Okay, according to someone on another forum I go on, humans have a suspiciously high resistance to the more common diseases associated with cannibalism, suggesting that at some point in our evolutionary past ‘long pork’ was so consistently on the human diet we actually developed a resistance to diseases spread via cannibalism that’s still present at least forty thousand years later.
Given that the person that originally mentioned this didn’t cite an article (apparently he’d read about it years ago) I’ve found myself wondering if it’s actually true or not.
It’s pretty much consensus that Neanderthals sometimes ate their own, but I’ve never heard this idea that it was so common among modern humans that some weird resistance has developed. And we don’t know if it was ritual cannibalism or “I’m hungry” cannibalism. Why don’t you ask him to cite his claim in that forum?
There would seem to be a logical argument that the reason humans evolve an immunity to human diseases is because they are humans not because they eat humans.
Although it is debated, evidence suggests that cannibalism was quite common in our prehistory. Cite. Human remains have been found processed in ways similar to non-human animal remains. Cite. Some believe that these de-fleshings were done for ritual reasons, but when the bones are broken in ways that suggest marrow extraction, it is hard to imagine another purpose for these skinnings and evisceration, especially when the bones are disposed of in a similar manner to the animal remains found along side of them. Cite. What’s fascinating about some of these sites (especially the early Homo ones) is that the individuals eaten were usually adolescents or children, including young females. Cite. So it wasn’t necessarily done as a way to dispose of enemy combatants.
Human flesh and bone has been found in human cropolites at various sites around the world. Cite.
The person arguing for genetic changes probably read this article.
Your link has the following quote:
Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, one of the co-directors of the Atapuerca project, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, said: “It is the first well-documented case of cannibalism in the history of humanity.”
This is such a bizarre claim it’s hard to know what he may have meant, or whether he was misquoted.
Seriously…the Maoris were very well-known cannibals, they ate several of Captain Cook’s crew. Quite a few tribes in the South Pacific were regular cannibals, including the Fijians.
The first of many in the history of the human species, not the first one ever. Using “first” as a synonym for “earliest”, a usage which seems obvious to me but is apparently not so obvious to other people.
Also, a lot of claims of cannibalism are not well-documented. It’s the sort of thing said about the tribe over the next hill. Not to say cannibalism doesn’t happen or hasn’t been well-documented in some cases, but it’s still one of those story’s that sometimes gets told without foundation.
Kind of off-topic a bit, but I remember seeing a show on TV claiming that cannibalistic frogs may receive some sort of genetic memory of previous generations.
I think that over time through naturally occuring mutations in our genes, we have developed this resistance. I’m assuming that early humans may have turned to canabolism during extreme circumstances for survival, or possibly for religious sacrifices. Regardless of how these humans chose to consume their own, resistance was going to develop over many thousands of years through naturally occuring mutations.
Also, through natural selection humans which may have caught diseases from canabolism probably died as a consequence or were less likely to reproduce, those humans which may have had a chance mutation in their genes were immune to these diseases and were able to survive and reproduce, so that this gene that coded for immunity was passed onto their offspring. Slowly but surely this process would have decreased the number of humans that did not possess resistance and increased the number that did.
However, this of course is just my hypothesis anyway!
