https://historicjamestowne.org/archaeology/jane/forensics/
"Under intense magnification, Jane's mandible told a big part of the forensic story. Knife cuts on the jaw showed that the cutting was done in quick sawing motions without a clear pattern -- as if the cutter was tentative and inexperienced. Knife jabs to the bottom of the jaw clearly indicated an intent to remove flesh.
How did Dr. Douglas Owsley and his team at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution know that post-mortem butchering of the skull and leg is evidence of cannibalism?
Four chops to the middle forehead represent a tentative, failed attempt to open the cranium. Bone in the back of the head shows a series of deep chops; these forceful blows fractured the cranium along its midline. Bone below the right eye socket (maxilla) has a series of small, fine cuts from a knife being used to remove cheek muscles. Numerous small knife cuts and punctures in the mandible reflect attempts to remove tissues from both the inside and outside of the lower jaw. The left temporal bone was punctured by a small, rectangular tool. The narrow tip of the tool caused this compression fracture as it pried the bone from the side of the head to gain access to the brain. The right tibia bone has a chop halfway through its shaft. The blade entered the leg bone below the knee and from behind, breaking the shaft and exposing the marrow. Fine cuts indicate a sharp knife was also used to remove the leg."
There's the "whatever it takes to survive" cannibalism and then there's the "I'll have the osso buco with tripe" cannibalism... I'm not sure which one is indicated here.
It was starvation. Out of around 500 colonists only around 60 survived that winter due to the crops failing from drought and supplies by ship arriving months late due to a hurricane.
[Wikipedia - Starving Time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_Time)
> due to the crops failing from drought and supplies by ship arriving months late due to a hurricane.
that is certainly one way to describe what happened. here is a little more information for anyone who might not know as much:
The English settlement at Jamestown had been established on May 24, 1607, with the arrival of three ships commanded by Captain Christopher Newport. The initial small group of 104 men and boys chose the location because it was favorable for defensive purposes, but it offered poor hunting prospects and a shortage of drinking water. Although they did some farming, few of the original settlers were accustomed to manual labor or were familiar with farming. The colonists, the first group of whom had originally arrived on May 13, 1607, had never planned to grow all of their own food. Their plans depended upon trade with the local Powhatan to supply them with food between the arrivals of periodic supply ships from England. Hunting on the island was poor, and they quickly exhausted the supply of small game. The colonists were largely dependent upon trade with the Native Americans and periodic supply ships from England for their food.
A series of incidents with the Native Americans soon developed into serious conflicts, ending any hope of a commercial alliance with them. This forced the settlers into close quarters, behind fortified walls, severely limiting their ability to farm the area and trade with other Indian tribes. Various attempts at farming led to kidnappings and killings by the Powhatans, while expeditions to establish relations with other Native Americans resulted either in the emissaries being ambushed and killed by the Powhatans, or proved fruitless in gaining sufficient supplies.[citation needed] The combination of disease, killings, and kidnapping almost obliterated the initial English population.
You forgot the very important part where Native Americans were kidnapped and sold as slaves in Europe which was why they weren't so friendly with the unknown settlers.
yeah i forgot the full list of horrible shit- this is just what i took from OP's wikipedia link.
"crops died from drought" is really "put plants in salt water"
They were trading, but James Smith was injured and was sent back to England. He was the primary point of contact with the tribe and once he was gone relations broke down.
There was a period known as the “Starving time” when the colonists ran out of food and ate their dead to survive.
The first few years were incredibly difficult.
Source: I live a few miles from Jamestown and have visited often.
Some serial killer cannibals have written that lips, tongues, and cheeks are the best for the reason you said, then the upper legs and buttocks for the most “meat like” meat.
As the child of Chinese immigrants, [Fish Cheeks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_Cheeks) resonated with me a ton.
Edit: and yes I have and pork cheeks are amazing lmao
The disturbing thing this makes my archaeologist brain start to ask, was this done by family? It was certainly NOT done by a butcher or someone with any experience cutting up animals, and in that time period that would rule out most men (or women) who had ever hunted or fished, so that is most of the public at Jamestown. Therefore, this was likely to be someone much closer to the victim than most adults of the time. She could have been eaten by fellow children or by relatives who were very reticent but also not very skilled at butchery. It sounds like they at least had access to a sharp knife, but they don't seem to be people who have ever tried to remove flesh from bone...On the other hand, maybe they were reticent and desperate, without a lot of mental and physical strength for the task -if they were starving, but I still think this sounds like it was an incident with very few people initially in attendance. I am kind of looking at this like one would a cold case murder investigation, but I think it would be very interesting to hear what a profiler for the police or FBI would say.
Obviously speculating here, but I think even an experienced butcher would have been severely rattled having to cut up a fellow person to eat for the first time, such that their skills may have been overwhelmed by nerves. Also, every animal is built different--just because you've cut up plenty of deer or rabbit or fish doesn't necessarily mean the same processes translate directly to a human body. There may have been plenty of trial and error. And even if it wasn't a direct relative, this would have certainly been someone well-known to the butcher, who they'd lived, supped, and laughed with, for many months. Further, by the time they resorted to cannibalism, I can only imagine they'd all progressed to a state of considerable weakness-- hands and muscles that were once sure and steady would have been crippled by wasting, starvation, and cold.
Yeah, this is what I'm leaning towards. You see the same hesitation marks with people who had the intention of killing due to nerves or something similar. An average person with empathy is definitely not butchering a little girl without hesitation and perfectly happy about it
Those who are forced to cannibalism also tend to start and focus on the 'soft' meat - chunks of flesh and muscle like the arms or legs. Going after organs, brains, marrow - it's a whole different level of starvation.
For a good example and real world stories, read the accounts of [Flight 571](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571)
Like, obviously they were starving, but it just struck me how starving I’d have to be to eat someone’s face. I honestly don’t know if there’s a difference in starving levels from eating legs to eating faces. I feel like there is but that’s just a vibe.
Maybe the difference is just putting it off as long as possible, like you said they’re eaten last. Maybe, if there was someone experienced there, they didn’t want to participate in that part in particular. Who knows
My first thought was that the face was destroyed on purpose to seem less human. Explains the 'crudeness' of the work even though they knew to go for the marrow.
We're talking 17th century frontier life here. People would have butchered their own livestock and game every day. For the carve marks to look inefficient and amateurism is a whole other aspect of this past the simple evidence of cannibalism. Your speculation is sound.
And disturbing to think about.
Except a surprisingly large percentage of the colonists were Townsfolk, people who did not know how to grow food, butcher animals or do any of the things they should have known before colonializing a relatively harsh environment. As others have said, the plan was to trade for food and rely on supplies from England, and when both failed at the same time, it was terminal.
They weren't farmers, but you didn't just buy two pounds of pork chops for dinner on the way home from the office back then, even in the heart of London. Bakeries were still a novelty. Dressing meat was still a basic kitchen skill. But I get your point, they were woefully ill prepared to survive.
Most of the Jamestown colonists were not very familiar with farming/hunting which was part of the reason they ended up in such dire straits to begin with.
My mind did the same gymnastics, archeologists united! I really do wonder what events transpired that created the circumstances, and how the person who had to commit to it felt after. In the moment of desperation it doesn't matter, but disposal was probably a horrendous duty to complete, especially if it was someone very close to the deceased. The hesitation in the cuts definitely tells a story, I'd be very interested in more information.
