Comment Re:Denial - Not Just a River - Also Druids Canniba (Score 3, Interesting) 502
I read an essay by Martin Gardner in one of his books on cannibalism, asking whether it really happened. The essay was really a discussion of a book, which made the claims:
- No anthropologist / explorer had ever witnessed cannabilism.
- No tribe had ever admitted to it.
The book claimed that all evidence of customary [1] cannibalism effectively boiled down to a tribe / people / whatever saying: "Those guys who live over there, they are cannibals!" So anthropology students have been taught for ages that various primitive tribes engaged in cannibalism, but there is seemingly no proof of this statement. This was controversial and a few years ago (10, perhaps?) so I'm not sure what the current state of the art is.
[1] There are obvious one-off examples, like recently those rugby players down in South America, and in (pre)history perhaps eating mighty chiefs/warriors to try to absorb some of their strength or mana. This is, rather, looking at the idea of tribes that eat people on a regular basis.