Marxist Anthropology: Primitive Communism or Primitive Cannibalism?

by Peter Gerard Myers

Date: April 11, 2025

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(1) Marxist Anthropology: Primitive Communism followed by Slavery
(2) Social Evolution - the Marxist version of 4 stages
(3) Aztec Cannibalism: they ate 250,000 people a year, from neighboring nations
(4) Maya Cannibalism too
(5) Our not-too-distant ancestors routinely killed and ate one another
(6) Letter from Les Hiatt
(7) Anthropology as Political Advocacy
(8) Anthropology split: CHAGNON REALISM of war, abuse & infanticide vs NOBLE SAVAGE ADVOCACY
(9) Chagnon's book Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

(1) Marxist Anthropology: Primitive Communism followed by Slavery

by Peter Myers, April 10, 2025.

You may have noticed that I know quite a lot about Marxism. That's because I gained an honours degree in Social/Cultural Anthropology in the early 1970s.

Anthropology courses were full of Marxism. Put it another way, many of the lecturers were Marxists, and many of the textbooks too.

e.g. the "Foundations of Modern Anthropology Series" edited by Marshall D. Sahlins, a Jewish Marxist.

I was at Sydney University during the early 1970s when Feminism was just getting under way, and when the Philosophy Department split into Traditional and Modern factions, the latter being leftist.

When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, a lot of Marxists (Stalinists) sold their books. In Canberra, I bought them, at garage sales and book fairs. That's how I picked up volume 1 of the Collected Works of Marx & Engels, which contains Marx's Ph.D. thesis.

I met Trotskyists such as John Passant, and Stalinists such as Ted Wheelwright.

Marx's view of history was a kind of Social Evolution; it featured four stages.

The first stage was Primitive Communism. It comprised Hunter-Gatherer society (Paleolithic, like Australian Aborigines), and early Farmers (Neolithic, like Melanesian and Polynesian society). They lived in stateless societies (i.e. there was no Government), which Marx called "Primitive Communism".

The next stage was Slavery. Some tribes conquered others and used them as slaves. Ancient Greece and Rome were slave societies, but so were Babylon, Egypt and China.

The next stage was Feudalism, "the dictatorship of an armed ruling class over an unarmed peasantry based on a system of land tenure".

The fourth stage was Capitalism, i.e. Wage Slavery.

And after that, we get back to Communism, this time not stateless but state-based. In responce to Bakunin's criticism that it would be despotic, Marx broke Communism into two stages, Socialism, in which a dictatorial state would rule, and Communism, in which the state would wither away because a New Man had emerged, thus approaching the Anarchism advocated by Bakunin. In the classless society there will be no conflict, and everyone will live happily ever after, with communal property and free love.

You might notice that there is no stage called "Civilization" What we used to call the great civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, India and China, Marx listed as Slave Societies.

Anthropology was a secular equivalent of theology; but it was anti-Civilization. Nearly all the peoples we studied were aboriginals or tribes which had been conquered by the Civilizations. Our emphasis was not on the virtues of Civilization but on its evils. Marx attacked all of the Civilizations; and his most subtle attack was to redefine them. Instead of calling them Civilizations, he called them "Class Societies".

Each was run by and for a small Ruling Class, and oppressed everyone else. The goal of all moral people should be to destroy the Class Societies (read Civilizations) in order to return to Communism. This time not primitive and stateless, but scientific, with all-powerful state control, which would be relaxed once all enemies of the new order had been defeated. War against the Civilizations was moral because the Civilizations themselves were founded on war, and used violence to maintain control, i.e. to maintain Civilization. Every Civilization had been underpinned by a Religion, and Marxism aimed to wipe out all organised Religion.

A lot of people believed the Biblical story that the Pyramids were build by Hebrew slaves. Egyptologists now know that the Exodus story is a myth, and that the Pyramids were built by paid workers, Egyptians not Hebrews. Archaeologists have excavated their villages and tombs near the Pyramids <http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6091E720100110>.

Dr. Ashraf Ezzat pointed out that the Pyramids are not even mentioned in the Bible:

"Have you ever wondered why are the Egyptian Pyramids and temples not mentioned in the Bible? Do you know that Egypt is mentioned in the Bible around six hundred times? The number is phenomenal and perplexing at the same time, for no one can revisit Egypt that too many times and never refers to one of its ancient icons; the Pyramids.

"On the other hand, do you have any idea how many times Israel/Israelites were mentioned in the Egyptian records? Get ready for this surprise; only once."

https://ashraf62.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/why-are-the-pyramids-not-mentioned-in-the-bible/ WHY ARE THE PYRAMIDS NOT MENTIONED IN THE BIBLE? Posted on July 24, 2016

The Biblical story may have influenced Marx's classification of Ancient Egypt as a Slave society.

All of those great civilizations are branded "Asiatic Despotisms" in Marxist anthropology. But Karl A. Wittfogel, a Trotskyist, branded the Soviet Union under Stalin a modern "Oriental Despotism", in his book of that name.

Wittfogel and other Trotskyists spared Lenin and Trotsky from such opprobium; but Solzhenmitsyn insisted that the totalitarianism begin with Lenin, not Stalin. Stalin merely gave the others a taste of their own medicine.

Friedrich Engels branded Primitive Communism as Matriarchial, thus inspiring waves of Feminism aimed at restoring that paradise. But Camille Paglia warned that Matriarchy had been bloody, the Chalice but also the Blade; and that Androgyny was the path to the fall of civilizations.

The discovery of the New World made Europe aware of societies radically different from any the West was familiar with, primitive societies, some of whom MAY have been idyllic.