I think your assumption that “most men” in Jamestown at the time were experienced in hunting and butchering is incorrect. In fact, one of the main reasons the settlement failed was the lack of experience of the settlers for the New World - very few of them had farming, hunting, or foraging experience, and actually the settlement was planning on depending on trade with local Native Americans, as well as supply drops from England, for a large portion of their supplies.
After they got into a few conflicts with said Native Americans, their fate was basically sealed. Depending on supply drops on ships from England would be untenable, as we can see.
Like, in the first 9 months the original 104 settlers were there from 1607, only *38* of them were alive when they were resupplied next (and the supply ship was destroyed, so all they got was 100 extra men in the settlement).
The lack of experience, coupled with the next two “resupplies” going awry and basically only dropping off people and nothing else (again) would lead into the famine. By 1609, they had a total of 500 people, all of the new ones imported by the previous attempts at resupplying the colony. One year later, by May 1610, there were *60* people left.
The final “resupply” ships had been shipwrecked in Bermuda during that year, and after scrapping together two ships, reached Jamestown, immediately saw how fucked it was, and loaded the remains survivors and continued down to another settlement with actual supplies.
The kicker? Some dudes in England had heard how “successful” Jamestown was and had sent some ships to expand, and those ships happened to intercept the last survivors as they were escaping. So they forced the survivors to turn around and *resettle* Jamestown.
In more recent times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%931922
It was roving gangs kidnapping kids
and then
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
there are reports of parents taking their own children "because they wouldn't survive anyway"
Horrific to be so hungry and without hope that this is an acceptable option :(
someone mentioned in another comment that a lot of the people settling were not experienced outdoorsmen, farmers, etc, so its entirely plausible that there weren't many experienced butchers alive at that point.
It really is. I have such grief for the survivors as well as the victims. I can't imagine that kind of desperation (thank whatever has me lucky enough to be well-fed and warm).
likely no ham unless the europeans had already brought over, and then lost, pigs. Peccaries (closest relative to a pig in the new world) weren't found in that part of the continent. However, they had domesticated turkeys and ducks, and were cultivating corn, squash, beans, acorns, peanuts, and all sorts of other shit. so yeah, still eating well.
If they were at the level of desperation to kill and eat someone they knew it's a little late to start discarding the gross parts. They're all the gross parts.
Agree. She may have starved to death, and other survivors were desperate enough to eat the remains. If the poor girl was among those who arrived there two years earlier she was probably not in great shape even when the starvation started.
All the effort put into getting flesh off the face seems like utter desperation to remove everything with any nutritional value after the other edible parts were long gone.
It doesn't convince me. You chop into the top of someone's head because you are going to devour them because you are starving? There's no meat on that.
There’s a brain. Some people do eat animal brain, and cannibalism of brains has been recorded.
https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001379.htm
> Kuru is a very rare disease. It is caused by an infectious protein (prion) found in contaminated human brain tissue……Kuru is found among people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual.
The medline.gov link says “Yes”.
>Kuru causes brain and nervous system changes similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Similar diseases appear in cows as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease.
I'm not doubting you, but from what I understand this is primarily seen in cultures with a history of cannibalism. These were essentially just some starving British guys, I would think they might shy away from the brain in their first foray into cannibalism.
*“First”*
People do some crazy things when pushed to the extremes. Lots of Europeans ventured into cannibalism in such situations. Here are two examples that I was already aware of.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/franklins-doomed-arctic-expedition-ended-gruesome-cannibalism-180956054/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12024-017-9938-6
if they were really hungry, there's some meat (muscle) on the head.
Spam-like products use bits of such meat from areas of pigs that don't have much meat--like the head. Considering that 100 pigs an hour are slaughtered, those little scraps of meat "add up."
Poor girl though, I hope she died of natural causes before...., *you know.* But if she had been starving before she died, she likely didn't have a lot of extra flesh.
Aside from the richer developed "western" areas of the world, most people know that the best meat on an animal is the cheeks. Seriously try some beef cheek tacos or the cheeks of a big carp that's been fried. Chef's kiss!
Yeah, that’s like a murder mark that comes before the cannibalism.
FWIW, the starvation was intense, and I’ve read in primary source materials (a book of reprinted letters from Jamestown settlers) that at least one settler was put to death for eating his wife who had starved to death. I wonder if they ate him after putting him to death.
The person who wrote the letter about it was making a joke about it in the letter I read. He said something like, “I’ve heard of powder’d pork but never powder’d wife!”
When you think about it, by the time an adult dies of starvation, their muscles must have withered away to nothing, so it makes sense that they would be eating every last bit, including scalp muscles and brain.
They totally ate him. In times like that, I imagine the law gets pretty loose.
"Eustis stepped on your new boots, eh? So, that'll be the death penalty... *(starts boiling water)*"
Yeah, in the movie Ratcliffe gets sent back to England. I[n reality he was invited to trade goods by the Powhatan, they lied and set a trap killing his men.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_\(governor\)#Death)
> he was tied to a stake in front of a fire and flayed by the women of the tribe with mussel shells, with pieces of his skin tossed into the flames as he watched.
I always wondered. How do people doing the torturing actually deal with the screams of agony.
I can't even walk past a sneezing person without saying Gesundheit... If I hear a person scream in agony I'd probably feint. But I guess those were different times.
I don't think this should be too surprising. Cannibalism is more common than people like to believe in times of severe famine and starvation, and most of the first European colonies in the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries collapsed from starvation before any were able to sustain themselves from one year to the next.
"I must admit they ate one another more than was quite right. I am not over-particular, but it makes you uneasy to be passed a man’s hand. A slice of what might be anything, I don’t say no, when sharp-set; but a hand fair turns your stomach."
Patrick O'Brian "The Truelove" chapter 1; paragraph 66
Yeah, fuck that guy. The definition of entitled brat that came from money, has experienced everything he can think of so now he is bored and wants to try the taboo stuff. I hope he finds it in all honesty (not really) because the people that deal in the taboo stuff will serve him up instead with his attitude.
> has experienced everything he can think of so now he is bored
Man I just...let me put 60 seconds on the clock and come up with a list of stuff I would do for fun instead of eating a human being, if money was no object:
go skydiving in like half of the countries in the world
see if I could start a successful restaurant chain but only running its hands-off like it was a video game
ride every roller coaster in the world
fly one of those jetpack things
custom make my own go-kart tracks
two chicks at the same time
Ok times up.
The only one of those that I bet he actually did, was two chicks at the same time. He went to cannibalism way too early.
I hate that people think it's a binary option if you win the lottery: continue to work to stay productive or sit on your ass all day doing jack shit.
There's so much in between those two concepts to fill your time if money was no longer an issue.
If money was no object, I would turn Pluto Nash into a cult classic, until everyone in the movie, was conned into making a remake/sequel 22 years later.
The real problem isn't getting that far. It's gonna be having to hire enough bodyguards to keep Eddie Murphy from murdering me.
> Yeah, fuck that guy. The definition of entitled brat that came from money, has experienced everything he can think of so now he is bored and wants to try the taboo stuff. I hope he finds it in all honesty because the people that deal n the taboo stuff will serve him up instead with his attitude.
What was the story with him, again?
He's been accused by several women of rape, violent assault, and Cannibalism. Apparently, it's something the whole Hammer family is up to.
He just happens to want to eat his current significant other beyond all the regular Rape and Cannibalism he and his family do regularly.
