[Sca-cooks] canabalism

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Also sprach vongraph:
>Actually I was speakingof the south seas areas,  as far as christians eating
>muslims or vice versa I seriourly doubt that occured, not that any thing was
>beyond either group as far as horrindeous acts. just they had fairly easy
>food available and unless its cultural thing very few of them would eat long
>pig. Now burning them alive or torture is much easier to document

As various and sundry have stated, it is documented in the case of
Crusaders at Acre, but even something documented can be distorted. It
seems like it was done, but then if you don't actually read a
genuine, detailed account of the suffering of the Donner group, and
the steps they actually took to survive, they're often presented as a
bunch of rabid dogs. I think something like four people were eaten,
two of whom had already died from various semi-natural causes. The
old campfire horror stories of people who had nearly starved and been
forced into cannibalism, later to discover that they actually
preferred the meat of humans, have funnelled away the great sadness
of the Donner story and turned it into horror fiction. (Now Albert
Fish, on the other hand...)

But for all that revisionist historians would like to rewrite human
history without a mention of cannibalism, it's found quite well
documented in 17th-century Scotland, 19th-century Ireland, 12th and
13th-century Germany, ancient China (I forget the earlier references,
but it seems to have continued on and off almost to the present day)
and various other places.

One viable piece of evidence that suggests that some cases of alleged
cannibalism were falsely deduced is the funerary practice of
excarnation, where bones with knife marks on them suggested to some
archaeo-anthropology types that the subjects had been butchered for
food, when in fact they had had the muscles stripped from the bones
for burial or other storage (of the bones).

Gosh, it's a beautiful morning! ;-)

Adamantius, ever cheerful