Human flesh isn't nutritious; ancient cannibals may have had other reasons

There’s evidence to prove that some among our prehistoric, cave-dwelling ancestors ate people – but it probably wasn’t because of the nutritional content of human flesh. 

A new examination of the human body’s caloric content reveals that, compared to the meat of other animals, human flesh isn’t nutritious enough to meet the dietary requirements of ancient cannibals. It is therefore possible said cannibals had other reasons for eating each other.

“We are a fairly small animal really and we don’t have much flesh and meat or fat to us, and we certainly wouldn’t necessarily have done in the past either,” said study author and archaeologist James Cole of the UK’s University of Brighton.

“Maybe there is more of a social driver here, not ritual specifically, but social.”

Man vs. Mammoth

To figure out what led cannibals during the Palaeolithic period (between 10,000 and 2.6 million years ago) to eat human flesh, Cole studied the 66-kilogram body of an adult male. Specifically, he analyzed the fat and protein content of each human body part, then converted the data into calorie values.

Eating the entirety of such a specimen would net you 144,000 calories. This includes the 32,000 calories that skeletal muscles – those fibers that make moving your body possible – would provide. The kidneys and spleen account for 376 and 128 calories respectively.

In comparison, dining on the muscles of one mammoth will give you 3.6 million calories. A single bear delivers 600,000 calories, a horse 200,100 calories, and a red deer 163,680 calories.

“What this suggests is that we aren’t terribly nutritious,” Cole stated.

Both the antelope and the human body supply a similar amount of energy. However, humans would have been more difficult – and dangerous – to catch and murder for food.

“You have to get together a hunting party and track these people, and then they aren’t just standing there waiting for you to stab them with a spear,” Cole explained to the National Geographic.

“If you’re hunting your own species, it’s the same size as you and can think just as well as you and can fight back just as well as you can,” he added. “We aren’t a great return of calories for the amount of effort.”

Cole therefore posits cannibals were motivated to feast on human flesh by factors other than dietary needs.

Ritualistic?

While Cole admits there’s a lack of evidence, he thinks our early ancestors consumed human flesh for cultural reasons. For example, it’s possible dead enemies were eaten as part of rituals performed at the conclusion of wars between tribes.

“It might be: ‘We’ve got our territory, these people are interlopers and they’re trespassing on it. We need to go and sort that out,’ ” he said. “There would have been some kind of ritual attached to the skulls of these individuals, but the bodies were consumed as part of the cannibalism act.”

A University of Durham professor of Palaeolithic archaeology, Paul Pettitt, agrees with Cole’s hypothesis.

“Such behaviors clearly form something like a behavioral ritual – an unconscious act that stemmed from common activities central to group behavior like eating meat,” he stated. “Somewhere along the line of human evolution this behavior turned from behavioral rituals to ritualized behavior, and as Coles shows very well, evidence does clearly reveal that eating human meat was not exclusively about survival.”

Researchers know cannibalism was practiced in the ancient world thanks to the discovery of prehistoric sites – including those in Belgium, Spain, and France – where human bones have been found bearing human teeth marks and cut marks. Such studies have revealed that, on occasion, ancient humans, Neanderthals, and other hominins ate their own kind.

What social reasons prompted them to do so, however, is something that remains to be examined by other researchers.

You can find Cole’s study in Scientific Reports. — TJD, GMA News