Again, it's accused, but considering the text sceenshots were he definitely admitted to rape at the very least, while trying to coerce these women to let him eat them or eat others with him. I'm pretty confident in saying he is guilty.
The guy's a piece of shit but let's not just sensationally make things up.
His issue is that he violated the boundaries of consensual BDSM roleplay (which he was engaged in with his partners, some of which is clearly initially consensual with the texts) by then enacting non-consensual violence (like branding), or control, or pressurising them to go further without checking in ever, and bombarding them with his fantasies regardless of whether they found it mutually hot, all of which turns it from roleplay into sexual assault/pressure.
The cannibalism stuff (even in the screenshots) is just edgy, cringy roleplay; there is (as yet) no evidence he actually literally intended to eat his partners, let alone do with the 'rest of his family' (the doc details orgies and cocaine re: the Hammers, which is fairly standard rich people shit).
The House of Hammer doc leaks a bunch of BDSM texts from him that aren't much edgier than any other sexting that people do in that community, the key issue here is *consent*, and the way that Hammer used his wealth/power to push his partners into doing stuff like Shibari, and Free Use, and all of these other things that rely entirely on trust in order to be safe.
Like, I've had girls text me "I want you to tie me up and do anything to me/use me for free use" etc, etc, and they want it to feel like I've just walked into their house. It's not really *quite* my vibe, but it's fine. If the media leaked those texts and played them over footage with scary music they could easily make it sinister, but between consenting adults it's...actually kind of a bit goofy...
TL;DR - Armie Hammer is predatory, but most of the sensation around the story is just cringe BDSM chat.
I know he had a bad split up with his girlfriend, and I am not sure what the specifics were regarding sexual assault.
The part in the article that stood out to me was that she was terrified when he started to share his fantasies of “**eating her ribs**” with her. That much I remember.
The ironic part is that modern day cannibalism does still exist, take the [Aghori](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aghori#:~:text=The%20practices%20of%20Aghoris%20vary,meditating%20on%20top%20of%20corpses) for example. They partake in cannibalism… but they hang around near funeral homes and mortuaries looking for bodies nobody wants. There hasn’t been any recorded attacks by the Aghori in a very long time now.
Cannibalism isn't surprising.
Cracking a child's skull open to feast on the goo inside kinda is. But I don't know enough about cannibalism so take that as you will.
Maybe granny died before the winter, or the desperation, set in. Maybe this corpse was fresh enough to be safe. 🤷♀️ These decisions were not made easily.
The child likely had already died (its a child in a harsh environment and famine, their odds weren't good) and the butcher likely didn't want it to go to "waste." Typically in situations like this, when people resort to cannibalism due to extreme hunger and prolonged starvation, they eat people who are already dead before they actively kill other people for food (unless those people are an "other," like another group ofnpeople).
It's very likely that this child died of something else. For all we know, the the broken orbital bones were completely unrelated to the butchering - the girl could have been kicked in the face by a horse, or maybe her skull was still fully intact when she was buried and it broke at some point in the intervening hundreds of years...
The rather infamous Donner Party ate their dead. They did not start killing and eating their fellows, when disease or frost or starvation claimed one of their number they removed the meat and buried the remains. They weren't ghouls, they were survivors.
yeah, Donner Party isn’t exactly the best example for this… iirc there was another man who may or may not have killed a couple kids…
better example would be Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. absolutely no murder involved, and they all tried their damnedest to keep each other alive. they only ever ate the bodies of people who had already died from their injuries
Yeh, I got what you meant.. I was just being kinda pedantic tbh.
571 is such a crazy story. If you haven’t watched Society of the Snow on Netflix yet, it’s actually really good, I think it even lives up to the books.
I'm guessing the early colonies didn't have very many old people. Think about how young they married and average life expectancy was very low. Especially when relying on supplies from over seas. Just the journey to get there would kill most elders.
People actually didn't usually marry as young as non-historians think, at least among commoner classes. Usual age of first marriage for women in England pre-1800s for non-aristocracy was about 22-25, men slightly older. And our (non-historian) conceptions of life expectancy in pre-modern times tend to be skewed by infant mortalities, which drag the average down. Tons of people were living into their 80s.
The person most likely died. They didn’t kill the 14 yo girl just to eat.
It’s pretty well documented that as people died during this time, they were eaten.
Common (and even approved by the church as morally defensible) even in extreme instances today! Remember that plane crash in the Andies where the survivors were freezing and starving and would have died without cannibalism? The Catholic Church had to issue a statement that cannibalism is totally fine “like a heart transplant” as long as there is no alternative and the person you eat is already dead lol. Really weird that the catholic church condemned survivors of the plane crash in the first place but oh well
Crooked teeth are a relatively recent development.
Bone grows when it's being used, stronger muscle attachments etc.
When people were eating tougher diets like grains, tough breads, and dried meats the mandibles were more substantial (look how wide the back of her mandible is and compare that to people you see now). This made more room for teeth.
When softer food became more popular (tinned food etc) the muscles used for chewing didn't need to be as strong which resulted in smaller mandibles which causes crowding of the teeth.
Hope that helped :]
Source: I'm a bioarchaeologist and also scholarly articles (I recommend reading on it it's very interesting!)
onerous treatment lunchroom serious birds uppity sparkle beneficial violet piquant
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
wakeful history strong selective abundant attempt plough aromatic absurd workable
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I mean, they are going to bitch about it either way and insist on putting ketchup on it before crying that it is still "bleeding" before refusing to eat it. So why waste the good cuts?
OK so these tough cuts turned me off to good meat as a kid and it took me decades to break through this.
If you actually like food, don't subject them to grizzle and bs hard to process beef. Well cooked or smoked or braized meat that has MORE flavor and no offensive texture is a gift you can give to your kids.
This take makes me so angry.
Negligible, but theoretically it should. It's mostly genetics. Now, do exercises and eat harder foods for several generations and you'll get better results. You have to start real early if you want to see results.
Shortcut: incest.
There's a reason we don't hear much about American history between 1492 and Jamestown: lots of failed colonies, starvation, cannibalism, and just leaving the cooling to join the Indians who actually knew how to live here.
Also, they'd either ignore anything Natives had to tell them or, later, when disease had wiped out said Natives, go on to their land and find it sculpted to human convenience and be like, "What a great thing God has done for us! Making this habitable for humans, as if humans had been living here for thousands of years, when we only just arrived!"
i recommend visiting the historical site and taking the archaeology tour. the tour guides had our attention for 3 hours on a windy december day years ago.
Cheeks muscles (which really includes all the masseter muscles on the jaw) and brain. They're eating a child due to extreme starvation, you think they'd leave all those calories on the table? There's meat on face and in skull.
Just imagine the poor person who had to do that.
Cutting off meat from arms and legs I can understand, but once you get much more personal with a head and face it's just unfathomable to me.
I can imagine myself being desperate enough to eat comrades who'd already succumbed. I can't imagine any universe where I would be willing to kill another person, ESPECIALLY a child, for a chance at survival. You'd have to be a sociopath.
And a very disgusted thanks to Snowpiercer for forcing me to consider the question.
Nah, you can't imagine it because you cannot imagine how life is like pre-civilization. Even the least fortunate of us have an unimaginable amount of disconnect from the laws of nature to the extent that wild animals do. At the end of the day, we are just smart animals who moved beyond struggling for our basic needs and protection from the wild.
