's definitely happening in Spain, in France, and in Germany, in these Neanderthal populations. And they're also finding it in their gut fauna too, right? Yeah. I think that's part of that too, is that at least in Spain and then later stuff too, they're definitely finding it in their gut fauna. So like, yeah, they're eating people. I mean, there's no other way that that gets inside of you. Yeah, there's no other fucking way. As we were searching through this, we came across this article that I really liked and it's titled,
00:27:02
Speaker
We're Neanderthals responsible for their own extinction by a gusty and Rubio Cambio. I just assumed that was Spanish, but it might be like the, um, I might be fucking up an Italian's name like we did with, uh, um, Alberto, um, or, uh, um, or, uh, uh, uh, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um
00:27:23
Speaker
Okay. One other language and it's Spanish and are taking that away from us. Um, I'm so sorry, though. So sorry. Such a, such a great guest. Yeah. And so what they're talking about in this article is, you know, like, so we know, uh, cannibalism is documented in a number of Neanderthal sites. So probably, so if it's a number of cannibal sites or. Yeah.
00:27:43
Speaker
cannibal sites, the intercom sites, you know, it's probably cannibalism because it seems to be like a cultural thing. Yeah. Um, so there's Caprina level 25 from Combe, Grinnell Mola where see, this is me fucking up French names again. We need our French speaker here, David.
00:28:03
Speaker
Quavadil Boqueta de Zaffiriah, LC drone. So yeah, a couple of these places. And they also talk about it being a Homo intercessor and Homo rodentiensis. And we're not touching that at the moment. So what they're talking about is as they're radiocarbonating these sites, they're noticing like they're late Neanderthal occupations. It's not great.
00:28:28
Speaker
And so they're looking at cannibalism for basically like they kind of ate themselves to death is like essentially like what they're trying to explore is this really sad idea that it wasn't humans that killed them off. It was like cannibals that are these nanotels got so hungry. They just ate each other cause they weren't doing so well towards the, well, the end of the last glacial maximum was still like 15,000, 20,000 years away, but they're not having a good time.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yeah, they're definitely on the decline. And it is interesting that if one of their results is that cannibalism is actually an okay strategy, but it depends in terms of like your territory versus other people's territory. So they're saying like in hostile territory, cannibalism ain't too bad of a strategy.
00:29:19
Speaker
It allows a group to increase its resources and protects the zone from incoming groups. And then once other people are a non-cannibalistic competitor is introduced, cannibalism becomes an extremely negative trait. And it kind of affects them that way, which is kind of a fucked up paper, but that's an interesting kind of idea.
00:29:40
Speaker
They're modeling this. They're putting this in a computer program. It's fantastic because you look at the figures and they clearly screen grab the entire screen. It looks like Fallout 1 is what their screen looks like. They put in all these variables and they're showing without an extra group, homo sapiens, cannibalism is beneficial because you're keeping the population alive. There's that really fucked up quote from The Walking Dead when they meet the cannibals in that. Core memory unlocked.
00:30:08
Speaker
And they justify it. They're like, you know, if a mother bear is starving and so are two cubs, if the mother bear dies, everyone dies. But if the bears eat their cubs, and so do pandas, a lot of animals eat their young when their times aren't great. Because at the end of the day, if they eat their babies and survive, they can just make new babies. That's kind of the game theory logic. And that's what they're applying here is like, if Neanderthals are eating each other when times are tough, it's going to help. But when you throw in another population that ain't eating each other,
00:30:37
Speaker
but apparently they are. I don't know. That's interesting. I think that's a, and that'll be in the links in the show notes. So we'll, we'll get that on paper. It's only six pages. It's like, it's a fun read. It's like, Oh, this is how you apply math and computers to like, what's this question solve?
00:30:55
Speaker
For sure. And then the next article, which really is cool because it talks about a very large time death from Homo Antisessor to the Bronze Age, and takes this big approach to say, what is the evidence for cannibalism in prehistoric Western Europe? You'd love to see this done in Eastern Europe. You'd love to see this done in Africa.
