Cannibalism: The Archetypical Sign of Otherness

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Cannibalism has a stigma. Western culture equates it with folk stories of ogres, the tale of Jack in the Beanstalk and horror stories like Hannibal the Cannibal. Archaeologists realize that there is a ton of baggage associated with concluding that cannibalism was practiced among the Anasazi people. So I don't know what the truth is. Was it witch-killing? Was it a ritual dismemberment of a corpse, or was it just cannibalism?

We look into the evidence from primatology and archaeology to find the roots of human cannibalism in nature or nurture. Along the way we find shadows our own dual nature between sexy hippy bonobos and hawkish war chimps; learn how homo sapiens slept with their food, visit a stone age cave of nightmares in Britain; and join the debate over what seems to have been a short-lived fad for eating humans among the Ancestral Pueblo.

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