Did Hunger Drive Cannibalism?

BRIGHTON, ENGLAND—The Guardian reports that James Cole of the University of Brighton assessed the nutritional value of the human body and found that an adult male weighing about 145 pounds would have provided about 144,000 calories, with 32,000 of those calories from skeletal muscle. That number is low when compared with the caloric values of other animals whose butchered remains are found at Paleolithic archaeological sites, such as 3,600,000 calories in the skeletal muscle of a mammoth, or 200,100 calories from a horse’s muscles. Cole thinks it would have been easier to obtain food from the saiga antelope, whose muscles contained around the same number of calories as those of humans, or small animals such as birds and hares, than from a hard-to-catch hominin. “Maybe there is more of a social driver here, not ritual specifically, but social,” he said. For more, go to “Colonial Cannibalism.”