00:31:17
Speaker
but this is where they're focusing their stuff on. And they really have a good kind of conglomeration, whatever it is, of dates, of methods, of cannibalism, of kind of what the population is, who is getting eaten, et cetera. So I think that is really interesting. And you can kind of see that cannibalism is for sure starting at least 800,000 BP.
00:31:45
Speaker
And then just kind of keeps ramping and gets more evidence as you go through time, which is interesting. I don't know. Want to take a break here and dive back in. Yeah. One hundred percent. I think that's a natural point. So yeah, we'll get back and we're going to talk about that, that paper, archaeological evidence for cannibalism and prehistoric Western Europe from home accessor to the bronze age by Salady and Rodriguez Hidalgo. So we'll be right back after these smooth, smooth messages, messages, messages, Jesus.
Religious and Cultural Contexts of Cannibalism
00:32:13
Speaker
And welcome back to episode 163. So getting to this article, they document evidence of like legit cannibalism in Western Europe. So Spain, Portugal, France, you know, basically the big players in World War II minus the Soviets. You got Croatian there. They were minor. They weren't, they weren't a big one in there, but weren't they Yugoslavia at that time?
00:32:34
Speaker
Yeah, probably. Yeah, I think so. Okay. So they talk about, I mean, it does a really good case by case of like, how long has this ship been going on? And like granted, we're talking about over the course of like thousands of years and they're looking at like 16 sites, but then again, paleoanthropology doesn't have that many samples to begin with anyways. So early Pleistocene, we got that Grandelina
00:32:53
Speaker
They're caught enough kids and eating them, you know, like going back to that bear. Between 10 and 15, they were eating children. And these are Homo antecessors. So there's 11 individuals and it's not great. Also a suggested intergroup violence. So that would be an example of exocannibalism. So that's
00:33:11
Speaker
They're eating their neighbor's kids. Yeah. Like so over 44.5% exhibited some anthropogenic modification, like being cut or bone breakage. And like, this is the big one. They're like cutting, they're breaking open, long bones and like sucking out merit, like they're eating each other. Like they're, they're, they're going hard. Numerous human teeth marks. They're, they're eating each other. And it just, it was scalp two, which is fucking wild. People wanted them dead and then in their stomachs very quickly. So who the hell knows?
00:33:42
Speaker
Jesus Christ. I did not expect that to go that hard. Yeah. They, whatever Homo antecessor is, which I don't know what the fuck that is even word that even falls on the tree. We're not going to try to define it either. Look it up. Cause we can't, we just can't.
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah. So homeless assessor and a couple sites across like France and Spain, they're, they're eating each other. Um, and then we're moving to like Neanderthals really quickly. So there's evidence of cannibalism dating from approximately 130 to 40,000 K away. So yeah, I forget everything. It's in the first two seconds. We got topic rather late. So apparently they were always fucking doing this. I was absolutely wrong.
00:34:20
Speaker
And the clearest example of cannibalism is found at Moule-au-Ghercy, France. Cuévadel Cidron. Crap, crappiness comes in there too. And Croatia, and that one has controversy. And it's documented in a number of other places. At these sites human remains are scarce and some bones show cut marks and green fractures. Basically, the green fracture is you're breaking them when they're fresh. So they're trying to extract bone marrow. That's what that evidence is.
