Eat Thy Neighbour (2 page)

Curiously, the act of cannibalism viewed with such obvious horror by the ancient Jews was, in a sense, incorporated into the most central tenet of the Christian religion, the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. Although the Eucharist will be dealt with again, in the next chapter, it is worth noting that in the Roman Catholic Church, the wine and bread used in the Communion are believed to literally transform themselves into Christ’s body and blood in the mouth of the communicant through the miracle of transubstantiation. Instances of far more blatant acts of cannibalism also found their way into Christian legend. In the
legend of St Nicholas, who became the patron saint of children and the progenitor of Santa Claus, the good saint is reputed to have resurrected two children after they were murdered, cut up and sold as meat by a pagan butcher.

No less an author than William Shakespeare also used cannibalism to intrigue his audiences in
Titus Andronicus
, and in Daniel Defoe’s eighteenthcentury classic
Robinson Crusoe
, the eponymous hero’s friend, Friday, is introduced when he escapes from a band of fierce cannibals. In the 1960s, sci-fi author Rod Serling gave the subject a modern twist in his short story ‘To Serve Man’, wherein the true purpose behind a seemingly benign alien invasion is revealed when an alien book, whose title also served as the title of the story, proved to be a cookbook. Even children’s literature is redolent with frightening characters who dine on humans, especially children. In
Jack and the Beanstalk
, Jack encounters a giant who bellows ‘Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.’ In
Hansel and Gretel
the abandoned children are lured into captivity by a wicked witch who puts Gretel to work sweeping and cleaning, while Hansel is kept in a cage where he is fattened up before being shoved into the oven. Even today the visage of the terrifying cannibal is never far from the best-sellers’ list. In Thomas Harris’s
Silence of the Lambs
, the character Dr Hannibal Lecter steals the show with the single line, ‘A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.’

A classic tale of cannibalism, based on numerous real-life sea disasters, came from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe. In Poe’s ‘Narrative of Gordon Pym’ we read a fictionalised – and completely fantastic – account of a group of shipwrecked men who, after a series of disastrous adventures, are left to drift in a lifeboat without food or water. Nearing death, they agree to draw lots, the loser to be killed and eaten to ensure the survival of the
remaining castaways. As we shall see in the next chapter of
Eat Thy Neighbour
, such nautical tragedies have happened more than once in real life.

If fictionalised tales of cannibalism have been employed to heighten the reader’s sense of fear, the same device has been used in more than one instance of biting satire.

In 1728, Jonathan Swift, best remembered as the author of
Gulliver’s Travels
, became incensed over the British Parliament’s callous disregard for the plight of Irish peasant farmers. Due to increasing taxation, high rent and repeated crop failures, thousands of Irish were barely staving off starvation while others were actually starving to death. Rather than reduce rents to a level commensurate with a given year’s harvest, the predominantly English landowners preferred to raise the taxes to compensate for the shortfall in crop sales. In a short tract generally known as
A Modest Proposal
, Swift wryly suggested a solution which he insisted would satisfy all concerned. If the Irish did not have enough money to feed their families, and the landlords were being deprived of their income because of their tenants’ poverty, Swift suggested that the Irish sell their children to the landlords as a food source. In this way, he argued, the Irish tenant farmers would increase their income while simultaneously reducing the number of mouths to be fed. A small excerpt from
A Modest Proposal
will serve to illustrate Swift’s vitriolic condemnation of British policy: ‘I grant that this food will be somewhat dear [but not too much for the rich landlords] who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children. I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten shillings for the carcass of a good, fat child, which . . . will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat.’ Not surprisingly Swift was vilified by the British government. It would seem that starving the Irish was perfectly acceptable but even the suggestion of eating them was intolerable.

In a more recent context, the redoubtable team from the 1960s’
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
took on the subject of cannibalism in a piece called the ‘Undertaker Sketch’. In this sketch, a man brings his deceased mother – whose body has been stuffed into a large refuse sack – to a funeral home to make arrangements for her burial. Here is a portion of that sketch.

Another Undertaker pokes his head around a door.

A section of the audience rises up in revolt and invades the set, remonstrating with the performers and banging the counter, etc, breaking up the sketch.

What is interesting about this morbid bit of comedy is not that the Pythons would perform it; there was almost no subject they would not gleefully tackle. What is interesting is that even these brilliantly irreverent comics felt it necessary to ameliorate the effect of their own comedy by having the audience rise up in righteous anger and storm the set. Even here, the sense that there are bounds beyond which one must not tread is strictly adhered to.

