The History of the Sky Burial

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When researchers come across the butchered remains of humans, they have to make a decision. And these can present difficulties of interpretation for anthropologists. So in Gough's Cave, they found the remains of five to seven people. They concluded that this was an example of either cannibalism or just the removal of flesh after death.

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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