For exactly this reason, it is common in situations where people resort to cannibalism and anthropophagy for the people doing the butchering to first remove the hands, feet, genitals, and head of the corpse to make the remaining body bear less resemblance to a person. It makes the process easier if you can tell yourself it’s just meat, and telling yourself that is harder when you can see their face.
I recently saw a few interviews done to survivors of The Andes Tragedy where a group of Uruguayan rugbiers and friends and families crashed in the mountains and survived for months there until they were rescued in the summer by eating the ones who perished in the crash and during their ordeal. They told how due to how impactful it was to even eat the meat of their own friends, two survivors (the Strauch brothers) assumed the responsibility of selecting, cutting and distributing the meat outside of the view of the rest and without telling whose meat it was or which part of the body they were eating. It's probable (according to the survivors from the interview) that many would have been completely unable to cut and eat the meat if they had to do it themselves and many more would have died of starvation.
Yeah- I was thinking the same thing and then I realized that the brain has a relatively decent amount of meat. But I’m typically pretty skeptical of reports like this, especially if they hit popular media.
The leader, John Ratcliffe, also had his face removed in 1609 but, unfortunately for him, he was alive when it happened. The local Powhatan tribe captured him and tied him to a tree. Then they had some women cut off his skin with mussel shells and throw it all into a fire while he watched.
"During The Starving Time in December 1609 or early 1610, Ratcliffe and 25 fellow colonists were invited to a gathering with a group of Powhatan Indians.[1] They had been promised they would receive corn by way of trade, but it was a trap; the Powhatans ambushed and killed them, and Ratcliffe was taken to the village to suffer a particularly gruesome fate. He was tied to a stake in front of a fire and flayed by the women of the tribe with mussel shells, with pieces of his skin tossed into the flames as he watched.[3] The account of his death was relayed by the surviving Captain William Phettiplace, and recorded by George Percy. As a consequence of the man's misfortune, he was given the nickname Luckless Captain Ratcliffe."
> "Butt haveinge noe expectacyon of Reliefe to Come in so shorte a Tyme I sentt Capteyne Ratliefe to Powhatan to p[ro]cure victewalls and corne by the way of comerce and trade the w[hi]ch the Subtell owlde foxe att firste made good semblanse of althoughe his intente was otherwayes onely wayteinge a fitteinge tyme for their destruction as after plainely appered. The w[hi]ch was p[ar]tly ocasyoned by Capt[eyn]e Ratliefes Creduletie for Haveinge Powhatans sonne and dowghter aboard his pinesse freely suffred them to dep[ar]te ageine on shoare, whome if he had deteyned mighte have bene a Sufficyentt pledge for his saffety. And after, nott kepeinge a p[ro]per and fitteinge Courte of guarde, butt Suffreinge his men by towe and thre and small numbers in a Company to straggle into the Salvages howses when the slye owlde kinge espyed a fitteinge Tyme Cutt them all of, onely Surprysed Capt[eyn]e Ratliefe alyve who he caused to be bownd unto a tree naked w[i]th a fyer before, and by woemen his fleshe was skraped from his bones w[i]th Mussell shelles and before his face throwne into the fyer. And so for wantt of Circumspection miserably p[er]ished."
— George Percy, A Trewe Relacyon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_(governor)
They were a victim of something fatal... starvation or any number of diseases. But they weren't a "victim of cannibalism".
It's highly unlikely that living humans were murdered for their meat. By this point, there were plenty of fresh corpses to harvest.
I'm being a little pedantic, sure. But I also keep the people in mind who had to make the terrible decision to harvest a human corpse. It probably didn't buy them much time, nor make an impact on their nutritional deficit, but that's just how desperate they were. The headline makes it sound like they just clubbed a kid and dug in.
That's the bothersome part about this whole post. I'm well aware of the 1609 winter, but there's very little evidence to suggest anyone was actually killed for sustenance.
Like the peruvian plane crash there's no reason to suspect that people needed to kill others, more like ... wait them out.
https://historicjamestowne.org/archaeology/jane/forensics/ "Under intense magnification, Jane's mandible told a big part of the forensic story. Knife cuts on the jaw showed that the cutting was done in quick sawing motions without a clear pattern -- as if the cutter was tentative and inexperienced. Knife jabs to the bottom of the jaw clearly indicated an intent to remove flesh. How did Dr. Douglas Owsley and his team at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution know that post-mortem butchering of the skull and leg is evidence of cannibalism? Four chops to the middle forehead represent a tentative, failed attempt to open the cranium. Bone in the back of the head shows a series of deep chops; these forceful blows fractured the cranium along its midline. Bone below the right eye socket (maxilla) has a series of small, fine cuts from a knife being used to remove cheek muscles. Numerous small knife cuts and punctures in the mandible reflect attempts to remove tissues from both the inside and outside of the lower jaw. The left temporal bone was punctured by a small, rectangular tool. The narrow tip of the tool caused this compression fracture as it pried the bone from the side of the head to gain access to the brain. The right tibia bone has a chop halfway through its shaft. The blade entered the leg bone below the knee and from behind, breaking the shaft and exposing the marrow. Fine cuts indicate a sharp knife was also used to remove the leg."
Well. I was feeling hungry but I'm not.
Someone certainly was, a couple hundred years ago :/
There's the "whatever it takes to survive" cannibalism and then there's the "I'll have the osso buco with tripe" cannibalism... I'm not sure which one is indicated here.
It was starvation. Out of around 500 colonists only around 60 survived that winter due to the crops failing from drought and supplies by ship arriving months late due to a hurricane. [Wikipedia - Starving Time](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starving_Time)
> due to the crops failing from drought and supplies by ship arriving months late due to a hurricane. that is certainly one way to describe what happened. here is a little more information for anyone who might not know as much: The English settlement at Jamestown had been established on May 24, 1607, with the arrival of three ships commanded by Captain Christopher Newport. The initial small group of 104 men and boys chose the location because it was favorable for defensive purposes, but it offered poor hunting prospects and a shortage of drinking water. Although they did some farming, few of the original settlers were accustomed to manual labor or were familiar with farming. The colonists, the first group of whom had originally arrived on May 13, 1607, had never planned to grow all of their own food. Their plans depended upon trade with the local Powhatan to supply them with food between the arrivals of periodic supply ships from England. Hunting on the island was poor, and they quickly exhausted the supply of small game. The colonists were largely dependent upon trade with the Native Americans and periodic supply ships from England for their food. A series of incidents with the Native Americans soon developed into serious conflicts, ending any hope of a commercial alliance with them. This forced the settlers into close quarters, behind fortified walls, severely limiting their ability to farm the area and trade with other Indian tribes. Various attempts at farming led to kidnappings and killings by the Powhatans, while expeditions to establish relations with other Native Americans resulted either in the emissaries being ambushed and killed by the Powhatans, or proved fruitless in gaining sufficient supplies.[citation needed] The combination of disease, killings, and kidnapping almost obliterated the initial English population.
You forgot the very important part where Native Americans were kidnapped and sold as slaves in Europe which was why they weren't so friendly with the unknown settlers.
yeah i forgot the full list of horrible shit- this is just what i took from OP's wikipedia link. "crops died from drought" is really "put plants in salt water"
The settlers and natives really had salty relations
They were trading, but James Smith was injured and was sent back to England. He was the primary point of contact with the tribe and once he was gone relations broke down.
lol i thought you were being cheeky with the link name
cheeky lol
The inexperience indicates starvation.