Thomas More's book Utopia was inspired by idealised reports of Maya society. But we now know that the Maya practiced Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism like the Aztecs.

Both the Aztecs and the Maya had tall, stepped, pyramids with temples at the top, at which the hearts were cut out from live victims, and offered to the gods. The bloody job was done by priests. Subsequently, the victims were eaten - well, only the limbs (arms and legs) were eaten; the torsos were left to wild animals.

"... the Aztecs sacrificed 250,000 people a year. This consituted about 1 percent of the region's population of 25 million." (item 3)

The Aztecs only ate their enemies, who they had captured in war; their did not eat their own people. An anthropologist recently pointed out that the Aztecs (& Maya) lacked large herbivores (cattle, horses, goats, sheep, pigs) and thus were short of protein. He gave that as a reason for the cannibalism. The Incas had llamas, but they were unknown to the Aztecs.

Could shortage of meat be a reason why so many primitive societies were cannibalistic?

I have been reading many accounts of Australian Aborigines, and cannibalism seems universal. In most cases, it was ritual cannibalism, where you eat a dead warrior to acquire his valour. But, just after giving birth, mothers ate unwanted babies; there was no contraception, and deserts and droughts made the food supply critical. A mother who wanted the baby became attached to it and did not eat it.

What would YOU do, reader, if our state collapsed - e.g. if wages and social welfare payments ceased, and you had no food? Would you eat other people? As historically happened after airplanes crashed in remote places? For us it is a nightmare, but for our far ancestors it was the norm.

Primitive Communism turns out to be Primitive Cannibalism.

In Ancient Egypt, Osisis, a king, was credited with teaching the people to give up Cannibalism. We think of this as a step in becoming Civilized. But in Marxist anthropology, those early civilizations were merely states in which the Ruling Class (the royal families and aristocracy) enslaved everyone else. There is no accolade called "Civilized".

Admittedly, the Pyramids WERE tombs of the early Pharaohs; thousands of people built them, as corvee service during the dry seasons where farms were idle.

From a Marxist viewpoint, they are monuments to the Ruling Class and Tyranny. Such a view is not much different from that of fundamentalist Christans and fundamentalist Muslims, who were implicated in damage to the Pyramids and the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria.

Today, we tend to see the Pyramids, and the tombs of the Pharaohs near Luxor (Thebes), as monuments to human achievement; and their destruction as desecration. But it still happens - witness the destruction of Buddhas in Afghanistan, and a temple at Palmyra.

I don't mean to imply that Primitive life had no benefits or virtues. I did my B.A. Hons thesis on Childbirth in Primitive Societies, and found that we had much to learn from them.

I was interested in discerning whether there was some commonality which could be called "human nature". Margaret Mead had claimed that there was not.

One commonality I found in these births was that the postures were overwhelmingly upright (kneeling, squatting, sitting on a birth stool with a hole in the middle, standing while holding a rope or supported by other people). The advantages are that the pelvic cavity is expanded, gravity lends assistance, and the woman is able to exert more abdominal pressure.

Another commonality was that breast-feeding lasted about 3 years.

I found that the medical textbooks for the training of doctors and nurses, in our universities and colleges, completely omitted any mention, let alone investigation, of upright posture. So much for the notion that they were the "experts".

One other important finding is that in our system, there is a changeover of expert just after the birth, from obstetrician - who has handled the pregnancy up to that point - to pediatrician, who takes over then. There was a lack of continuity, which might explain the problems in getting bonding and breast-feeding established.

The obstetrician, for example, judged his sucess by whether mother and baby survived. It was not his business whether interventions during the birth (induction, cesarean, drugs etc) affected the ability of mother and baby to bond afterwards.

Bonding occurs as a hormonal reaction in the mother soon after birth if interferences have not disturbed her. In the case of farm animals, touching the newborn before the mother has bonded can cause her to reject it.

This instinctive bonding is an instant falling-in-love with the baby, that makes the arduous task of looking after it seem a joy. Fathers, siblings, and mothers who don't bond at birth, can still bond gradually, the slow way. You know you've bonded when you can't imagine life without the new child.

The baby instinctively looks at human eyes, and smiles at them. These elicit caring responses.

In Home Birth methods, upright posture is commonly used, and the same midwife attends the woman throughout - during the pregnancy, at the birth, and for the first 10 days after, to help mother and baby settle in together.

One thing I was not interested in, in my study, was the religious aspect of birth; I edited this out of my reports.

Yet later, when I looked through the reports again, I noticed that, in every case, the people were praying to their spirits, gods or goddesses, requesting safe delivery and thanking them for it afterwards.

The spirits or gods were different from group to group, so the details of each religion seemed - to the outside observer - to be man-made. Yet, man-made or not, these religions were crucially important to the peace of mind of all these people, and the smooth functioning of their social relations.

Personally, I admire the great skill that Australian Aborigines had in surviving in difficult environments. If our states were to collapse, and we had to fend for ourselves, it would take us many years to re-learn the skill that primitive people had.

And I don't deny that they may have been healthier and happier than more civilized people.

Futher, there was greater equality among them than among ourselves, and each person had greater freedom because there was no Government to control everyone. But for that very reason, people used to kill each other more freely; elders administered the death penalty for offences under their law, and tribes had to be constantly on alert for enemies who might attack them.

When a woman's husband died, she became the wife of his brother; every adult woman was married. Many conflicts were over women, because the more wives you had, the more children. You would kill the other guy and acquire his wives. It was a Darwinian version of Social Evolution, not a Marxist one.

One of the consequences was keeping the human population level down. The ending of that Primitive tribal life has contributed to the population explosion in Africa and South America.

