[lurk2]

I was surprised that I had never heard of this, but as I investigated further I found the citations were sparse. All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg. Here's an excerpt from the About section of his website:

> This book led me onto even stranger topics still: ghosts and poltergeists. As a lifelong rationalist and agnostic, I had no interest in these until I came across vampires behaving like poltergeists. What could this mean? After a lot of reading, of cases seemingly so impossible they made your head hurt; and after talking about poltergeists to many people, and having a surprising number of them say, Yes – that’s happened to me, I came to suspect that poltergeists were actually real. Not only that, but I also realised that the poltergeist is a master of disguise. Across centuries and continents, when people talk about vampires, witches, demons, ghosts, and even fairies, they are often clearly describing poltergeist outbreaks.

You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.

[defrost]

> All of the posts I could find about the topic on Reddit, for example, pointed back to Richard Sugg.

You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.

I assuming the throw away part about corpse medicine is what you refer to?

The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places. The writings in England on eating parts of humans as medicine are considerably more loaded, there are pre Henry VIIIth references and then there's a whole body of anti-Catholic propaganda spread about by protestants following the reformation.

Still, the guts of my comment was that canabalism was more common than thought, it appears to have been commonplace across all branches of human evolution:

* https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1083320

* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.300.5617.227a

are links to a paper (2003) and commentary that goes down that path looking at genetics.

The more troubling to some is recent history during which attitudes towards using body parts have changed, even in Europe.

Many accept evidence of cannibalism 1,000 years past in the Americas: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691637396/pr...

Some are uncomfortable about contempory reports of human flesh used in Asian medicines: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/chinese-made-infant-flesh-caps...

People can be forgiving of survival cannabilism in European famines (even in the 1930s) and among castaways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism_in_Europe

A number are just unaware that human bones were used to make beet sugar: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/skeletons-from-battle-of...

> You'll excuse me if I find it hard to take these claims seriously.

You're excused.

[lurk2]

> You can do better than searching reddit - eg. drilling back through references used by Volker in https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2189571/ and other papers.

The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper. I'm not contesting that cannibalism occurs, I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization. The original article you posted seemed to imply that the consumption of human body parts was common practice in Europe during the Renaissance. If the trade in human flesh and bones had been as common as the article was implying, why were anatomists robbing graves to find cadavers?

> The Egyptian mummy snacks were a thing and documented in multiple places.

I will concede on this. Most of the citations I was finding in the Wikipedia article you linked to ultimately only pointed to two sources (all the other articles it cited ultimately led back to Richard Sugg), but based on the article you linked to in this comment, I was able to find this article [0] on JSTOR which gets to a primary source describing the trade. I will have to do more reading about this as I wasn't able to find any indication of how this trade was viewed.

There were only a few instances of cannibalism listed during the colonial period in the Wikipedia article you linked to - most seem to have involved sailors lost at sea. I don't want to sound like I'm minimizing this given what I just learned about the trade in powdered mummies, but I still don't think there is a convincing case that the problem was occurring at anywhere near the scale seen in the South Pacific.

[0] - https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345912

[defrost]

> The word "Europe" does not appear in that paper.

I never claimed that it did.

I did strongly assert that "digging back through references used by Volker in (one random paper) and other papers" would serve you better than 'researching' via reddit.

There's an entire crowd of respected researchers in history, literature, anthropology, genetics, and disease that I dug into some 15 years past (and going back further, I knew the Alpers family since the 1970s) and while I'm not about to unearth that crate ATM I can promise there's better material "out there".

> I'm contesting the idea that it was occurring at rates that were at all comparable to the Maori at the time of colonization.

Perhaps you should have said that in your first reply to me then? I was honestly scratching my head a little as to what specific detail you had seized upon.

On that note, however, the Maori were exo-cannibals who delibrately descrated the bodies of their enemies in order to shame them and as an act of revenge.

How should we describe the act of digging up the fallen and grinding their bones in order to make sugar beet (as happened in Europe)? Is that on the scale of Maori battlefield desecration or at an even greater scale (given the numbers involved)?

All the recent references to cannabalism aside, my main point is that defences against disease related to cannibalism appears to be baked into human evolution .. we (all human evolutionary branches) have all practiced cannibalism in our past and the traces are still in our current makeup.