Cannibalism has been documented again and again in archaeological contexts, as part of normative human behavior. Here's a recent report (I've not looked yet at the original) from the German Neolithic:
Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports.
The authors say their findings provide rare evidence of cannibalism in Europe's early Neolithic period.
Up to 500 human remains unearthed near the village of Herxheim may have been cannibalised.
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I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the "tribal" people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or…
I have lived among Cannibals, according to a lot of people who claim to know. The number of times that the "tribal" people of the Congo have been called cannibals is too great to be counted, most notably in great literature like The Heart of Darkness but most commonly, I suspect, from the pulpit or…
[A repost from gregladen.com, unmodified]
There is a ceremonial burial in Britain .. ceremonial because it has some red stuff smeared on bone ... that has now bee dated to a few thousand years earlier than previously thought (to ca 25,000 years old).
Age of earliest human burial in Britain…
Lund
Alsengems are little multilayered button-like discs of coloured glass with incised human stick-figures on one side. Archaeology became aware of them in 1871 when one was found on the Danish island of Als. These gems are pretty coarse and ugly compared to the exquisite agate and intaglio ones…
Of course those were atheist cannibals because they ate babies. I think I'll buy a bag of baby squid for dinner. I'm waiting for the sociologists to come up with a story about how eating jesus is in fact an expression of our evolved cannibal gene.
I wonder if this was cannibalism between tribes or within tribes. On the other hand, there are those German stories of a witch with a gingerbread house ... I wonder if they'll find any gingerbread fossils.
The witch-and-gingerbread-house story is set in a more Northerly part of Germany, I think. That said, fossil gingerbread should be quite easy to find on our Christmas Fairs these days.
And anecdotally, I remember having had an excellent dinner in a Herxheim restaurant some years back.