The population explosion is the reason we cannot return to a Paleolithic or Neolithic lifestyle. Civilized society allowed much greater population density, such that no return would be possible without large-scale genocide.

(2) Social Evolution - the Marxist version of 4 stages

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/cowl/1939/abc/02-evolution.html

Carl Cowl

ABC of Marxism

* * *

Lesson Two The Evolution of Society

The deepest understanding and demonstration of the laws of social science (Marxism) can be derived from a study of the evolution of society from the beginning of time to the present. This evolution can be divided into four distinct stages: 1) Primitive communism; 2) Chattel Slavery; 3) Serfdom (Feudalism); 4) Wage-Slavery (Capitalism).

A. Primitive communism

The earliest known system of society, of which there exist examples today in certain backward spots of the earth. Men lived together in groups known as gens or clans. These were units of a larger group called the tribe. This type of organization is built up on kinship or blood relationship. There was no private property, and hence no classes. The land was owned and exploited in common. While the simple tools and weapons of the period might be held and used temporarily by the individual, the products of labor were owned in common. Each person got what he needed from the common store or supply. Necessarily life was extremely primitive. Great changes in the material conditions of primitive existence brought about changes in social organization. Domestication of animals and the introduction of simple agriculture permitted man to be less dependent upon the hunt for his food supply. Thus he adopted new habits of life. A long period of social development under savagery and barbarism laid the basis for the system of chattel Slavery.

B. Chattel Slavery

The extension of the domestication of animals and agriculture meant that more labor had to be expended and employed by the shepherd and planter in these industries. Labor become more valuable. Various tribes learned not to kill their captives in battle but to use them as slaves, because the captive could thus produce more wealth than necessary to maintain him. Greece and Rome were the classical slave states of antiquity, although Slavery existed in all parts of the world where society was emerging from primitive communism. Slavery arose through the development of private property in land and the recognition of the right to mortgage, to buy and sell land. The debtor who failed to pay his debt became the slave of the creditor. The rise of private property broke down the old tribal system of life. It introduced a new form of social organization: the state. The state was created by the propertied class to protect their property from those who possessed no property. But the very system of Slavery proved its own undoing. Freemen could not compete with slaves and themselves fell into Slavery. The system was extended to such an extreme, wealth became concentrated into so few hands, that the whole system was weakened from within by corruption and rebellion and fell under blows from without by invasion. The prevailing mode of production under chattel Slavery was agricultural.

C. Feudalism

Feudalism is the dictatorship of an armed ruling class over an unarmed peasantry based on a system of land tenure. It grows up in the period of incessant warfare following the dissolution of the slave states. A special class of warriors arises to ÒprotectÓ the toiling peasants in order at the same time to exploit them. The peasants become ÒboundÓ to the soil. The military leaders assume hieratical ranks from a king and nobility down to the knight. Feudalism is a ÒstaticÓ system in that it exists in local isolation with fixed customs. Economy is at a subsistence level. Money economy, trade, the new luxuries from the East, the rise of towns within the feudal economy ­ all these are alien and inimical elements that arise to break down the feudal system and gives way to the modern system of capitalism. Agricultural production gives way to hand tool production (handicraft). Feudal economy loses its fight with handicraft production which is much more efficient. This development gives birth to what we call capitalism.

D. Capitalism

Capitalism arises out of exchange economy, trade, buying and selling in the market. The rising merchant class spread this system over the entire globe and created the world market. Everything becomes a commodity, a useful article produced not for consumption by the producer but for sale on the market. It is this system that we shall study more in detail in this course. The capitalist mode of production, based on the monopoly and private ownership of the means of production, is distinguished from all other past and future modes of production by 1) wage-labor; 2) commodity production; and 3) surplus value.

* * *

Required Reading

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm> The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State ­ Engels

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm> The Communist Manifesto ­ Marx and Engels

Suggested Reading

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1890/property/index.html> The Evolution of Property ­ Paul Lafargue

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/pdf/1902/two_pages.pdf> Two Pages from Roman History ­ Daniel DeLeon

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1892/12/mark.htm> The Mark ­ Engels

<https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1912/marxism-darwinism.htm> Marxism and Darwinism ­ Pannekoek

<https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/morgan-lewis/ancient-society/index.htm> Ancient Society ­ Lewis Morgan

<https://minervawisdom.com/2019/10/28/karl-marxs-dialectical-historicism/> Karl MarxÕs Dialectical Historicism

(3) Aztec Cannibalism: they ate 250,000 people a year, from neighboring nations

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/02/19/archives/aztec-sacrifices-laid-to-hunger-not-just-religion.html

Aztec Sacrifices Laid to Hunger, Not Just Religion

By Boyce Rensberger

Feb. 19, 1977

February 19, 1977, Page 50<https://store.nytimes.com/collections/new-york-times-page-reprints

The Aztecs sacrificed human beings atop their sacred pyramids not simply for religious reasons but because they had to eat people to obtain protein needed in their diet, a New York anthropologist has suggested.

Based on evidence he has gathered, Dr. Michael Harner, a professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, contends that in the 15th century, just before the Spanish conquerors arrived in Mexico, the Aztecs had the most cannibalistic culture known to modern anthropology.

Although most sources on the Aztecs note that human sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced, they seldom suggest that it was anything more than an occasional religious rite.

Dr. Harner's theory of nutritional need is based on a recent revision in the number of people thought to have been sacrificed by the Aztecs. Dr. Woodrow Borah an authority on the demography of ancient Mexico at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently estimated that the Aztecs sacrificed 250,000 people a year. This consituted about 1 percent of the region's population of 25 million.

