hard to say if it’s them or me, I suspect LJ, as my other surf-activities are doing ok. I lost a friend on my list, I wonder who it was? Not a reciprocal link, so it was someone fairly new, whom i’ve not read a great deal of.
this just in….
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It’s official — early Americans practiced cannibalism, at least at one site in the U.S. Southwest, researchers said.
Cut-up bones and human blood found in cooking pots had long suggested that someone cooked seven people at an Anasazi site in southwest Colorado, but tests of human feces found at the site prove that someone ate them, according to Richard Marlar of the University of Colorado and colleagues.
The site, which seems to have been abandoned suddenly around 1150 A.D., has long intrigued scientists and provoked lengthy and often heated debate about what happened there.
“Several lines of evidence indicate that during the abandonment or soon after, the bodies of seven people of both sexes and various ages were disarticulated, defleshed and apparently cooked as if for consumption by other humans,” Marlar and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the science journal Nature.
“Here we show consumption of human flesh did occur as demonstrated in preserved human waste containing identifiable human tissue remains,” they wrote.
That someone was cut up and cooked is not in dispute — the bones were clearly butchered and human blood was found in cooking pots.
But some scientists have argued that this could have been part of a funerary ritual, or perhaps a deliberate act of terrorism by a small group of people aimed at scaring others away.
Something bad certainly seems to have happened at the settlement, one of many abandoned by people now known as the Anasazi, which means “ancient enemy” in Navajo.
The Anasazi mysteriously disappeared, but are believed to have been the ancestors of the modern-day Hopi and Zuni people, the so-called Pueblo Indians who built complex settlements.
Usually, Native Americans carefully cleaned up before they left a village or settlement, collecting valuables, stripping logs and roofing, and then often torching what was left.
Not at Cowboy Wash, Colorado.
There, cooking pots were left behind, as were tools, ornaments and construction materials.
And, scattered among them were human bones that had been cut up, cracked open and burned.
Perhaps left as one last insult was a lump of human excrement, laid in the ashy hearth.
It was this single turd — a coprolite in scientific terminology — that provided the proof.
Marlar’s team needed solid evidence that the men, women and children whose bones were found had been eaten. So Marlar’s team looked for myoglobin, a human protein, in the feces — and they found it.
“Human myoglobin should only be present in fecal material if it is consumed and passed through the digestive system by the depositor of the feces,” the team wrote.
The finding is certain to be controversial.
“Fur is probably going to fly over this,” said Tim White, an anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley who has studied early humans and who found evidence last year that some Neanderthals practiced cannibalism.
Cannibalism was used by many as an excuse to justify ”civilizing” native cultures — or for wiping them out. Accusing early Native Americans of a practice so abhorrent to so many societies will not be popular.
But anthropologist Christy Turner of Arizona State University has studied many southwestern sites where human bones appear to have been butchered. He describes evidence of cannibalism at 38 sites in his book “Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest.”
White thinks the evidence is pretty clear.
“Some of the long bones (such as leg bones) at these sites don’t have any ends to them at all,” White said in a telephone interview. That, he said, suggests they were processed to get the grease out — something people commonly do with animal bones.
Why would anyone do that?
“They were hungry,” he answered.
