An American zoologist has devoted himself to studying the most terrifying form of human foraging behavior: cannibalism. This secret of the theory of evolution could very well make perfect sense.
Perhaps the most disgusting man of all time came from a small village in Wisconsin, in the North of the United States…
Ed Gein was the owner of a run-down farm and lived alone, hardly visited by anyone but two women, and none of them left the place alive: Gein slaughtered them, fried their hearts.
In addition, he also excavated the bodies of 15 people from the local cemetery, used leather upholstery and made masks. Gein was the inspiration behind the cannibal Hannibal Lecter in Thomas Harris’ series of horror novels (The Silence of the Lambs).
Documentary photo during the famine in Russia 1921.
It is also possible that the suspicious title above belongs to Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo or ” the Rostov Butcher “ , the Russian, who murdered at least 53 women and children and ate them after brutal torture.
Temporarily ignoring the criminological aspect of those characters, and forgetting about the phenomena of cannibalism in the animal kingdom, the question must be asked: why do people eat people?
If you can put these disgusting characters in the scientific research section, then American zoologist Bill Schutt will be the correct address to find the answer. The biology professor at Long Island University has a fairly dispassionate and relaxed view when studying the phenomenon of cannibalism.
“In the essence of the theory of evolution, cannibalism makes perfect sense,” was his scientific view. Because it promises to bring solutions to many burning problems of humanity, such as overpopulation or lack of food on earth.
So far, Prof. Schutt has mainly studied the phenomenon of cannibalism in the animal world. The sand tiger shark, for example, is already a killer before birth: when it’s still not quite fish, the fastest growing fetus will eat the smaller sibling to make room in the womb. Can that form of barbaric struggle for survival be extended to humans?
During the course of his research, Professor Schutt realized that cannibals like Gein and Chikatilo make up a tiny fraction of the human population, and fortunately, they’re just heavy, will-oriented versions of psychopaths. destroy the environment. There will be people who think that cannibalism is common in primitive tribes or peoples far from the civilized world, deep in the Amazon jungle.
According to the records of some explorers, the Wari people of the Brazilian rainforest have a special tradition when burying the dead: to overcome grief, they eat the flesh or bones of the dead soaked in honey. But is that true?
Anthropologist William Arens in the late 1970s pointed to a serious flaw in similar studies: countless explorers traveled to the jungle tribes and returned with gruesome reports. snails, but it seems that not one of them has ever witnessed a “forest man” happily gnawing on human ribs by the grill.
Even venerable names like Christopher Columbus are no guarantee of the veracity of horrifying anecdotes. For example, his account of the natives of a Caribbean island roasting the limbs of prisoners to eat, later considered as absurdly fabricated to label them a way of life that was anti-Christian, argued. for enslaving them.
Even Bill Schutt couldn’t find a race that specializes in cannibals. He can only cite a few details in Chinese history books, which record a phenomenon of offerings according to Confucian rituals: young people invite the elderly to a part of their body, usually legs and arms, to eat with porridge. However, the scientist did not specify what the ritual was for.
Is this drawing of the Caribbean aborigines a product of the imagination?
The phenomenon of cannibalism, however, has many different causes, many of which are related to religion . The Fore people of Papua New Guinea, the world’s third largest island nation, have a custom of eating dead relatives to keep their souls alive. Until the mid-20th century, the Korowai nomads in Papua province executed those considered haunted by piercing the heart with arrows, then cut the meat wrapped in banana leaves and then grilled to eat to eliminate all harm.
In 1867 British missionary Thomas Baker went to the village of Nabutautau on the island of Fiji in search of a new sheep. He did not know that people there abstain from rubbing children’s hair, so they were executed and eaten. It was not until 2003 that the islanders went to England to beg the descendants of Baker for forgiveness.
In ancient China, conquered enemies were also… in the pot, as a sign of humiliation. King Zhou, the last generation of the Shang Dynasty, is said to have been slandered by two men. He ordered one to be chopped, the other was cooked and cut into slices, put on the ancestral altar and fed to the three pieces. Under the influence of Buddhism, such barbaric practices were gradually abolished, but in the Guangxi Autonomous Region during the Cultural Revolution, there was still the phenomenon of eating meat to punish “class enemies” , as author Zheng Yi with the book The Famous Old Well.
Belief in the unity of body and soul also leads to many chilling inferences. Two historical researchers Anna Bergmann (Germany) and Richard Sugg (UK) showed that in Europe until the early 18th century, some human body parts were still used to make medicine. The Romans of that day believed that the fresh blood of gladiators was a cure for epilepsy. The corpses of death row inmates are sold directly to the pharmacy for preparation. Human fat and the flesh of children who died before being baptized were also made into ointments and pills to fight leprosy, rheumatism, etc.
Currently, in a German museum, there is a prescription from the 17th century monk Johann Schroeder, describing how to make medicine from human muscle. Similarly, American anthropologist Beth A. Conklin quotes from Mabel Peacock’s book published in 1896: “In Denmark, whenever a death row inmate is beheaded, the epileptic man surrounds the scaffold with a plate in his hand. , ready to drink the blood flowing from the convulsive body of the ill-fated.” Until the 1870s, for example 1879 in Berlin when the Penal Code was born, it was common to dig graves for meat and blood to “promote the health of the sick”.
There is a much more brutal form of cannibalism, which occurs in most places where there is famine , when humans go crazy from lack of food and attack their fellow humans to survive. Prof. Schutt cites a few historical events in the United States, when fate played out like a process to find the light at the end of the tunnel in the laboratory. In 1846, on their way to find a shortcut to sunny California, a group of 87 people got lost in the Sierra Nevada mountains and were surprised when winter came early that year. The Donner Party (the Donner Party, named after its leader, George Donner) lost its way in the snow-covered mountains, and after eating all the horses and sled dogs, the group took out their belts and leather shoes to eat.
Another special food saved the lives of about half of the Donner group: in desperation, they ate the corpses of those in the group who had died of exhaustion or illness.
According to GS Schutt’s gloomy picture, is this phenomenon an early warning for humanity today. Will climate change in the near future cause global hunger because of crop failure and saltwater intrusion – and consequent re-emergence of cannibalism?