Meat Shortage

While the Aztec civilization, with its architecturally spectacular cities and elaborately codified life-styles, is usually thought of as having been bountiful, Dr. Harner contends that conventional food in the thickly populated region was not always abundant.

He argues that cannibalism, which may have begun for purely religious reasons, appears to have grown to serve nutritional needs because the Aztecs, unlike nearly all other civilizations, lacked domesticated herbivores such as pigs or cattle.

Staples of the Aztec diet were corn and beans supplemented with a few vegetables, lizards, snakes and worms. There were some domesticated turkeys and hairless dogs. Poor people gathered floating mats or vegetation from lakes.

Humans Fattened in Cages

Dr. Harner's theories are to be published in a formal article in the February issue of American Ethnologist a journal of the American Anthropological Association.

ÒThe evidence of Aztec cannibalism,Ó Dr. Hamer wrote for that article, Òhas largely been ignored and consciously or unconsciously covered up.Ó

In contemporary sources, however, such as the writings of Hernando Cortes, who conquered the Aztecs in 1521, and Bernal Diaz, who accompanied Cortes, Dr. Harrier says there is abundant evidence that human sacrifice was a common event in every town and that the limbs of the victims were boiled or roasted and eaten.

Diaz, who is regarded by anthropologists as a highly reliable source, wrote in ÒThe Conquest of New Spain,Ó for example, that in the town of Tlaxcala Òwe found wooden cages made of lattice-work in which men and women were imprisoned and fed until they were fat enough to be sacrificed and eaten. These prison cages existed throughout the country.Ó

The sacrifices, carried out by priests, took place atop the hundreds of steepwalled pyramids scattered about the Valley of Mexico. According to Diaz, the victims were taken up the pyramids where the priests Òlaid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them.

Above, Dr. Michael Harner. Right, a depiction of human sacrifice practiced by the Aztecs. Above left, the royal city of Tenochtitlan, showing pyramids and, at far right, the rack estimated by Spaniards to have held 136,000 skulls.

Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off their arms and legs. Then they ate their flesh with a sauce of peppers and tomatoes.Ó

The skulls were placed on a skull rack near each pyramid, alongside the skulls of previous victims. In Tenochtitlan, the royal city of the Aztecs and the precursor of Mexico City, Cortes's associates counted a minimum of 136,000 skulls on the rack.

Diaz's accounts indicate that the Aztecs ate only the limbs of their victims. The torsos were fed to carnivores in zoos.

According to Dr. Harner, the Aztecs never sacrificed their own people. Instead they battled neighboring nations, using tactics that minimized deaths in battle and maximized the number of prisoners.

The traditional explanation for Aztec human sacrifice has been that it was religiousÑa way of winning the support of the gods for success in battle. Victories procured even more victims, thus winning still more divine support in the next war.

Dr. Harner contends that a need for food, particularly during periods of famine, came to be a significant factor, especially as the human population in the Valley of Mexico grew to 25 million.

In 1450, for example, Aztec records indicated that famines were so severe that the royal granaries, which contained the grain surpluses of more than 10 good years, were depleted.

Traditional anthropological accounts indicate that to win more favor from the gods during the famine the Aztecs arranged with their neighbors to stage battles for prisoners who could be sacrificed. The AztecsÕ neighbors, sharing similar religious tenets, wanted to sacrifice Aztecs to their gods.

(4) Maya Cannibalism too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0W6NMGbo4c

The Chilling Truth About Maya Cannibalism

<https://www.youtube.com/@ThomasSowellTV> Thomas SowellTV

Apr 4, 2025 Subscribe to Odysee

Transcript

0:00 By the time the Spaniards arrived on the scene centuries later, the great centers of Mayan civilization were already ruins, some overgrown by jungle, though much of the intangible culture still survived. 0:12 However, long before the Spanish invasion, indigenous invaders brought a new infusion of peoples and cultures to the 0:18 Mayan regions.

The earliest known contact between the Maya and the Spaniards occurred in 1511, when several survivors of a Spanish shipwreck were captured by the Maya, became human sacrifices and their bodies were eaten at a feast. Other urvivors of the same shipwreck were deemed too thin for a feast, then were ept for a later holiday that was approaching, by which time they might be fattened up. In the meantime they escaped

(5) Our not-too-distant ancestors routinely killed and ate one another

Natural born Cannibals, by Richard Hollingham

New Scientist, 10 July 2004

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18324555-400-natural-born-cannibals/

For decades argument has raged overwhether human cannibalism was ever widespread. But with startling new evidence to go on, it is time to accept that our not-too-distant ancestors routinely killed and ate one another, says Richard Hollingham

AS IS usual in such cases, Armin Meiwes's neighbours in the small German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda described him as "quiet". The truth, as the world now knows, was very different. Meiwes was a cannibal killer who in 2000 butchered and partially ate a man known as Jurgen B, a 42-year-old from Berlin who he met in an internet chat room. What makes the case even more shocking was that Jurgen B was apparently a willing victim.

The Meiwes case, and the global media frenzy it whipped up, served as a reminder of cannibalism's power to shock and fascinate. From Anthony Hopkins's portrayal of the fictional Hannibal Lecter to the real-life testimonies of the Donner Party - a band of US pioneers who in December 1846 became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains and had to resort to eating their companions - stories of cannibalism are utterly compelling. Who hasn't gasped at the tale of the Uruguayan rugby union team who crashed in a remote part of the Andes in 197a and were forced to eat their dead team mates?

Modern-day cannibalism is fascinating because it is widely seen as an extreme anomaly of human behaviour - either a last-ditch bid to survive or a sick crime perpetrated by a madman. What is perhaps surprising, though, is that ancient cannibalism is often viewed through the same lens. Despite extensive archaeological and anthropological evidence for its occurrence, most scientists believe that cannibalism was only an irregular feature of prehistoric human societies.

