My favorite was the claim that the cliff dwellings of the SW, which are obviously defensive in nature, were sited for passive solar heating or some such nonsense. The popular claim in the 80s and 90s was that the Anasazi were a peaceful people.
They recently found an Anasazi coprolite (preserved feces) and analyzed it, finding human proteins. IOW, the gentleman had been dining on people.
If the neighbors got into cannibalism, I think I’d move into a cliff dwelling too.
I’ve often wondered if the change from mesa-top unfortified pueblos to cliff dwellings might have had something to do with influences from Mexico, where human sacrifice and cannibalism was an ancient way of life.
Yeah.
It’s amazing that anybody, no matter how stupid, ignorant, or uneducated he is, could mistake what we have today as worse, much worse, than the past. We are simply better at slaughter than they were, but they were no less willing to engage in it, and would do it for reasons we no longer would.
And also, we are much better at the good stuff, too.
Could the human proteins come off the intestinal walls as the food traveled through the body? Have they done DNA studies? If cannibalism there should be DNA from both the eater and the eaten.
If you are referring to cannibalism as an “ancient way of life” are you thinking of the Aztecs or earlier groups? The Aztecs had only been city dwellers for a few centuries. The Toltecs were far more ancient, but I don’t know their practices. The Mayans were far older and did engage in human sacrifice, but I don’t remember cannibalism being a significant part of it. They often threw their sacrifices into sacred wells, sinkholes known as cenotes. Hard to eat them down 80 feet below the surface.