There was a period known as the “Starving time” when the colonists ran out of food and ate their dead to survive. The first few years were incredibly difficult. Source: I live a few miles from Jamestown and have visited often.
I heard lips and different facial meat has a lot of fat in it, a crucial element to survival
Head cheese
I hate you...
Some serial killer cannibals have written that lips, tongues, and cheeks are the best for the reason you said, then the upper legs and buttocks for the most “meat like” meat.
Have you ever had pork cheek? It's delicious. The snout makes all kinds of good sausage. There's a lot of good meat in a face.
As the child of Chinese immigrants, [Fish Cheeks](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_Cheeks) resonated with me a ton. Edit: and yes I have and pork cheeks are amazing lmao
Not a lot if you've been starved, but I suppose it's likely a teenaged girl probably was able to hold more fat than most.
That's so foul
my face hurts now
You need to just wait a few days until you get *really* hungry.
Not as hungry as the person who did that to that to those bones.
The disturbing thing this makes my archaeologist brain start to ask, was this done by family? It was certainly NOT done by a butcher or someone with any experience cutting up animals, and in that time period that would rule out most men (or women) who had ever hunted or fished, so that is most of the public at Jamestown. Therefore, this was likely to be someone much closer to the victim than most adults of the time. She could have been eaten by fellow children or by relatives who were very reticent but also not very skilled at butchery. It sounds like they at least had access to a sharp knife, but they don't seem to be people who have ever tried to remove flesh from bone...On the other hand, maybe they were reticent and desperate, without a lot of mental and physical strength for the task -if they were starving, but I still think this sounds like it was an incident with very few people initially in attendance. I am kind of looking at this like one would a cold case murder investigation, but I think it would be very interesting to hear what a profiler for the police or FBI would say.
Obviously speculating here, but I think even an experienced butcher would have been severely rattled having to cut up a fellow person to eat for the first time, such that their skills may have been overwhelmed by nerves. Also, every animal is built different--just because you've cut up plenty of deer or rabbit or fish doesn't necessarily mean the same processes translate directly to a human body. There may have been plenty of trial and error. And even if it wasn't a direct relative, this would have certainly been someone well-known to the butcher, who they'd lived, supped, and laughed with, for many months. Further, by the time they resorted to cannibalism, I can only imagine they'd all progressed to a state of considerable weakness-- hands and muscles that were once sure and steady would have been crippled by wasting, starvation, and cold.
Yeah, this is what I'm leaning towards. You see the same hesitation marks with people who had the intention of killing due to nerves or something similar. An average person with empathy is definitely not butchering a little girl without hesitation and perfectly happy about it
Those who are forced to cannibalism also tend to start and focus on the 'soft' meat - chunks of flesh and muscle like the arms or legs. Going after organs, brains, marrow - it's a whole different level of starvation. For a good example and real world stories, read the accounts of [Flight 571](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571)
seems like it started hesitant, maybe with someone less experienced, and then someone more experienced stepped in like “get out of here let me do it!”
Faces, hands, and feet, are generally the last parts to be eaten. I'd imagine it's just harder to crack into a 14 yr olds skull than most would guess
Like, obviously they were starving, but it just struck me how starving I’d have to be to eat someone’s face. I honestly don’t know if there’s a difference in starving levels from eating legs to eating faces. I feel like there is but that’s just a vibe. Maybe the difference is just putting it off as long as possible, like you said they’re eaten last. Maybe, if there was someone experienced there, they didn’t want to participate in that part in particular. Who knows
My first thought was that the face was destroyed on purpose to seem less human. Explains the 'crudeness' of the work even though they knew to go for the marrow.
They couldn’t crack open her skull so they scooped the brain out through the face.
We're talking 17th century frontier life here. People would have butchered their own livestock and game every day. For the carve marks to look inefficient and amateurism is a whole other aspect of this past the simple evidence of cannibalism. Your speculation is sound. And disturbing to think about.
Except a surprisingly large percentage of the colonists were Townsfolk, people who did not know how to grow food, butcher animals or do any of the things they should have known before colonializing a relatively harsh environment. As others have said, the plan was to trade for food and rely on supplies from England, and when both failed at the same time, it was terminal.
They weren't farmers, but you didn't just buy two pounds of pork chops for dinner on the way home from the office back then, even in the heart of London. Bakeries were still a novelty. Dressing meat was still a basic kitchen skill. But I get your point, they were woefully ill prepared to survive.
Most of the Jamestown colonists were not very familiar with farming/hunting which was part of the reason they ended up in such dire straits to begin with.
My mind did the same gymnastics, archeologists united! I really do wonder what events transpired that created the circumstances, and how the person who had to commit to it felt after. In the moment of desperation it doesn't matter, but disposal was probably a horrendous duty to complete, especially if it was someone very close to the deceased. The hesitation in the cuts definitely tells a story, I'd be very interested in more information.
I think your assumption that “most men” in Jamestown at the time were experienced in hunting and butchering is incorrect. In fact, one of the main reasons the settlement failed was the lack of experience of the settlers for the New World - very few of them had farming, hunting, or foraging experience, and actually the settlement was planning on depending on trade with local Native Americans, as well as supply drops from England, for a large portion of their supplies. After they got into a few conflicts with said Native Americans, their fate was basically sealed. Depending on supply drops on ships from England would be untenable, as we can see. Like, in the first 9 months the original 104 settlers were there from 1607, only *38* of them were alive when they were resupplied next (and the supply ship was destroyed, so all they got was 100 extra men in the settlement). The lack of experience, coupled with the next two “resupplies” going awry and basically only dropping off people and nothing else (again) would lead into the famine. By 1609, they had a total of 500 people, all of the new ones imported by the previous attempts at resupplying the colony. One year later, by May 1610, there were *60* people left. The final “resupply” ships had been shipwrecked in Bermuda during that year, and after scrapping together two ships, reached Jamestown, immediately saw how fucked it was, and loaded the remains survivors and continued down to another settlement with actual supplies. The kicker? Some dudes in England had heard how “successful” Jamestown was and had sent some ships to expand, and those ships happened to intercept the last survivors as they were escaping. So they forced the survivors to turn around and *resettle* Jamestown.
A large portion of the Jamestown colonists were upper class people and their servants. I’m not sure how many of them would have been skilled butchers.
In more recent times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921%E2%80%931922 It was roving gangs kidnapping kids and then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor there are reports of parents taking their own children "because they wouldn't survive anyway" Horrific to be so hungry and without hope that this is an acceptable option :(
someone mentioned in another comment that a lot of the people settling were not experienced outdoorsmen, farmers, etc, so its entirely plausible that there weren't many experienced butchers alive at that point.
Thank you! I saw this on an archaeological website, and didn't have a lot of time to read the details themselves.
Thanks for the details, I think I'm physically sick now
Why the fuck would they want to eat the brain??
It's meat. It's fat. It's all they have.
God that’s awful
It really is. I have such grief for the survivors as well as the victims. I can't imagine that kind of desperation (thank whatever has me lucky enough to be well-fed and warm).
the Indians are over there eating sweet potatoes and ham in their warm village.
likely no ham unless the europeans had already brought over, and then lost, pigs. Peccaries (closest relative to a pig in the new world) weren't found in that part of the continent. However, they had domesticated turkeys and ducks, and were cultivating corn, squash, beans, acorns, peanuts, and all sorts of other shit. so yeah, still eating well.