But in the past year or so studies have been published suggesting that human cannibalism was once much more widespread than we might care to think. Genetic and biochemical evidence has now convinced many scientists that the consumption of human flesh was once commonplace, perhaps even socially acceptable. And chillingly, if they are right, many of us carry genetic protection against diseases passed on by eating our fellow humans.

These controversial claims have reignited a lively and highly polarised ebate that stretches back several decades. Until recently, the arguments have centred on two types of evidence - accounts of cannibalism documented by explorers and anthropologists, and telltale "butchery" marks on human bones found at archaeological sites.

Among the believers in widespread cannibalism is archaeologist Timothy Taylor of the University of Bradford, UK. He cites anthropological evidence for cannibalism dating back hundreds of years, from accounts of the ancient Greeks, to explorers including Christopher Columbus and Captain Cook, to 20th-century anthropologist Edward Gifford of the University of California at Berkeley. In 195l, after a study of prehistoric Fijian culture, Gifford concluded that "outside of fish, man was the most popular of the vertebrates used for food". Taylor aIso points to the archaeological evidence. "We can infer from cut-marked animal bones that animals were part of the human diet," he says. "The same logic should be applied to cut-marked human bones."

Bones like these have turned up all over the world and throughout human history. Recently, for example, palaeoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California at Berkeley unearthed three 160,000-year-old fossil skulls in Ethiopia. They were the oldest known fossils of modern humans, but that wasn't all: each skull had cut marks indicating they had been "de-fleshed" (Nature, vol 423, p 742). Previous studies by White have found similar cut marks on hominid bones dating back 600,000 years, and what he describes as "compelling evidence" for cannibalism from Neanderthal remains found in France (Science, vol 286, p 128).

Similar evidence has also been found at an Anasazi site known as Houck K in Arizona. Back in the early l990S, the site, which dates from the mid 12th century, yielded a large cache of human bones. The bones show signs of having been butchered and cooked: they bear cut marks and also have a worn appearance indicating they have been subjected to prolonged boiling. What is more, the vertebrae are selectively missing, which some researchers suggest is because some had been crushed to extract bone marrow. "Wherever you look in the prehistoric record you come across this phenomenon," says White. "There is widespread evidence for cannibalism in France, England, Mexico and North America."

However, the anthropological and archaeological evidence is circumstantial. Sceptics point out that no outsider, whether explorer or anthropologist, has ever witnessed an act of cannibalism: all the reports are second-hand and therefore unreliable. Even the supposedly well-established cannibalistic "mortuary feasts" of Papua New Guinea have never been confirmed. "Out of the 10,000 anthropologists in the world, not one has ever witnessed a human being butchered and eaten," says Bill Arens, professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University in New York and author of The Man-Eating Myth (Oxford University Press, 1980). What is more, cut marks on bones could have arisen in all sorts of ways that need to be excluded before concluding that they were made by cannibals. They could have come about through conflict with enemies, executions or burial rituals, for example. And even if some butchery was going on, that does not necessarily mean the flesh was subsequently eaten.

But in the past year or so, new evidence has emerged that looks like swinging the argument in the favour of believers such as Taylor.

The first piece of evidence concerns some peculiar goings-on 850 years ago in what is now south-western Colorado. There, in a tiny pueblo, at least seven people were butchered, cooked and eaten. The evidence for cannibalism at the site is comprehensive, providing the first solid proof that humans were being killed an eaten in pre-Columbian America (Nature, vol 407, p 74).

The site, a typical settlement on a broad flood plain called Cowboy Wash, comprised three cylindrical houses 3 to 5 metres in diameter and built from sun-dried adobe brick. Previous studies at the site indicated that, after being occupied for around 30 years, the houses were suddenly abandoned in around 1150. The occupants left behind everything from cooking pots and utensils to polished stone tools and ornaments. It appeared that nothing had been scavenged from the site and no structures had been destroyed - they were just left to crumble.

But it was the more grisly discoveries that the team, led by pathologist Richard Marlar of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, chose to investigate further. In the remains of one of the pit houses were more than a thousand human bones and bone fragments. Some were scattered across the Floor, others were piled up in a side chamber. Closer examination revealed cut marks on the bones and traces of human blood on two stone cutting tools. Nearby were the remains of cooking pot and, in the ash of the hearth, a deposit of human faeces known as a coprolite.

Marlar and his team suspected cannibalism, so they carried out biochemical tests on the cooking pot and coprolite. They were looking for traces of human myoglobin, a protein found only in skeletal and cardiac muscle cells, where it is used to store and transport oxygen.

Cooked and eaten

They subjected shards of the cooking pot to immunological test that uses antibodies at bind only to a target protein - in this case human myoglobin. Analysis revealed that human myoglobin was indeed present in the pot, whereas it was not found in 29 samples taken from other cooking pots from nearby archaeological sites dating from 150 to 1175. In other words, human flesh had almost certainly been cooked at the site.

But had it been eaten? To find out, they subjected the coprolite to the same type of analysis. Under the microscope, the absence of starch granules from the faeces suggested that the depositor hadn't eaten any plant material for up to 36 hours previously, and had probably consumed only meat. No one would have been surprised to find human proteins in the faeces, as we are constantly shedding epithelial cells from the lining of our intestines. But finding myoglobin would be almost unthinkable.

A control group of 39 modern humans, including some with blood in their faeces, as well as samples from 20 other prehistoric coprolites, showed no human myoglobin. Because the protein is found only in skeletal and cardiac muscle, the test would only prove positive if human flesh had been consumed. It did, giving Marlar "the first direct evidence of cannibalism in the American south-west".

