Here, we will focus on the ramifications of cannibalism for human health. The lines are, perhaps, slightly more blurred than our initial reaction might infer.įor the purpose of this article, we do not need to wade into the interplay between instinctive gut feelings and cold, hard logic. For instance, many of us eat our fingernails, and some people eat their placenta after giving birth. Once we start to strip away at cannibalism’s ability to make us instantly recoil, we see that our feelings aren’t quite as clear-cut as they seem. To Western minds, this might seem disturbing, but to those who entertain these rituals, burying your mother in the dirt or leaving her to be entirely consumed by maggots is equally disturbing. In some cultures, once a person has died, their loved ones consume parts of their body so that they, quite literally, become a part of them. Even priests and royalty routinely consumed human body products in an effort to stave off anything from headaches to epilepsy and from nosebleeds to gout. In Europe, from the 12th century up until the early 18th century, people knowingly sold and purchased human body parts as medications, particularly bones, blood, and fat. For instance, there are reports of cannibalism during the North Korean famine in 2013, the siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s, and China’s “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s and 1960s. In desperate times, people have also fallen back on cannibalism to survive. Elsewhere, the consumption of human flesh had a more ritual significance. In some cultures, cannibalism involved eating parts of one’s enemies to take on their strength. Cannibalism occurs in many species and has been a part of human culture for thousands of years.
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