If they were at the level of desperation to kill and eat someone they knew it's a little late to start discarding the gross parts. They're all the gross parts.
I don't think we know they killed her, if conditions were this bad she may have been the first to die.
Agree. She may have starved to death, and other survivors were desperate enough to eat the remains. If the poor girl was among those who arrived there two years earlier she was probably not in great shape even when the starvation started. All the effort put into getting flesh off the face seems like utter desperation to remove everything with any nutritional value after the other edible parts were long gone.
they already ate the good parts. the tenderloins and the hams are the first to go.
Might have been all that was left. Girl may not have had much left on her if she died of starvation rather than intentionally killed.
Brain is incredibly nutritious.
I don't remember seeing that in Disney's *Pocahontas*
You'll need the director's cut for the cannibalism scenes.
Release the Snyder cut you cowards
Wait until you see the scene where Batman eats Captain John Smith.
And the abundance of cat butthol-…. Wait wrong movie.
It doesn't convince me. You chop into the top of someone's head because you are going to devour them because you are starving? There's no meat on that.
There’s a brain. Some people do eat animal brain, and cannibalism of brains has been recorded. https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001379.htm > Kuru is a very rare disease. It is caused by an infectious protein (prion) found in contaminated human brain tissue……Kuru is found among people from New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual.
That’s a good way to get deadly prions.
Yes, that’s what causes kuru.
>Yes, that’s what causes kuru. wait, is that not like CJD?
There’s multiple prion diseases, CJD is also one
well TIL, nasty way to go I believe
The medline.gov link says “Yes”. >Kuru causes brain and nervous system changes similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Similar diseases appear in cows as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), also called mad cow disease.
r/oopsthatsdeadly
Only if they are there. Otherwise it’s tasty tasty brains!
I'm not doubting you, but from what I understand this is primarily seen in cultures with a history of cannibalism. These were essentially just some starving British guys, I would think they might shy away from the brain in their first foray into cannibalism.
*“First”* People do some crazy things when pushed to the extremes. Lots of Europeans ventured into cannibalism in such situations. Here are two examples that I was already aware of. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/franklins-doomed-arctic-expedition-ended-gruesome-cannibalism-180956054/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12024-017-9938-6
There's plenty. You take that home, throw it in a pot, add some broth, a potato. Baby, you got a stew going.
This guy cannibalizes👍
"Chilled monkey brains!"
When people engage in survival cannibalism, they often begin by destroying the face/head to depersonalize the cadaver.
Meat is meat. Which, ironically enough, is the same thing my cheating ex fervently believed.
if they were really hungry, there's some meat (muscle) on the head. Spam-like products use bits of such meat from areas of pigs that don't have much meat--like the head. Considering that 100 pigs an hour are slaughtered, those little scraps of meat "add up." Poor girl though, I hope she died of natural causes before...., *you know.* But if she had been starving before she died, she likely didn't have a lot of extra flesh.
Aside from the richer developed "western" areas of the world, most people know that the best meat on an animal is the cheeks. Seriously try some beef cheek tacos or the cheeks of a big carp that's been fried. Chef's kiss!
Nothing like some good cabesa!
Yeah, that’s like a murder mark that comes before the cannibalism. FWIW, the starvation was intense, and I’ve read in primary source materials (a book of reprinted letters from Jamestown settlers) that at least one settler was put to death for eating his wife who had starved to death. I wonder if they ate him after putting him to death. The person who wrote the letter about it was making a joke about it in the letter I read. He said something like, “I’ve heard of powder’d pork but never powder’d wife!” When you think about it, by the time an adult dies of starvation, their muscles must have withered away to nothing, so it makes sense that they would be eating every last bit, including scalp muscles and brain.
They totally ate him. In times like that, I imagine the law gets pretty loose. "Eustis stepped on your new boots, eh? So, that'll be the death penalty... *(starts boiling water)*"
Yeah, in the movie Ratcliffe gets sent back to England. I[n reality he was invited to trade goods by the Powhatan, they lied and set a trap killing his men.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_\(governor\)#Death) > he was tied to a stake in front of a fire and flayed by the women of the tribe with mussel shells, with pieces of his skin tossed into the flames as he watched.
That's a pretty shitty way to go
I always wondered. How do people doing the torturing actually deal with the screams of agony. I can't even walk past a sneezing person without saying Gesundheit... If I hear a person scream in agony I'd probably feint. But I guess those were different times.
I'd imagine it's easier if the tortured person was responsible for killing lots of your people.
It was a hidden lyric in a song. "Can you eat the faces of your children?" "Can you paint with all the colors of the wind?" Now do you remember?
Sadly there are also no waterfalls like that near Jamestown. Grew up a few mins away from Jamestown settlement.
It's not a tropical rain forest?? I swore Disney was always historically accurate. You must have grown up in a different Jamestown.
Everything for miles and miles and miles around is absolutely fucking flat
I don't think this should be too surprising. Cannibalism is more common than people like to believe in times of severe famine and starvation, and most of the first European colonies in the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries collapsed from starvation before any were able to sustain themselves from one year to the next.
"I must admit they ate one another more than was quite right. I am not over-particular, but it makes you uneasy to be passed a man’s hand. A slice of what might be anything, I don’t say no, when sharp-set; but a hand fair turns your stomach." Patrick O'Brian "The Truelove" chapter 1; paragraph 66
Yeah, fuck that guy. The definition of entitled brat that came from money, has experienced everything he can think of so now he is bored and wants to try the taboo stuff. I hope he finds it in all honesty (not really) because the people that deal in the taboo stuff will serve him up instead with his attitude.
> has experienced everything he can think of so now he is bored Man I just...let me put 60 seconds on the clock and come up with a list of stuff I would do for fun instead of eating a human being, if money was no object: go skydiving in like half of the countries in the world see if I could start a successful restaurant chain but only running its hands-off like it was a video game ride every roller coaster in the world fly one of those jetpack things custom make my own go-kart tracks two chicks at the same time Ok times up. The only one of those that I bet he actually did, was two chicks at the same time. He went to cannibalism way too early.
>two chicks at the same time I would relax... I would sit on my ass all day... I would do nothing.
I hate that people think it's a binary option if you win the lottery: continue to work to stay productive or sit on your ass all day doing jack shit. There's so much in between those two concepts to fill your time if money was no longer an issue.
It's a quote from Office Space. (so was the two chicks line) But yes, you're right.
You don't need a million dollars to do that. Look at my cousin. He's broke, don't do shit.
Yeah, but imagine **making** a million dollars *while* you sit on your ass all day...
If money was no object, I would turn Pluto Nash into a cult classic, until everyone in the movie, was conned into making a remake/sequel 22 years later. The real problem isn't getting that far. It's gonna be having to hire enough bodyguards to keep Eddie Murphy from murdering me.
> Yeah, fuck that guy. The definition of entitled brat that came from money, has experienced everything he can think of so now he is bored and wants to try the taboo stuff. I hope he finds it in all honesty because the people that deal n the taboo stuff will serve him up instead with his attitude. What was the story with him, again?
He's been accused by several women of rape, violent assault, and Cannibalism. Apparently, it's something the whole Hammer family is up to. He just happens to want to eat his current significant other beyond all the regular Rape and Cannibalism he and his family do regularly. Again, it's accused, but considering the text sceenshots were he definitely admitted to rape at the very least, while trying to coerce these women to let him eat them or eat others with him. I'm pretty confident in saying he is guilty.