Two

Ancient Origins: Archaeological Evidence of Cannibalism

A
lthough the earliest humanoid remains – found in Africa and dating from 3.5 million years ago – show how the human species originated and what our progenitors looked like, they are too few, and too scattered, to tell us much about the social structure in which proto-man lived. For such details we have to fast-forward three million years and travel to China. At a dig site known as Dragon Bone Hill, just south of Beijing, the plentiful remains of 500,000-year-old Peking Man show clear evidence that among the various food sources accessed by these early people were other humans; probably other members of their own genetic stock. This does not imply that human meat was a regular menu item, but when other animals were scarce, or the only available creatures were too fierce to tackle, members of less warlike clans may have been seen as easy prey. Cannibalism may not have been a practice of choice, but in times of need, any meat is better than none.

Evidence of cannibalism at Peking Man sites is similar in nature to that found at Gran Dolina in north-central Spain. Spain has proved the world’s most fruitful site for the recovery of human remains between 1.5 million and 100,000 years old and a significant number of these sites have shown evidence of cannibalism. Other bones dating from 100,000 years ago,
and providing nearly identical evidence, have been found in Krapina, Yugoslavia. Similarly, 12,000-year-old human remains found at campsites in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset show signs of cannibalism almost indistinguishable from those found in Yugoslavia, Spain and China. Nearly identical physical evidence has been found at innumerable campsites of Neanderthal man, but since there is wide controversy as to whether or not Neanderthal was actually a close relative of modern man or a dead-end offshoot of our family tree, his eating habits may not qualify in our argument. For our purposes, however, Neanderthal hardly matters because there is ample evidence that those who were unquestionably our direct ancestors did, indeed, eat each other. If this evidence is correct, it indicates that cannibalism was, to a greater or lesser extent, practised by human tribal groups in nearly every corner of the globe, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. Of course, as many anthropologists argue, finding a heap of human bones – even when they are randomly mixed with the bones of game animals – is not viable evidence of cannibalism. The question now becomes: what proof do we have that ancient people were actually eating each other and not just rotting quietly away in a corner of their cave?

Among the first signs anthropologists look for when examining suspected sites of cannibalism are tool marks made when flint knives have been used to remove flesh from bone very shortly after death. While such marks may look like random scratches to the layman, to the trained eye they are as identifiable as a signature or fingerprints. Again, there are those who argue that defleshing is not proof of cannibalism. It may be that the flesh was removed from the bones of the dead and the skeletal remains reverently cleaned and buried or placed in an ossuary, or bone box. True again. There are many recorded societies that did exactly this and they were not cannibals, so we must look further for definitive proof of the practice.

The next piece in assembling our cannibalistic puzzle is determining exactly which types of bones are present in the spoil heap. In many cases, where the discarded bones are found at sites suspected of being field stops during a hunting expedition, it is only particular bones such as ribs, spine, hands and feet that have been discovered. The assumption here is that the meatier parts of the carcass were cut away and hauled home while the less savoury parts were left in the field. When it is the heavily fleshed long bones of the arms and legs that are discovered, they tend to be found at permanent campsites and randomly mixed with animal carcasses, all of which bear the marks of defleshing tools. In such cases these long bones often provide one more bit of telling evidence. The large knuckle ends of the bones have been crushed – as have corresponding bones of animal carcasses – in order to remove the protein-filled marrow. When these factors are combined they provide a preponderance of evidence that would surely stand up in any court of law. As a race, we are most certainly guilty of eating our neighbours. But if early man went around eating people indiscriminately, he would probably have eaten those closest to hand – the members of his own tribe – possibly beginning with those least able to defend themselves, the children and women. Had he done this, humanity would have died out in no time at all. In point of fact, there seems to be some evidence that Neanderthal was more than a little indiscriminate as to who he ate and we could conjecture that this might have been a contributing factor in his extinction. Obviously, if the human species was going to flourish, there had to be rules about who got spit-roasted and who did not.

One archaeologically substantiated instance of cannibalism, which has provided no clear-cut clues to the underlying cause, has left scholars scratching their heads in confusion and social activists shaking their fists in anger. It has only been a century and a half since the American Indian was the whipping boy for
expansionist-minded white America, but in recent decades the Native American’s past has been transformed into something sacrosanct. Now, the image of one of these supposedly peace-loving, spiritualistic tribes has been called into question by discoveries in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, once the home of a people known as the Anasazi. The Anasazi flourished throughout the American south-west between
AD
700 and 1300. During those six hundred years they developed a complex and advanced society that spread across Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Remnants of their culture can still be seen in the towering cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and numerous other sites scattered across the Mojave Desert. The question of their disappearance has long troubled scholars and historians and, until recently, the accepted wisdom has been that a massive drought caused the Anasazi social structure to collapse. Certainly, there is ample evidence that as their population expanded they despoiled their land and hunted the game to near extinction. If this alone was not enough to raise the ire of those who believe the Anasazi were back-to-the-land-minded conservationists, recent evidence has caused one of the greatest social controversies since Charles Darwin proposed the theory of human evolution. Thanks to a mounting pile of physical evidence, many archaeologists and anthropologists have become convinced that the Anasazi practised cannibalism.