But some anthropologists think we should be cautious about how this finding is interpreted. "What the study proves is that cannibalism may have occurred at this particular site," says Arens. "It doesn't prove it was widespread." He has devoted much of the past 30 years to debunking the claims of those who believe cannibalism was endemic in human societies. "I sometimes feel I'm banging my head against a brick wall," he says. "We look at one or two archaeological finds and say, people were cannibals. There is no evidence that there was cultural cannibalism."

Arens clearly has a point. There migh be specific instances of cannibalism, but where is the evidence that cannibalism was widespread in early human societies? John Collinge of University College London thinks he has it, and his evidence comes from an unlikely source.

In a paper published last year (Science, vol 300, p 640), Collinge's team, led by Simon Mead, reported on their study of the effect of the brain disease called kuru found amongst the Fore people from the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Eat the ancestors

Kuru is a prion disease, rather like BSE and CID, that is widely believed to have been contracted during mortuary feasts. Though such feasts were never witnessed by outsiders, reports that the Fore had a custom of eating their dead have been central to studies of kuru since it was first investigated by Carleton Gajdusek of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in the 1950s. There is some evidence to support the reports, not least that kuru started to decline once the Australian colonial authorities banned mortuary feasts in the 1950s. Kuru also affected mostly women and children, who were said to be the main participants at the feasts.

Collinge's team set out to study the genetic effect of the disease on the Fore population. From studies of people in the UK infected with variant CJD, they knew that some people are more likely to contract the disease than others. Was this the case with kuru too?

The basis for differences in susceptibility to vCJD is that there are two forms of the gene that codes for the prion protein. They differ by a single amino acid - one form codes for the amino acid valine, the other codes for methionine. For reasons that are not well understood, people with one of each type, known as heterozygotes, seem to be more resistant than homozygotes - people who have two of the same form, whether they code for valine or methionine (Nature, vol 352, p 340).

Collinge's team analysed the genotypes of a large group of Fore people and compared the data with 1000 other genotypes, representing different ethnic groups from around the world. Their first discovery was that more than three-quarters of Fore women over the age of 50 were heterozygotes. Statistically this is much, much higher than would be expected. Mead and Collinge proposed that because the Fore were exposed to kuru through cannibalism, the population was subjected to evolutionary pressure to preserve both variant genes.

If true, this would be a rare instance of what is known as balancing selection. For most genes one version is slightly better than another and so variants tend to disappear over evolutionary time. Only occasionally do two or more variants persist in a population the best example is the haemoglobin gene, which has several variants that, singly, offer a degree of protection against malaria. The downside is that having two copies of one of the variants causes sickle-cell anaemia or thalassaemia.

But the bigger discovery was still to come. When Collinge analysed DNA samples from ethnic groups around the world, he discovered that the Fore weren't alone. Heterozygotes are lound in every population, suggesting that the rest of us have also been exposed to balancing selection to preserve both variants of the prion gene in the population. In other words, all human populations have inbuilt resistance to prion diseases.

What has given us this resistance? It is of course possible that the selection pressure came from eating infected animals. Rut Collinge believes that the most plausible explanation is that our ancestors were cannibals. The implication is that, rather than being an aberration, cannibalism was widespread in traditional human societies.

It's a conclusion that Arens maintains is fundamentally flawed. "There is no evidence that the Fore were cannibals," he says, "This whole study is based on a practice that never existed. It was never witnessed." Arens reckons the more likely explanation for kuru is that it was contracted when pigs were fed on other pigs before being eaten by humans, in much the same way that feeding cows to cows led to the BSE epidemic and, ultimately, vCJD. However, there is scant evidence for his claim.

For White, meanwhile, the biochemical and genetic studies vindicate what he has been saying for years. "The question now is not did cannibalism happen," he says, "but why did it happen?" If cannibalism was widespread, it would suggest the consumption of human flesh went beyond merely nutritional necessity, also known as survival cannibalism. In his book The Buried Soul (Fourth Estate, 2002) Taylor suggests any number of reasons, some more unsavoury than others. For example, it could be aggression, spirituality or even for pleasure.

Despite the new evidence, however, the unsettling conclusion that our ancestors regularly consumed human flesh is something that many people will still find hard to accept. Taylor reckons there's a taboo to overcome: people simply don't want to believe. Perhaps that's no great surprise. After all, it's not too big a leap from accepting our cannibal legacy to believing the chilling statement that Meiwes made to the police after his arrest: "There are about 800 cannibals in Germany."

Richard Hollingham is a science writer and broadcaster based in London

(6) Letter from Les Hiatt

Here is a letter to me from Dr L. R. Hiatt, one of Australia's leading Anthropologists, in 1975. He was my supervisor when I did my B. A. Hons thesis at Sydney University.

I was awarded 2nd class Hons division 1. This was probably because, when I did the course work in 1973, I had glandular fever. I did the thesis the next year, 1974.

It was a comparative study of childbirth in primitive and modern societies. I argued against those Anthropologists who deny that there is such a thing as Human Nature. Instead I showed that in pregnancy, birth and infancy there is a natural way, which was followed by simpler societies, but that we can ignore (as ours does) at our cost.

It was 70,000 words. After that, they imposed a limit of 20,000 words.

I could not do further research in childbirth because it is such a private matter, one where men are excluded. Getting 2nd class rather than 1st class meant that I did not get a grant do a higher degree in Anthropology. So I dropped it.

