Pass the Pepper!

Check out this great article on Cannibalism and the deeper role it plays anthropologically than most people want to believe. I found it credible, but it totally ignores the fact that Nature has a way of punishing a species when it practices consistent cannibalization, ie; prions like Kuru, nvCJD, and Mad Cow Disease. Those prions exist in all mammals, but only accrete to a toxic level when we consume our own kind. This further ignores the reality that once a culture is forced into cannibalism as a  means of survival, prion infection with its delayed incubation periods is probably the least of its worries..

Anthropophagy routinely emerges, says Petrinovich, under predictable starvation conditions, and such examples of human cannibalism are not as rare as many people believe. "The point is that cannibalism is in the human behavioral repertoire," writes Petrinovich in his 2000 book The Cannibal Within:

… and probably is exhibited for a number of reasons—a common one being severe and chronic nutritional deprivation. A behavior might be exhibited only under extreme circumstances and still be part of our biological inheritance, and the fact that its course follows a systematic pattern argues against the hypothesis that it is psychotic in character.

Petrinovich wends his way through a human history littered with the gnawed-on bones of our cannibalized ancestors, revealing that—contrary to critiques arguing that man-eating is a myth conjured up by Westerners to demonize "primitives"—we really have been gobbling each other up for a very, very long time. We're just one of 1,300 species for which "intraspecific predation" has been observed. Among primates, cannibalism can usually be accounted for by nutritional and environmental stress, or it appears as a reproductive strategy in which mothers, for example, consume their unhealthy infants to make way for more viable offspring.

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