00:34:48
Speaker
But it gets, it gets weird. It's like one of those things where is this link to a funerary practice? That's where like this whole thing kind of keeps coming back to play. It's like without us watching them eat each other or with the evidence of like the might of the DNA and like the fecal matter that shows like, no, there's, there's human proteins other than the digestive tract. Like there's human flesh in that literally. It's like, how, what are we seeing here? Cause like we can't,
00:35:14
Speaker
you know, affirmatively say like, this isn't a burial practice of some sort. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting at the, the moolagirsee stuff. They're treating the hominin and deer carcasses the same way. Yeah. That's fucking wild to me. Exactly.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're understanding of a human and you're not thinking about him as cannibalism, you're just thinking about it as another food to eat in this area, that you're butchering him the same. Which is really interesting, because that means there's no, it doesn't really signal any distinction between
00:35:50
Speaker
other folks and animals. Yeah, exactly. It's like, oh, they're, they're doing the exact same thing that they're doing to their prey species. Like that's probably. Yeah. These are, you know,
Conclusion and Reflections
00:36:04
Speaker
they're, they're, they're butchering that long pig. Yeah. Yeah. What was it called when they put it in the stew? Wasn't there like a
00:36:13
Speaker
Oh my God. I'll figure it out. Uh, but yeah, he's called long pig in general. I think in Pirates of the Caribbean, like when they're talking about, that's, I think we talked about this on the show before they call it long pork. And if you're listening, it was like, where did this is the second movie. And they're talking to some guy and I was like, Oh, I saw that ship at this Island. They have the best long pork he's ever eaten. And like, yeah, he's like, say there's fucking cannibals there. But like, if you don't know that term,
00:36:38
Speaker
It's just like, Oh, he's eating a kind of like pork jerky. Cool. Like, no, I've read this really fucked up creepy pasta about going to hell and Guy Fieri's there and he's having a long pork and he turned down and he's like taking cuts off your legs and feeding it to you. Anyways, that's how I learned to be in the show notes. How do you like that long pin?
00:37:01
Speaker
And then we start, so yeah, that's fascinating. They're treating their relatives or friends or whoever, like they are dear, like it's the exact process. And that's what you'd be doing if you were eating your relatives, you know what you're doing. There's a certain, you can only, I mean, there's a couple of ways to skin a cat, but like there's only those couple of ways to skin a cat, same for people. Like there's only so much you can do. Like if you're trying to be, you know,
00:37:27
Speaker
There's only so many ways to skin a human is the name of this. But moving on, we do see it also in anatomically modern humans in the Upper Paleolithic, also into the Bronze Age. They estimated that 40% of French Magdalenian remains showed signs of butchery and only 5% were found in intentional burials.
00:37:53
Speaker
So that's like scavenging, right? You're not putting them in there or you're not deflashing them, putting them in there and bury them. You're, you're scavenging or I guess not burying them. I mean, that gets into the weeds again, same sort of thing. There's a group of people in India.
00:38:12
Speaker
that do this. I saw them on the wild boys. So now that I'm saying that out loud, I don't know if it's necessarily factual, but it's a group of people rather, you know, how like Hindus are always trying to do, like get, get into heaven by doing all the good shit they can. Their ideas are, well, if they do all the bad shit, they think if they do all the bad shit in the world, so they like rob graves and eat human flesh, they practice this. One of them tried to eat wee man, like on television. It was fucking hilarious.
00:38:39
Speaker
So they're just like, uh, they're trying to get all the, the sins out of them quick. And then they'll just live pure lives later in heaven or whatever. Yes. The Angori, a small group of ascetic shy of, uh, sad who's, uh, they engage in poor post-mortem rituals. They often dwell on carnal grounds, smear cremation ashes on their bodies and needs, but from human corpus for crash and cop, all is enjoy. So yeah, they, they legit, they're legit. They do this.
00:39:07
Speaker
Yeah. And this is, um, we're going to actually change the name of this podcast to how to pronounce everything because we are just so good. And then also, I don't mean to go on a rant, but
00:39:21
Speaker
and talks about modern day cannibalism as your research. Just a couple of years ago when I was in my introduction archeology class, there were talked about how there was this like, you know, human meat made out of, it's like fake human meat and it was made out of plant-based proteins. And I don't know how they got the texture and taste right. I've never eaten humans. I don't know. And I've always been bummed like that'd be kind of cool to try. But recently last year as part of a Halloween promo in 2022, a group out of Sweden came up with this.
00:39:51
Speaker
This is from their commercial.
00:40:22
Speaker
But relax. Cause it's plant-based. The human meat plant-based burger. Do you dare to taste it? Only available this Halloween. Cause otherwise it would be creepy. I want it. I want it so bad. I'm scared. I'm scared.
