Witty Viewpoint
here is a lot of negativity towards
cannibalism. In the 21st Century, it seems
to have all but died out. There is scant
mention of it on TV cookery programmes, either
as a totemistic or nutritional diet choice. By clumsy
chance, as I write this, I am sucking blood – my own- having gashed open my finger while rummaging for
my laptop in my rucksack.
Several years back, there was the gory news story
of a German man who advertised for someone who would
volunteer to be eaten. I’m not sure which magazines accept
classifieds from hungry human flesh-eaters – these are the
loneliest hearts columns. Apparently, the volunteer began to
experience regret when he and the chef partook of his flesh
together. I don’t know if this was an issue over seasoning, or
the realisation that this was a less glamorous way to die than he’d
imagined.
It was while I was in Germany last month that my thoughts
turned to the more positive sides of cannibalism. In Leipzig, I
learnt that cannibalism can be a boon for the curious evolutionary
geneticist. Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo is one of the founders of
palaeogenetics. He led the team that sequenced the Neanderthal
genome in 2010, which provided new evidence for interbreeding
between Neanderthals and modern humans. Headlines appeared
when suppositions were made that our genetic inheritance from
the Neanderthals included allergies, incontinence and depression,
but also our ability to fight disease.
But what has all this got to do with cannibalism? One of the
major problems of sequencing the DNA of extinct creatures,
or any elderly relic, is the degradation that occurs over time.
It is hard to find specimens untainted by bacteria, human
touch or the multitude of other ways in which nature can
maul a bone.
In 1994, however, a large cache of Neanderthal bones
was discovered in the El Sidrón cave in northern
Spain. The bones had scars and cut marks across them,
suggesting that they’d been sliced to remove flesh and
muscle for the purposes of a meal. The archaeologists
think that this particular family were victims of survival
cannibalism, which means they were eaten out of necessity
rather than desire (dietary cannibalism) or for mystical reasons
(symbolic cannibalism).
This terrible act of survival has given modern geneticists a great
advantage. As the bones
were lacking in tasty
sinews, they were far less
appealing to bacteria, wild
dogs or anything else that might
have scavenged, trampled or
eroded them. All these things
would have further damaged the
integrity of the Neanderthal DNA.
So the bone samples found
themselves taken from a cave
of death and destruction to the
remarkably clean basement of the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, where among
Tupperware and UV light, Pääbo and
his team now search for the holy grail of
DNA. Within some of these pecked and
sucked at bones will be gene sequences that
reveal more about the effects of the coupling
between Neanderthals and our Homo
sapiens ancestors.
In 17th-Century Europe, human
remains were often used as ingredients
in medicine. Charles II’s tincture, ‘the
King’s Drops’, for instance, contained
distilled human skull and was used to
treat a variety of ailments.
Unfortunately, snacking on
human remains didn’t do much
for Charles and co. But the sad
necessity of cannibalism 40,000
years ago is helping us to
discover why we are who
we are. With new genetic
sequences, we may make new
medical breakthroughs – without
the need to munch on a still-
beating heart ßT
Robin Ince is a comedian and writer who presents, with Prof Brian Cox, the BBC Radio 4 series
The Infinite Monkey Cage. ILLUSTRATION: JAMIE COECANNIBALISM
“Cannibalism has all but died
out. There is scant mention of
it on TV cookery shows”