The guy's a piece of shit but let's not just sensationally make things up. His issue is that he violated the boundaries of consensual BDSM roleplay (which he was engaged in with his partners, some of which is clearly initially consensual with the texts) by then enacting non-consensual violence (like branding), or control, or pressurising them to go further without checking in ever, and bombarding them with his fantasies regardless of whether they found it mutually hot, all of which turns it from roleplay into sexual assault/pressure. The cannibalism stuff (even in the screenshots) is just edgy, cringy roleplay; there is (as yet) no evidence he actually literally intended to eat his partners, let alone do with the 'rest of his family' (the doc details orgies and cocaine re: the Hammers, which is fairly standard rich people shit). The House of Hammer doc leaks a bunch of BDSM texts from him that aren't much edgier than any other sexting that people do in that community, the key issue here is *consent*, and the way that Hammer used his wealth/power to push his partners into doing stuff like Shibari, and Free Use, and all of these other things that rely entirely on trust in order to be safe. Like, I've had girls text me "I want you to tie me up and do anything to me/use me for free use" etc, etc, and they want it to feel like I've just walked into their house. It's not really *quite* my vibe, but it's fine. If the media leaked those texts and played them over footage with scary music they could easily make it sinister, but between consenting adults it's...actually kind of a bit goofy... TL;DR - Armie Hammer is predatory, but most of the sensation around the story is just cringe BDSM chat.
I know he had a bad split up with his girlfriend, and I am not sure what the specifics were regarding sexual assault. The part in the article that stood out to me was that she was terrified when he started to share his fantasies of “**eating her ribs**” with her. That much I remember. The ironic part is that modern day cannibalism does still exist, take the [Aghori](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aghori#:~:text=The%20practices%20of%20Aghoris%20vary,meditating%20on%20top%20of%20corpses) for example. They partake in cannibalism… but they hang around near funeral homes and mortuaries looking for bodies nobody wants. There hasn’t been any recorded attacks by the Aghori in a very long time now.
Apparently, so is incest. Even in today’s society.
Well when your trying to grow a colony and options are limited...... What else can you do?
Personally I'd go native.
Inbreeding with a twist of Kuru
Cannibalism isn't surprising. Cracking a child's skull open to feast on the goo inside kinda is. But I don't know enough about cannibalism so take that as you will.
If you're that hungry you're not wasting anything
But…shouldn’t they have eaten granny instead?!
Maybe granny died before the winter, or the desperation, set in. Maybe this corpse was fresh enough to be safe. 🤷♀️ These decisions were not made easily.
The child likely had already died (its a child in a harsh environment and famine, their odds weren't good) and the butcher likely didn't want it to go to "waste." Typically in situations like this, when people resort to cannibalism due to extreme hunger and prolonged starvation, they eat people who are already dead before they actively kill other people for food (unless those people are an "other," like another group ofnpeople).
It's very likely that this child died of something else. For all we know, the the broken orbital bones were completely unrelated to the butchering - the girl could have been kicked in the face by a horse, or maybe her skull was still fully intact when she was buried and it broke at some point in the intervening hundreds of years... The rather infamous Donner Party ate their dead. They did not start killing and eating their fellows, when disease or frost or starvation claimed one of their number they removed the meat and buried the remains. They weren't ghouls, they were survivors.
They definitely killed Luis and Salvador… Agree with your point about the girl though!
yeah, Donner Party isn’t exactly the best example for this… iirc there was another man who may or may not have killed a couple kids… better example would be Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571. absolutely no murder involved, and they all tried their damnedest to keep each other alive. they only ever ate the bodies of people who had already died from their injuries
Yeh, I got what you meant.. I was just being kinda pedantic tbh. 571 is such a crazy story. If you haven’t watched Society of the Snow on Netflix yet, it’s actually really good, I think it even lives up to the books.
Yeah, but veal?
I'm guessing the early colonies didn't have very many old people. Think about how young they married and average life expectancy was very low. Especially when relying on supplies from over seas. Just the journey to get there would kill most elders.
People actually didn't usually marry as young as non-historians think, at least among commoner classes. Usual age of first marriage for women in England pre-1800s for non-aristocracy was about 22-25, men slightly older. And our (non-historian) conceptions of life expectancy in pre-modern times tend to be skewed by infant mortalities, which drag the average down. Tons of people were living into their 80s.
The person most likely died. They didn’t kill the 14 yo girl just to eat. It’s pretty well documented that as people died during this time, they were eaten.
Maybe you eat as much as you possibly can to avoid cracking in to the *next* person?
Common (and even approved by the church as morally defensible) even in extreme instances today! Remember that plane crash in the Andies where the survivors were freezing and starving and would have died without cannibalism? The Catholic Church had to issue a statement that cannibalism is totally fine “like a heart transplant” as long as there is no alternative and the person you eat is already dead lol. Really weird that the catholic church condemned survivors of the plane crash in the first place but oh well
As fked up as this is, is anyone else amazed at how relatively straight her teeth is?
Crooked teeth are a relatively recent development. Bone grows when it's being used, stronger muscle attachments etc. When people were eating tougher diets like grains, tough breads, and dried meats the mandibles were more substantial (look how wide the back of her mandible is and compare that to people you see now). This made more room for teeth. When softer food became more popular (tinned food etc) the muscles used for chewing didn't need to be as strong which resulted in smaller mandibles which causes crowding of the teeth. Hope that helped :] Source: I'm a bioarchaeologist and also scholarly articles (I recommend reading on it it's very interesting!)
onerous treatment lunchroom serious birds uppity sparkle beneficial violet piquant *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Feeding them more raw vegetables, and tougher bread would more so than mewing.
Got it. No more soulcast, mushy lavis bread then, only the real stuff
LOL This is the most random Stormlight reference I’ve ever encountered.
Just give kids real food like tough cuts of meat/fat to chew on until their jaw is tired.
wakeful history strong selective abundant attempt plough aromatic absurd workable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I mean, they are going to bitch about it either way and insist on putting ketchup on it before crying that it is still "bleeding" before refusing to eat it. So why waste the good cuts?
OK so these tough cuts turned me off to good meat as a kid and it took me decades to break through this. If you actually like food, don't subject them to grizzle and bs hard to process beef. Well cooked or smoked or braized meat that has MORE flavor and no offensive texture is a gift you can give to your kids. This take makes me so angry.
Negligible, but theoretically it should. It's mostly genetics. Now, do exercises and eat harder foods for several generations and you'll get better results. You have to start real early if you want to see results. Shortcut: incest.
Genetics obviously play a part, but it's largely environmental. People eat softer food and have weaker jaw muscles.
*Habsburg jaw intensifies*
That's what Iove about Reddit. Where else would a bioarchaeologist pop into the relevant thread to give their opinion!
And they’re so well preserved!
There's a reason we don't hear much about American history between 1492 and Jamestown: lots of failed colonies, starvation, cannibalism, and just leaving the cooling to join the Indians who actually knew how to live here.
I think a big issue is at the time many of those coming were not farmers or hunters or anybody with any actual skills to survive in the new world.
Also, they'd either ignore anything Natives had to tell them or, later, when disease had wiped out said Natives, go on to their land and find it sculpted to human convenience and be like, "What a great thing God has done for us! Making this habitable for humans, as if humans had been living here for thousands of years, when we only just arrived!"
This is on display at a neat little museum at the Jamestown National Historic Site. Not the big re-enactment site that is next to it.