The University of Sydney
12/2 (February 12, 1975)
Dear Peter,
I understand there is money available for research on such matters as childbirth through organizations associated with International Year for Women. If you are interested in pursuing this topic, please let me know. Personally, I think it would be a shame if you dropped it in favour of something else. Your thesis, in my opinion, was First Class Hons. standard. I would be glad to support you should you decide to continue this work at an empirical level.
Sincerely,
Les Hiatt

the letter is at Hiatt-Les-letter.pdf.

(7) Anthropology as Political Advocacy

by Peter Myers, April 11, 2025

In many respects, Anthropology is a dying profession, because primitive peoples have nearly all been swallowed up by Civilizations, i.e. states.

On the other hand, native peoples within Western states (Canada, USA, Australia, NZ) have been agitating for land rights, apologies, reparations and independence, in alliance with leftist Anthropologists who have become political advocates for their cause.

Most of these leftist Anthropologists are Marxists. Since I finished my Anthropology course in 1974, they have increasingly taken over the profession. They have brought LGBT perspectives in, and completely changed the presentation of human history. There used to be a database called the Human Relations Area Files, which contained ethnological reports, but the last time I checked, it seemed to have been locked up (censored).

These Marxist Anthropologists deny that there is such a thing as Human Nature. Their motto is 'Man Makes Himself'. Margaret Mead was their figurehead; Marshall Sahlins a more recent leader.

Anthropology is a revolutionary profession. Engels' book The Origin Of The Family Private Property And The State was based on anthropolgical theories of Lewis Henry Morgan, in which matriarchial, matrilineal society was overthrown by Patriarchy.

The promise of Liberation was based on anthropological accounts of Primitive Communism.

That is where Radical Feminism comes from; and, more recently, LGBT, Gay Marriage and Sex-Change.

There used to be a debate, within the profession, on Nature vs Nurture. Which was more critical in shaping people, biological constraints (Nature) or culture (Nurture)?

The truth lies in the interaction of both variables. Nature expects Nurture, anticipates it and is programmed to receive its input; this was a key insight in John Bowlby's book Attachment. Thus sexual behaviour in primates is both "instinctual" and "learned", in that the social environment normally provides the opportunities for imitation that the individual organism is programmed to look for.

When that social environment no longer provides the same conditions, behaviour that normally is instinctive no longer occurs.

In Childbirth, the undrugged mother, attended by an experienced midwife, normally experiences hormonal bonding just after the birth. When the undrugged baby looks at her eyes (as it instinctively does), she falls in love with it, and forgets the difficulty of the birth. But human intervention, or a difficult birth, may render this interaction void.

Breastfeeding increases the bonding, because Nature has made it very pleasurable for the mother. This is a reward and an enticement.It is a mistake for nurses to give a bottle to the baby, because as a result it will suck less next time, and the sucking is necessary for drawdown.

Until the mid 1970s, the Sexual Division of Labour was universally accepted as a feature of human life. This means that men and women have different roles.

In hunter-gatherer society, men hunt and women collect small game and wild vegetables. The Aboriginal man carries only a spear, so that, if a kangaroo is spotted, he can instantly pursue it. The woman carries the baby and everything else. They had few possessions, because the hunting life is nomadic. As they exhausted the food supply in one place, they had to move. Home was a humpy made of boughs.

When alternative-lifestylers (like me) moved to rural areas in the late 1970s, the men learned to build houses and the women learned to give birth at home. In the cities, men and women had lives more similar to one another, but young children were still mainly looked after by their mothers; daycare was uncommon. Today, women are urged to pursue careers, daycare is universal, and young men have been trained to pride themselves on their cooking skills. The idea behind it all is Androgyny - that there is really only one sex.

Androgyny was promoted in early Bolshevism, but Marx and Engels were ambivalent about it, sometimes in favour and sometimes opposed, as Alison M. Jagger shows in her book Feminist Politics and Human Nature: sex-soviet.html.

However their followers in the West, from the mid 1970s, have swung firmly behind Androgyny, and rejected the Sexual Division of Labour; it is now called "sexist".

Marx taught that Civilization was oppressive; social unity was a myth, instead there was a perpetual class war. Freud taught that Civilization was based on repression of our natural desires - sex in particular. The remedy, administered via Freud's Marxist followers in the Frankfurt School, has been the "liberation" of those desires. The balance between instinct and conscience obtained in earlier times has been destroyed by the attack on the "authoritarian personality". Hence the denunciation of the opponents of Gay Marriage as haters and bigots - unthinkable in earlier times.

Religion is a means by which our instincts are kept in check. Every Civilization is based upon a religion, but Freud taught that religion is a mental illness; in this way he undermined Civilization. Yet Thomas Szasz points out that he exempted the Jewish religion, and identified strongly as Jewish and a Zionist: freud.html.

The Frankfurt School of psychologists (Theo Adorno and associates) began with the idea that Hitler = Stalin, a Trotskyist and Zionist position. Casting out these demons, they asked, how can society prevent such Authoritarian Personalities from developing? And they answered, by personal "liberation", the dismantling of all taboos especially rules on sexual conduct. Officially their targets were Stalin's brand of Communism, and National Socialism, but the social anarchy they spawned has dissolved the very Western civilization which fought both Hitler and Stalin.

Marxism set out to destroy our attachment and identification with all past civilizations. It has succeeded, by "deconstructing" them, analysing them into lifeless components.

A person without a past is like a child with no family, an orphan.

Marxism has succeeded in changing the view of the younger generation about the past. That's why most kids are glued to their pop music etc, and despising or ignoring their parents.

We have no alternative to build a new, more robust conception of the past, which can withstand the attacks of the Deconstructers.

