The secret of cannibal clusters

Recent evidence suggests that all of our ancestors were probably cannibals and that cannibalism was widespread in early human societies

Armin Meyers, a computer expert from the town of Rothenburg in central Germany, was seen by his neighbors as a kind, quiet gentleman, yet in fact he was a cannibal, and in the year 2000, he killed and partially ate a man named Jürgen B man. Meyers also videotaped the entire process of his killing and eating.

Meyweiss's case has once again aroused shock and curiosity about the phenomenon of cannibalism. From Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, the "cannibalistic psychologist" in "The Silence of the Lambs," to the cannibalism stories of the 1840s (when pioneers in the American West in 1846, starving and cold, had no choice but to feed on the corpses of their fellow travelers), cannibalism has been sensationalized in this way. The most apocryphal tale came in 1972, when the Uruguayan rugby union team's plane crashed in a remote part of the Andes and the players were forced to eat the bodies of their teammates.

In ancient times, people were forced to eat each other in order to survive, which seemed understandable to later generations; nowadays, some people are born with a natural bloodlust and a taste for human flesh, which is widely attributed to the pathological criminality of maniacs. But the latest evidence suggests that all our ancestors were probably cannibals, and that each of us still bears traces left by our ancestors' cannibalism.

Bones of cannibals are found all over the world

While many archaeologists and anthropologists have found that cannibalism did occur in ancient times, most scientists are convinced that it was only an uncommon trait in prehistoric human societies.

In recent years, however, there has been mounting evidence that cannibalism was far more common in ancient times than we thought.In 1951, after studying prehistoric Fijian cultures, anthropologist Edward Gifford of the University of California at Berkeley concluded that, "With the exception of fish, man is the vertebrate most frequently used for human food. " Attention was finally focused on two types of evidence: cannibalism literature found by anthropologists and explorers; and evidence of massacres, in the form of human remains, found at archaeological sites.

British anthropologist Timothy Taylor said that people in ancient times ate human flesh, sometimes not out of hunger; some ate to show off their brutality, some believed that eating human flesh could cure certain diseases, and some ate the flesh of their enemies to take revenge because of the hatred they harbored. Taylor also points out that we can find archaeological evidence for this. "Just as we can find that animals were food for humans from the remains of cut animals, we can likewise find the remains of cut humans."

Bones left behind in this way have been found all over the world. For example, Tim White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, has unearthed three 160,000-year-old fossilized human skulls in Ethiopia, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils. Each skull showed clear signs of having been cut, suggesting that they had been massacred. White has also found 600,000-year-old human skulls with the same scars, which he says is very convincing evidence of cannibalism left behind by Neanderthals found in France.

The same evidence also appears at an Anasazi archaeological site in Arizona, USA, a place called Houck K. Back in the early 1990s, this site had been examined for the burial of a large number of human remains in the mid-12th century. The bones had both chop marks and worn profiles, suggesting that they had been cooked for a long time; what's more, the vertebrae were selectively missing certain parts, which the researchers attributed to the fact that they had been knocked out of their bones. Says White, "When you look at prehistoric cultural archives through these phenomena, there's plenty of evidence of cannibalism occurring in France, England, Mexico and North America."

Direct evidence

In recent years, some new evidence has been discovered. One piece of evidence is that 850 years ago, at least seven people were slaughtered, cooked and eaten in a very small abandoned Indian village in what is today southwestern Colorado, USA. This suggests that Native Americans were killing and eating people before Columbus discovered the American continent.

Thousands of human bones and bone fragments were found scattered on the floor or piled up in a side room at the settlement, called Cowboy Baths, where further examination revealed cut marks on the bones and human blood on two stone cutting tools. The researchers also found a cooking pot nearby, and in the ashes of the fire, the researchers found a pile of human excrement deposits, known as fossilized feces.

Suspecting that this was the remains of cannibalism, a team of researchers led by Richard Mara, a pathologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, USA, proceeded to conduct biochemistry experiments on the cooking pot and fossilized feces in search of the remains of human myoglobin Myoglobin is a protein responsible for storing and transporting oxygen that is found only in skeletal muscle and cardiac muscle cells.

The results of the study showed that the pot did contain human myoglobin.

The researchers went on to analyze the fecal fossils. Under the microscope, the fecal fossils lacked starch grains but had myoglobin, suggesting that the men had not eaten any plant food for 36 hours and were probably eating human flesh.

The scientists did tests on 39 modern human controls, which included some samples of blood from the stool; and 20 samples of fecal fossils taken from other archaeological sites. As a result, myoglobin was found in none of the controls. Since this protein is only found in skeletal and cardiac muscle, a positive result in a fecal sample would indicate that the Native Americans of the time were cannibalistic. This is direct evidence of the existence of cannibalism.

The traces of cannibalism that remain in us

But all of the above evidence taken together still only shows that cannibalism was "widespread," not that it was a "common" phenomenon. Now, however, genetic and biological studies have convinced many scientists that cannibalism was once common, and perhaps even widely accepted by society at the time. Chillingly, some of the disease-resistant genes we all carry may have been inherited from our ancestors who ate human flesh.

In 2003, the scientific team at Corinchi, led by Simon Meade, published a paper in Science reporting their findings on a brain disease called kuru disease prevalent among the Frey people of the remote Papua New Guinea highlands.

Kuru disease is a prion disease, much like mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and is widely believed to be a disease caused by the natives' eating of human corpses. The Frey had a tradition of cannibalism since ancient times, and it was only in the mid-1950s, when the Australian authorities, then hosting Papua New Guinea, issued a ban, that the Frey's cannibalistic habits were ended. Women and children are said to be more susceptible to kuru disease because they are the mainstay of the human feast.

Colledge's team studied the genetic effects of the disease in the Frey population. They found that about 3/4 of Frey women over the age of 50 are genetically resistant to prions, an ability that could only have arisen from generations of cannibalism by their ancestors.

The really surprising discovery came later: when Colledge analyzed DNA samples from different races around the world, he found that the Frey people were not alone, and that the gene for resistance to prions turned out to be present in all races. In other words, all populations around the world have built-in resistance to prion diseases.

How did this resistance develop in us? Researchers believe that the most plausible explanation, and perhaps the only one, is that our ancestors were cannibals, and cannibalism was widespread in early human societies.

Despite more new evidence, it's still hard to believe that our ancestors ate human flesh on a regular basis, and many people just have a hard time accepting that. In fact, accepting that our ancestors cannibalized people is no more chilling than believing that cannibalism may be widespread today. Meyers told police after his arrest, "Today, there are about 800 cannibals in Germany alone."