00:40:45
Speaker
You know, and what's funny enough is like an hour ago before the podcast, I, um, Lana was the one that had the Bob's burgers recipe book. And I'd been craving like one of those Bob's burgers. So I ordered the book and like that first recipe is based on the first episode where it's like the human meat one. So I'm going to find these goddamn human meat plant patties and I'm going to make that goddamn burger. You should film it. Do a Carlton cooks. Oh Jesus. Cooking with Carlton.
00:41:14
Speaker
Last time I did a cooking with Carlton. See, I feel like this is like a gateway drug though. You start eating like plant-based human flesh. You're like, Oh, this is good. This tastes like, and then you like, you kind of crave it. And then you're like, okay, what's, what's the real thing tastes like though? You got it. You want to take that next step. Yeah. Just join the Ukrainian liberation force and just start like every time I kill a Russian going, Oh, how's that?
00:41:39
Speaker
It looks, it looks pretty fresh there. Let's get that backstrap off him. See how that tastes like. No one will tell. We'll just throw him in a masquerade later. I'll report back. Jesus Christ. I'll be like real careful with all my archeological knowledge to like make sure it like looks like it's a deflashing practice.
00:42:02
Speaker
Just like just cut off the surface, not even get the bone. Like no one will know I'm cutting. See, that's what you have to do as we have to do. It's, there should be no marks on the bone. If you hit the bone, you've gone too far. Yeah. Just roast the whole person. We could just oven bake them. Like the Hawaiians and the pig, like I could just oven bake them and the meat will fall off. There's no bone. And then just, yeah, mass grave. Sky burial too.
00:42:26
Speaker
Oh dude, even, even, I mean, what am I the bird? Am I gonna like peck at it? I mean, I want that process. I don't want to eat after them. Wait, you're not gonna eat raw human flesh? What are you? Let me just start with the plant-based burger and then we'll go from there. Told you it's a fucking gateway drug. Why do you put the, why do humans do this? Like we are the only species that artificially created our own meat to feed to ourselves because we don't want to actually eat ourselves.
00:42:57
Speaker
This article caught her, it's genetic. We were predisposed to want to eat ourselves. So it's only naturally come up with a plant-based alternative. So we don't actually commit the sin of not cannibalism, remember, because we did the definitions in the beginning. Cannibalism is culturally approved. We don't want to do anthro-pophagy, which is not approved. So yeah, I'll do the plant-based human burger. This only confirms to me that vegans are the worst people on the whole planet.
00:43:26
Speaker
or vegetarians. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. They all suck. Weren't you a vegan for a bit? I sucked. I bet. I felt so bad for you. It was, it was abuse. That was actually good. Okay. Not all vegans are bad, but it is hilarious to me that vegans did create the first human meat. Yeah. I like it in moderation. Like I'd like going veggie days. Oh yeah. I do like my,
00:43:52
Speaker
meat every now and then. I need that protein. Like that's, and the omega threes, like I just don't want to go crazy just by eating plants. The only thing they could never really replicate, like they could do kind of meat substitutes, which are okay. They obviously don't have like the omega threes or the amount of protein that you get out of red meat, but they could never replicate cheese in a way. They could never, they could never, ever
00:44:15
Speaker
put cheese, make vegan cheese good enough as the regular stuff. Like there's, it's just not possible. It hasn't happened. I really liked those meatless crumbles, my Morningstar, those and the black bean patties. Yeah. I'll go to love those. Absolutely. The chicken wings are weird. It's just like, yeah, I'd rather get the soy crumbles. Like I can, I can fake that pretty well. Like that's, that's good. And I can, I can fuck with a Beyond Meat burger.
00:44:39
Speaker
every once in a while. I mean, they're not terrible. I'd have to talk to my future brother-in-law. I don't know. He works for one of those companies that does it with mushrooms specifically. The tofu-based stuff and the soy-based stuff is just terrible for you. But his company is doing it out of mushrooms, which is something that is more
00:45:02
Speaker
less bad for you in general. I just think I like high soy and high tofu, like diets are just dog shit and not really good for you. Fair enough. I thought your sister's still not married because they got engaged like a year or two ago, right? Yeah, she got married in October. Oh, sweet. Congrats to her. Yeah, it's going to be a wild one.
