Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [92]
The signs of warfare-related cannibalism among the Anasazi are an interesting story in themselves. While everyone acknowledges that cannibalism may be practiced in emergencies by desperate people, such as the Donner Party trapped by snow at Donner Pass en route to California in the winter of 1846-47, or by starving Russians during the siege of Leningrad during World War II, the existence of non-emergency cannibalism is controversial. In fact, it was reported in hundreds of non-European societies at the times when they were first contacted by Europeans within recent centuries. The practice took two forms: eating either the bodies of enemies killed in war, or else eating one’s own relatives who had died of natural causes. New Guineans with whom I have worked over the past 40 years have matter-of-factly described their cannibalistic practices, have expressed disgust at our own Western burial customs of burying relatives without doing them the honor of eating them, and one of my best New Guinean workers quit his job with me in 1965 in order to partake in the consumption of his recently deceased prospective son-in-law. There have also been many archaeological finds of ancient human bones in contexts suggestive of cannibalism.
Nevertheless, many or most European and American anthropologists, brought up to regard cannibalism with horror in their own societies, are also horrified at the thought of it being practiced by peoples that they admire and study, and so they deny its occurrence and consider claims of it as racist slander. They dismiss all the descriptions of cannibalism by non-European peoples themselves or by early European explorers as unreliable hearsay, and they would evidently be convinced only by a videotape taken by a government official or, most convincing of all, by an anthropologist. However, no such tape exists, for the obvious reason that the first Europeans to encounter people reported to be cannibals routinely expressed their disgust at the practice and threatened its practitioners with arrest.
Such objections have created controversy around the many reports of human remains, with evidence consistent with cannibalism, found at Anasazi sites. The strongest evidence comes from an Anasazi site at which a house and its contents had been smashed, and the scattered bones of seven people were left inside the house, consistent with their having been killed in a war raid rather than properly buried. Some of the bones had been cracked in the same way that bones of animals consumed for food were cracked to extract the marrow. Other bones showed smooth ends, a hallmark of animal bones boiled in pots, but not of ones not boiled in pots. Broken pots themselves from that Anasazi site had residues of the human muscle protein myoglobin on the pots’ inside, consistent with human flesh having been cooked in the pots. But skeptics might still object that boiling human meat in pots, and cracking open human bones, does not prove that other humans actually consumed the meat of the former owners of those bones (though why else would they go to all that trouble of boiling and cracking bones to be left scattered on the floor?). The most direct sign of cannibalism at the site is that dried human feces, found in the house’s hearth and still well preserved after nearly a thousand years in that dry climate, proved to contain human muscle protein, which is absent from normal human feces, even from the feces of people with injured and bleeding intestines. This makes