An archaeologist calculated the nutritional potential of a human being, to understand why people in the Paleolithic era resorted to cannibalism,.
How many calories are you going to take in if you eat another human being? The question is cold in the back. But during the Paleolithic era, cannibalism was a common thing. To understand the reasons for this scenario now worthy of a horror film, archaeologist James Cole of Boston University counted the number of calories reported by the human body. His study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
125,000 calories
Based on reports of autopsies carried out between 1940 and 1950, archaeologist James Cole estimated the nutritional value of a human being at 125,000 calories. For example, a lung would bring in 16,000 calories, a heart 650 calories and a kidney 380 calories. Does that sound huge to you? Not that much, if the archaeologist is to be believed. “When you compare to other animals, we are not that nourishing,” he commented in an interview with National Geographic.
While James Cole obviously reports that a prehistoric animal of massive size like a mammoth or a woolly rhino would yield 3-6 million calories, an animal with a less impressive build like a bear, a boar or even a beaver. represents a caloric intake much more important than that of the human body.
Half as nutritious as birds
The study even proves that birds contain twice as many calories as the rest of us humans. “A human body could not have met the energy needs of a group of 25 people for just a day and a half,” says Cole.
If the study does not mention whether the human body is healthy or not, the site Quartz emphasizes on the other hand the fact that certain tribes of New Guinea have succumbed to diseases after having ingested human meat. Suffice to say that it does not open the appetite.
The human being, a food choice by default
And that’s not all: because according to Cole’s study, the fact of hunting someone of his own species to kill him and then to eat him turns out to be more difficult than with a animal. “If you hunt your own species, they are the same size as you, can think just like you, and can fight you back,” the scientist points out.
As to why our ancestors in the Paleolithic era practiced cannibalism, scientists interviewed by the National Geographic agree that it was more a question of necessity than of food selection. Clearly, prehistoric men ate each other when they had nothing else to eat. But it could also be explained by social reasons, such as funeral rites or a way of defending one’s territory.
The archaeologist concludes by mentioning that the results of his study relate only to raw meat, but that given recent studies which claim that cooking meat increases its calorie content, the data is potentially likely to increase. with cooked human flesh. “Given the nature of the study, it was not possible to push the analyzes that far,” the researcher quipped.
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