

Neanderthals may have been eaten by early humans - awt
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/17/neanderthals-cannibalism-anthropological-sciences-journal

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Silentio
I'm just wondering, if I ate a Chimpanzee would it be considered cannibalism?
I'm not sure H. Sapiens sapiens eating H. Neanderthalensis is much different
from H. Sapiens sapiens eating Pan troglodytes.

Also, I'm not clear on whether the stigma against cannibalism is mainly based
on social pressure or stems from our biological programming.

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awt
I always sort of wondered if maybe some myths in northern europe about trolls
may have originated with the Neanderthals.

~~~
defen
That's the basic idea behind Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead" (made into the
film "The Thirteenth Warrior") except he uses it to explain the Grendel myth
rather than trolls.

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TweedHeads
If I am a modern human moving to africa, would I start eating monkeys?

Why modern humans moving to europe ate neanderthals? Why not cro-magnons,
australopithecus, aztecs, mayans, vikings?

Did europeans eat american aborigins when they conquered america?

No, they just killed them.

Just because you saw a jawbone with some marks it doesn't mean one million
neanderthals had that fate.

I don't deny cannibalism has existed since the dawn of humanity, but please.

~~~
qeorge
_If I am a modern human moving to africa, would I start eating monkeys?_

Why not? What's to say they weren't already?

 _Why modern humans moving to europe ate neanderthals? Why not cro-magnons,
australopithecus, aztecs, mayans, vikings?_

\- Cro-magnons are modern humans, AFAIK

\- Australopithecus existed long before modern humans (millions of years), and
not concurrently

\- Aztecs, Mayans, and Vikings: by this point in human history social mores
against cannibalism had already developed. Most European exploration was
funded by theocracies.

This isn't my field, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

 _Did europeans eat american aborigins when they conquered america?

No, they just killed them._

Again, this is confusing an anthropologist's "modern humans" (30k years old)
with a more common definition of modern humans (last 2k years). Social mores
had already developed.

 _Just because you saw a jawbone with some marks it doesn't mean one million
neanderthals had that fate._

I agree, but I didn't see that claim in the article.

~~~
TweedHeads
Maybe some anachronisms slipped, let me try to explain my thoughts again:

Gorillas don't eat monkeys and monkeys don't eat chimpanzees.

Lions don't eat tigers, tigers don't eat leopards.

Maybe it is written in all species DNA not to eat themselves or their close
relatives.

(Yes, they can kill each other, mating, male supremacy, territories, etc, but
not "eat" each other)

Just a thought.

~~~
electromagnetic
Chimpanzees specifically eat other monkeys as a form of nutrition. This
doesn't happen in all species, but many species are pure herbivores but will
still kill other species to defend their territory.

Lions don't eat tigers, because they will never get close enough to fight.
During the Roman Colosseum they actually had to chain lions and tigers close
enough to each other that they were both so uncomfortable that they would
attack each other. The reason they both don't attack is because they
invariably both die. Even Rome's celebrity lion, it's one of the few actual
lions named by scholars at the time, died during mid fight due to so many
injuries that a juvenile leopard, (IIRC) which is the smallest of all the big
cats, easily killed it during its final fight.

Lions and tigers will never fight, they don't even exist in the same
territory. Jaguar's live not only on a different continent, but in an entirely
different hemisphere. That leaves the Leopard, which is the smallest of all
the Big Cats and as such will always retreat from a confrontation.

However, Hyenas have been known to kill Lions and vice versa. In fact, out of
all apex predator species the two behave strangely because not only do they
guard their territory from each other, which is strange because apex predators
usually disregard each other as it's deadly not to. However, Hyena's are
occasionally the prey of a Leopard despite Hyena's being able to scare a
Leopard away from prey.

It's exceedingly simplistic to assume something from animals given the
extremely complex relationships and higherarchies that are carried out. Tigers
are the most territory dominant of all the Big Cats, yet they have been seen
to offer food to multiple females and cubs, they've even been seen offering
food to completely unrelated males despite the fact they will usually fight
over a prey.

It's somewhat true that an animal will not eat its own kind, but that's rather
ignorant thinking because we're assuming a tiger is actually edible to another
tiger. Humans aren't truly edible to another human, we're actually rather
nutritionally poor by all standards. We suck at producing vitamins, your
average goat produces 15,000mg of vitamin C a day, we produce 0mg in a
lifetime. Eating a goat gets me nutrition, where as eating a human gets me
rather nutrient poor protein.

Humans frequently have to be careful over what organs of animals we eat,
because when we encountered Polar Bears people were getting Vitamin A
poisoning. This not only likely happened when the Inuit started hunting Polar
Bear, but is documented to have happened again when people started sailing to
the North Pole.

Humans likely ate Neanderthals, but likely only as often as we ate each other,
which largely depends on famines. When early man ran out of food, instead of
choosing each other they might have chosen the Neanderthals instead. However,
humans still eat our own species up to this day, and during famines, so do
many other apex predators.

Pigs frequently eat their own young, in fact it's the leading reason for
infant death in the species. Chimpanzees too are known to eat their own young,
and sometimes others young. This extends to all cat species, all wolf/dog/fox
species, a fair amount of primates, humans, bears and also happens frequently
in certain species of fish. It's also documented in Bottlenose Dolphin,
however it doesn't seem documented in any other aquatic mammals.

Then there's the whole sexual cannibalism thing in many species of insect.
There is also size-structured cannibalism which occurs in many insect species,
but notably in some squirrels too where the large will frequently consume the
young, not usually infants though.

Quite literally, there is nothing in our D.N.A. telling us not to eat our
close relatives, in fact there's more conclusive evidence on what species _do_
eat their own than what species _don't_ eat their own.

