by vox_mundi » Thu 06 Apr 2017, 11:10:30
How many calories is that human? A nutritional guide for prehistoric cannibals$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]If you were to eat, say, another human being, how many calories would you be taking in? That’s a valid question not only for health-conscious people, but for anthropologists, too. You see, our human ancestors were cannibals — but we don’t really know why.
Did they kill and eat each other like they would a mammoth or a wholly rhino — for the meat? Or were they practicing some sort of religious ritual?$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')b]
Maybe they are easier to catch? To answer that question, James Cole, a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Brighton, looked into the nutritional value of a human being and then compared it to that of other animals our ancestors dined on. He found that eating a man provides fewer calories than gobbling down a mammoth, bison, or red deer. And that suggests that our ancestors ate each other not for nutrition but for some other purpose — maybe as a form of funerary or cultural ritual.
The findings were published today in the journal Scientific Reports.:format(webp)/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/54099289/cannibal3_1.0.png)
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