Archaeologist James Cole calculated how many calories there are in one person.
Throughout the history of human existence, cannibalism has been present in one form or another. Scientists managed to establish that the first people who inhabited the territory of Europe ate not only the meat of their enemies, but also their fellow tribesmen. Relatively recently, paleontologists have established that the Neanderthals who lived in the Marignac caves were engaged in the separation of limbs from the body of the dead. For what reasons they did this, scientists do not yet know. It is likely that they ate the dead. Proof of this is the find in one of the Belgian caves, made by Johannes Krause: a large number of bones of ancient people, with distinct traces of the so-called culinary processing.
The researchers speculated that human flesh could serve as a substitute for animal meat. According to British archaeologist James Cole, this is not entirely true, since cannibalism could never become a full-fledged replacement for hunting, for example, mammoths. In total, the human body (skin, muscles, bones) contains about 144 thousand calories. The most nutritious is adipose tissue - it contains about 50 thousand calories. The liver is also very nutritious - about 2,600 calories (which is the daily value of an adult man). Thus, the researchers say, a person is not the most high-calorie food, because his body contains about 50 percent of the calories that are in the skeleton of a cow.
The caloric content of the human body can be compared with the nutritional value of any medium-sized animal, for example, roe deer. Mammoth meat contains about a hundred times more calories than the human body. The body of a bull could give ancient man about 980 thousand calories, which is also much more than human meat. A Neanderthal tribe, consisting of 25 people, the body of a killed tribesman would have lasted only half a day, while the carcass of a bull, mammoth or rhino could provide this tribe for 10 days or even a month.
All these calculations were made by the scientist for a reason - based on the results obtained, Cole made the assumption that primitive people were not engaged in cannibalism in order to satisfy the feeling of hunger, because bison, mammoths and other large representatives of the fauna of those times could give people much more nutrients … Of course, in this case it is impossible to consider especially hungry periods of life, when ancient people could really consider their fellow tribesmen as a source of food. In all other periods, the scientist claims, ancient people were engaged in cannibalism for certain social reasons (for example, ritual murder and eating the body of an enemy to gain his strength). As Cole notes, hunting one horse together made much more sense than killing six tribesmen or enemies.to get the same amount of calories.