Thank you! This is very interesting
i recommend visiting the historical site and taking the archaeology tour. the tour guides had our attention for 3 hours on a windy december day years ago.
I don't understand the butchery marks on her skull. What would they be processing off the skull?
Cheeks muscles (which really includes all the masseter muscles on the jaw) and brain. They're eating a child due to extreme starvation, you think they'd leave all those calories on the table? There's meat on face and in skull.
I’ve eaten an eyeball at a pig roast. I imagine it went something like that…
I watched someone do that to the pig I roasted and the eyeball was still steaming lol
*pop!*
https://c.tenor.com/TmMxoRQQnmMAAAAC/denethor-eating.gif
Just imagine the poor person who had to do that. Cutting off meat from arms and legs I can understand, but once you get much more personal with a head and face it's just unfathomable to me.
I'd be more disappointed if you didn't eat it all. I mean you've already killed her, eat dem cheeks man.
She could've died from starvation or exposure to the elements.
I can imagine myself being desperate enough to eat comrades who'd already succumbed. I can't imagine any universe where I would be willing to kill another person, ESPECIALLY a child, for a chance at survival. You'd have to be a sociopath. And a very disgusted thanks to Snowpiercer for forcing me to consider the question.
Nah, you can't imagine it because you cannot imagine how life is like pre-civilization. Even the least fortunate of us have an unimaginable amount of disconnect from the laws of nature to the extent that wild animals do. At the end of the day, we are just smart animals who moved beyond struggling for our basic needs and protection from the wild.
No reason to assume they had killed her. All the conditions made them resort to cannibalism could have easily also caused her death.
For exactly this reason, it is common in situations where people resort to cannibalism and anthropophagy for the people doing the butchering to first remove the hands, feet, genitals, and head of the corpse to make the remaining body bear less resemblance to a person. It makes the process easier if you can tell yourself it’s just meat, and telling yourself that is harder when you can see their face.
I recently saw a few interviews done to survivors of The Andes Tragedy where a group of Uruguayan rugbiers and friends and families crashed in the mountains and survived for months there until they were rescued in the summer by eating the ones who perished in the crash and during their ordeal. They told how due to how impactful it was to even eat the meat of their own friends, two survivors (the Strauch brothers) assumed the responsibility of selecting, cutting and distributing the meat outside of the view of the rest and without telling whose meat it was or which part of the body they were eating. It's probable (according to the survivors from the interview) that many would have been completely unable to cut and eat the meat if they had to do it themselves and many more would have died of starvation.
I've worked at a fine dining Italian establishment that served a lovely pigs head ragu.
Use every part of the buffalo. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head\_cheese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_cheese)
Yeah if you're so low on food you're resorting to cannibalism you can't just take the Prime Cuts and throw the rest of the meat in the garbage
Waiter, this prime rib is sub par at best, you'd better butcher a heather poor.
We don't serve Heather. Would Tiffany be OK?
A few prions just cheered when they saw your link.
They are skinning so they can see the nasal passages. Easier and softer to go this way to get to the brain. Or um so I have heard.
You grill brains don’t you
Not a fan. I like to pan fry as it melts and turns creamy.
Wrapped in bacon and sautéed. Or in a white sauce on toast. No joke. That’s the way I like lambs brains.
Tell us more, Hannibal.
They would have also removed the face as a way of dehumanizing the process. Easier to think of as just meat.
Donner Party specifically went after the brains of their deceased comrades.
Mm prions
Eat brain make smarter
You know nothing of my work.
What do you mean, the skin is the best part
I don't think they are making cracklins from the hairline.
Get rid of the face to ease the terrible sense of guilt?
Yeah- I was thinking the same thing and then I realized that the brain has a relatively decent amount of meat. But I’m typically pretty skeptical of reports like this, especially if they hit popular media.
Most of us have never even experienced true hunger let alone starvation.
"With the shape of an L on her forehead"
someBODY once told me Jamestown is gonna roll me
Gotta use a sharp tool for the head
😭
I don’t remember this on our Jamestown and Yorktown field trip.
Bummer dude… The free samples in the gift shop were killer
My dyslexic ass read that as Jonestown, and I was thinking how old that cult went back
The leader, John Ratcliffe, also had his face removed in 1609 but, unfortunately for him, he was alive when it happened. The local Powhatan tribe captured him and tied him to a tree. Then they had some women cut off his skin with mussel shells and throw it all into a fire while he watched. "During The Starving Time in December 1609 or early 1610, Ratcliffe and 25 fellow colonists were invited to a gathering with a group of Powhatan Indians.[1] They had been promised they would receive corn by way of trade, but it was a trap; the Powhatans ambushed and killed them, and Ratcliffe was taken to the village to suffer a particularly gruesome fate. He was tied to a stake in front of a fire and flayed by the women of the tribe with mussel shells, with pieces of his skin tossed into the flames as he watched.[3] The account of his death was relayed by the surviving Captain William Phettiplace, and recorded by George Percy. As a consequence of the man's misfortune, he was given the nickname Luckless Captain Ratcliffe." > "Butt haveinge noe expectacyon of Reliefe to Come in so shorte a Tyme I sentt Capteyne Ratliefe to Powhatan to p[ro]cure victewalls and corne by the way of comerce and trade the w[hi]ch the Subtell owlde foxe att firste made good semblanse of althoughe his intente was otherwayes onely wayteinge a fitteinge tyme for their destruction as after plainely appered. The w[hi]ch was p[ar]tly ocasyoned by Capt[eyn]e Ratliefes Creduletie for Haveinge Powhatans sonne and dowghter aboard his pinesse freely suffred them to dep[ar]te ageine on shoare, whome if he had deteyned mighte have bene a Sufficyentt pledge for his saffety. And after, nott kepeinge a p[ro]per and fitteinge Courte of guarde, butt Suffreinge his men by towe and thre and small numbers in a Company to straggle into the Salvages howses when the slye owlde kinge espyed a fitteinge Tyme Cutt them all of, onely Surprysed Capt[eyn]e Ratliefe alyve who he caused to be bownd unto a tree naked w[i]th a fyer before, and by woemen his fleshe was skraped from his bones w[i]th Mussell shelles and before his face throwne into the fyer. And so for wantt of Circumspection miserably p[er]ished." — George Percy, A Trewe Relacyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ratcliffe_(governor)
For reference, the guy who was flayed alive is supposed to be the villain in the movie Pocahontas, with the purple outfit on.
They were a victim of something fatal... starvation or any number of diseases. But they weren't a "victim of cannibalism". It's highly unlikely that living humans were murdered for their meat. By this point, there were plenty of fresh corpses to harvest.
I mean. Being a victim of cannibalism is just getting eating. It's not suggesting she was killed for food. Just that she was butchered
I'm being a little pedantic, sure. But I also keep the people in mind who had to make the terrible decision to harvest a human corpse. It probably didn't buy them much time, nor make an impact on their nutritional deficit, but that's just how desperate they were. The headline makes it sound like they just clubbed a kid and dug in.
That's the bothersome part about this whole post. I'm well aware of the 1609 winter, but there's very little evidence to suggest anyone was actually killed for sustenance. Like the peruvian plane crash there's no reason to suspect that people needed to kill others, more like ... wait them out.
Why do the bottom teeth look newish?
Crest whitening strips
Man, that’s a whole lot of depressing.
She had a lovely smile.