(8) Anthropology split: CHAGNON REALISM of war, abuse & infanticide vs NOBLE SAVAGE ADVOCACY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon

Napoleon Chagnon

Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon (27 August 1938 ­ 21 September 2019) was an American cultural anthropologist, professor of sociocultural anthropology at the University of Missouri in Columbia and member of the National Academy of Sciences.[2] Chagnon was known for his long-term ethnographic field work among the Yanomamö/Yanomami, a society of indigenous tribal Amazonians, in which he used an evolutionary approach to understand social behavior in terms of genetic relatedness. His work centered on the analysis of violence among tribal peoples, and, using socio-biological analyses, he advanced the argument that violence among the Yanomami is fueled by an evolutionary process in which successful warriors have more offspring. His 1967 ethnography Yanomamö: The Fierce People became a bestseller and is frequently assigned in introductory anthropology courses.

Admirers described him as a pioneer of scientific anthropology. Chagnon was called the "most controversial anthropologist" in the United States in a New York Times Magazine profile preceding the publication of Chagnon's most recent book, a memoir titled Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous TribesÑthe Yanomamö and the Anthropologists.[3]

... The anthropologist Brian Ferguson argued that Yanomamö culture is not particularly violent, and that the violence that does exist is largely a result of socio-political reconfigurations of their society under the influence of colonization. Bruce Albert rejected the statistical basis for his claims that more violent Yanomamö men have more children. Others questioned the ethics inherent in painting an ethnic group as violent savages, pointing out that Chagnon's depiction of the Yanomamö as such breaks with anthropology's traditional ethics of trying to describe foreign societies sympathetically, and argued that his depictions resulted in increased hostility and racism against the Yanomamö by settlers and colonists in the area. Emily Eakin countered that Albert "cannot demonstrate a direct connection between Chagnon's writings and the government's Indian policy" and that the idea that scientists should suppress unflattering information about their subjects is troubling and supports the idea that nonviolence is a prerequisite for protecting the Yanomamö.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, one of Chagnon's graduate teachers, criticized Chagnon's methods, pointing out that Chagnon acknowledged engaging in behavior that was disagreeable to his informants by not participating in food-sharing obligations. Sahlins claimed that Chagnon's trade of steel weaponry for blood samples and genealogical information amounted to "participant-instigation" which encouraged economic competition and violence. Lastly, Sahlins argued that Chagnon's publications, which contend that violent Yanomamö men are conferred with reproductive advantages, made false assumptions in designating killers and omit other variables that explain reproductive success. In 2013, Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences, in part in protest of Chagnon's election to the body. Other researchers of the Yanomamö such as Brian Ferguson argued that Chagnon himself contributed to escalating violence among the Yanomamö by offering machetes, axes, and shotguns to selected groups to elicit their cooperation.

Chagnon said that it was instead local Salesian priests who were supplying guns to the Yanomamö, who then used them to kill each other.

In his autobiography <Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes - the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists>, Chagnon stated that most criticisms of his work were based on a postmodern and antiscientific ideology that arose within anthropology, in which careful study of isolated tribes was replaced in many cases by explicit political advocacy that denied less pleasant aspects of the Yanomamö culture, such as warfare, domestic violence, and infanticide. Chagnon stated that much of his work has undermined the idea of the 'Noble savage' ­ a romanticized stereotype of indigenous people living in synchrony with nature and uncorrupted by modern civilization.

This page was last edited on 26 March 2025, at 12:08 (UTC).

(9) Chagnon's book Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists

This book is great reading and very cheap. If you're interested, buy it - Peter M.

https://www.amazon.com/Noble-Savages-Dangerous-Yanomamo-Anthropologists/dp/0684855100

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes -- the Yanomamo and the Anthropologists Hardcover ­ February 19, 2013

by Napoleon A. Chagnon (Author)

The most controversial and famous anthropologist of our time describes his seminal lifelong research among the Yanomamö Indians of the Amazon basin and how his startling observations provoked admiration among many fellow anthropologists and outrage among others.

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENTIFIC MEMOIRS OF OUR TIME

When Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela's Amazon region in 1964 to study the Yanomamö Indians, one of the last large tribal groups still living in isolation, he expected to find Rousseau's "noble savages," so-called primitive people living contentedly in a pristine state of nature. Instead Chagnon discovered a remarkably violent society. Men who killed others had the most wives and offspring, their violence possibly giving them an evolutionary advantage. The prime reasons for violence, Chagnon found, were to avenge deaths and, if possible, abduct women.

When Chagnon began publishing his observations, some cultural anthropologists who could not accept an evolutionary basis for human behavior refused to believe them. Chagnon became perhaps the most famous American anthropologist since Margaret Mead - and the most controversial. He was attacked in a scathing popular book, whose central allegation that he helped start a measles epidemic among the Yanomamö was quickly disproven, and the American Anthropological Association condemned him, only to rescind its condemnation after a vote by the membership.

Throughout his career Chagnon insisted on an evidence-based scientific approach to anthropology, even as his professional association dithered over whether it really is a scientific organization. In Noble Savages, Chagnon describes his seminal fieldwork - during which he lived among the Yanomamö, was threatened by tyrannical headmen, and experienced an uncomfortably close encounter with a jaguar - taking readers inside Yanomamö villages to glimpse the kind of life our distant ancestors may have lived thousands of years ago.

And he forcefully indicts his discipline of cultural anthropology, accusing it of having traded its scientific mission for political activism.

This book, like Chagnon's research, raises fundamental questions about human nature itself. ==

This book is great reading and very cheap. If you're interested, buy it - Peter M.

END

Copyright: Peter Myers asserts the right to be identified as the author of the material written by him on this website, being material that is not otherwise attributed to another author.

END

Write to me at contact.html.