CANNIBALISM

Cannibalism means consuming a member of one's own species. Human cannibalism is therefore the consumption of human tissue by another human.

That definition sounds simple, but it includes behaviors that have almost nothing else in common. A starving survivor consuming someone who has already died is not performing the same social act as a community consuming deceased relatives during funeral rites, nor is either equivalent to using powdered human remains as medicine.

One of the strangest chapters in European medicine is the history of mumia. The word originally referred to bituminous material associated with embalming and medicine, but European misunderstanding and translation gradually connected the term with the preserved bodies of Egyptian mummies. Powdered mummy became a medicinal substance sold and prescribed for a wide variety of complaints.

By the early modern period, the idea went beyond ancient Egyptian remains. Some European medical writers recommended preparations made from relatively fresh human corpses. A seventeenth-century recipe associated with Oswald Crollius, for example, described processing the body of a young executed man with alcohol, myrrh, and aloe to create medicinal mumia.

Mummy being looked at in preporation

European medical illustration

Corpse Medicine Beyond Mummies

Mumia was only one part of a larger European tradition sometimes called corpse medicine. Human materials could be assigned healing properties because of ideas about vitality, sympathy, death, and the medicinal powers believed to remain in a body.

This creates an important contradiction in the history of European writing about cannibalism: outsiders could be labeled savage for consuming human bodies while European medical traditions themselves incorporated human remains.

Human sacrifice was deeply connected to the Aztecs religious life. Sacrificial rites were understood within a cosmology in which humans owed obligations to the gods, and divine forces required nourishment and ritual repayment. Maintaining a cosmic order, and ensuring the continuation of life, were central ideas surrounding sacrifice.

Some sacrificed captives were also consumed afterward in ritual feasts. This was not ordinary food and was not a significant nutritional source. Scholarship has challenged older theories claiming Aztec cannibalism existed because the population lacked protein; evidence instead supports ritual and religious interpretations.

Tlacatlaolli

Colonial sources describe a dish called tlacatlaolli, made with maize and a small portion of flesh from a sacrificed captive. A warrior who had captured a prisoner could host a ritual feast involving relatives and other participants. The captor himself was not necessarily the person eating his captive, and portions were distributed according to ritual and status.

This also means Aztec cannibalism should not be described simply as "Aztecs ate people." It belonged to a highly specific ceremonial system involving warfare, captives, sacrifice, rank, religion, and communal feasting.

Among the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea, mortuary anthropophagy was historically part of funerary practice. It was not understood as violence against the dead. Ethnographic research records Fore explanations that consuming deceased loved ones was connected with mourning, affection, and properly disposing of the body. :contentReference[oaicite:12]{index=12}

During some rites, relatives and mourners consumed parts of the deceased, including tissues that could carry infectious prions. This allowed kuru, a fatal neurodegenerative prion disease, to spread through communities.

What Is Kuru?

Kuru is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy—a prion disease related to disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It damages the brain and nervous system and historically produced symptoms including tremors, loss of coordination, neurological decline, and death.

This is another example of why context matters. Describing the Fore practice only as "brain eating" turns a complicated funerary tradition into shock value and leaves out how participants themselves understood mourning, kinship, and treatment of their dead.

Survival cannibalism occurs when people facing starvation consume human remains because no viable food source remains. It has been documented in shipwrecks, sieges, expeditions, famines, and other disasters.

The Donner-Reed Party

The Donner-Reed Party became trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846–47 while traveling toward California. Their provisions disappeared, livestock were consumed, and survivors eventually resorted to eating human remains. The National Park Service records that both members attempting to reach help and people remaining in camp resorted to cannibalism during the crisis.

Importantly, the familiar image of everyone immediately turning on one another is misleading. Contemporary evidence and survivor testimony describe people reaching cannibalism only after prolonged starvation and after other sources of food had been exhausted.

Other Survival Cases

The Donner Party is famous in the United States, but survival cannibalism appears throughout history. Maritime disasters, polar expeditions, wartime sieges, and famine have produced similar situations.

These cases raise a difficult ethical distinction between consuming someone who has already died and deliberately killing another person for food. Historically and legally, those actions have not always been treated the same way.

Cannibalism has also been used as an accusation. European colonial powers repeatedly described foreign or Indigenous peoples as cannibals, sometimes based on real practices, sometimes on misunderstanding, and sometimes in ways that helped portray conquered peoples as dangerous or uncivilized.

That does not mean every historical report was invented. It means each claim has to be evaluated rather than automatically accepted simply because a colonial writer recorded it. Scholarship on Aztec cannibalism, for example, shows both substantial historical evidence and serious problems in interpreting colonial testimony.