00:45:18
Speaker
We got really off on a tangent. These like third segments of these episodes, just like go the rabbit hole that we go down is like.
00:45:34
Speaker
So I like it for the third segment, but like, cause when you guys try to have me listen to history of hyenas, this was like two minutes in, you know, they're always off topic. I know it was wild that that fucking sandwich I had down the corner, it was like fucking gone.
00:45:51
Speaker
I was like, what the fuck is this? I was like, okay, this comment was a while. I was like, all right. But anyways, we leave it for the third segment where we go off on random tangents about soy products. Yeah. I think we can end our discussion there. Do look up these articles that we're going to drop in the show notes. If you have questions about cannibalism, ask Carlton because he might be one soon. I'll be an anthropophageous.
00:46:16
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much for listening to us. Once again, like, rate, review, whatever they say on those big podcasts that actually make money. Please do those things. Yeah, please do those things. I can view the COVID podcast, yeah.
00:46:31
Speaker
If you're listening to us on the old shows feed, we greatly appreciate it. But you know, same as always, click the subscribe button to our individual show. That's how we get the numbers. That's how we get sponsors and people that want to promote on our show. Um, our numbers are doing well, everybody. You know, thank you everyone who for all the love and support you've given us. We'd really love the emails. We'll get back to them when we can. Yeah. And they've been, and they've been great and supportive and asking good questions. So yeah, thank you. Thank you all for doing that. We enjoy the shit out of it.
00:46:57
Speaker
So, but are Catholics cannibals, not just Catholics, Christians, because as I'm almost finished with this bottle of wine, wine is the blood of Christ. So is that like- And the bread is the body. And the bread is the body. So is that a form of ritual? Is that still like a form of ritual cannibalism? Like that's the whole point, right? Okay. The bigger question is, does drinking blood count as cannibalism or is it flesh derived? Hold on, is drinking blood cannibalism? I think it is.
00:47:23
Speaker
Because I like to see flesh everywhere in like the description. Like is Dracula or what's his face, Vlad the Impaler? Yes. Well hold on, people are upset about this. Drinking your own blood is considered cannibalism.
00:47:44
Speaker
But then if you drink someone's urine, is that cannibal? No, that's a waste product. Well, blood could be a waste product too. Oh, look at this, it's communion cannibalism. If we took these references, literally it looks like cannibalism. Actually, Christians in the other days of the church were accused of cannibalism because they heard about Christians eating Christ's body, drinking his blood. But it wasn't legal at that time, not until Constantine.
00:48:10
Speaker
But the doctor in theology says, it's not cannibalism, it's being properly connected to Christ. I don't know, you're eating the dude. You're still out on that. You're still out. Yeah, all the good stuff. I interviewed the podcast, really appreciate the ratings and what you guys think of the show. Yeah, let us know if there's other topics. We got one lined up. Someone was curious.
00:48:31
Speaker
Send us topics and not necessarily people. We're kind of getting away from the interview thing, to be honest. It's gotten kind of, things have changed. Like we're not all like grad students anymore. Like we've tried, there's some people I want to interview and like you're a professor now. It's like the dynamics changing everybody. Yeah. So give us topics that we can bring people on rather than just strict interviews. Yeah. I'm not saying we're canceling those interviews, but we're just going to do them less, less often or probably people we are closer to. It's, it works better that way.
00:48:59
Speaker
Yeah, this is what you guys asked. They just told us to stop doing those so much anyways. We're like, we're still going to do them. Yeah, sweet. And we're out.
00:49:13
Speaker
Thanks for listening to a life in ruins podcast. You can follow us on Instagram and Facebook at a life in ruins podcast. And you can also email us at a life in ruins podcast at gmail.com. And remember, make sure to bring your archaeologists in from the cold and feed them beer. Connor, what is your joke for me today?
00:49:30
Speaker
Oh man, this one's good. My buddy crashed the car while listening to Adele. He was rolling in the Jeep. God damn it. God damn it. Alright, and with that we're truly out.
00:50:03
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Culturo Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.