RedHanded - ShortHand: Cannibalism

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

What could drive a person to eat another human being? Well, as it turns out, humankind has actually been surprisingly open to a little cannibalistic carpaccio.From funeral traditions where families gather to gobble up their loved one as a mark of respect; to a European craze for drinking liquefied, mummified human brains (plus a surprising number of societies who just really liked the taste) – here is ShortHand’s history of inter-personal dining.--Patreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesYouTube - Full-length Video EpisodesTikTok / Instagram

As a species, we've never been short of colouring options. We're omnivores to an extreme degree. We're just as happy chowing down on nuts, berries, grains, scallops, rabbits, big Macs, Dubai chocolate, or macho-machi. Do you know where the guy who invented Dubai chocolate's actually from? Barnsley. No, a bit more exotic than that. He's from the Pilipines. Oh, well, there you go.

Lovely. So yes, to us pretty much anything with calories is fair game. And despite being surrounded by options throughout human history, there have been stories of human beings, voluntarily eating each other. Cannibalism has been a staple in folklore across the world as an act of savagery, an unholy inversion of the normal order of things, so much so that some academics started to argue that no human culture has ever regularly eaten human flesh,

that it was all a bunch of colonial smoke and mirrors designed to dehumanize tribal peoples. But cannibalism is very real, and it happened everywhere. And I do have to say, I went to Indonesia, and I was very lucky to go to North Sumatra and some of the other little islands that is not as well-trodden. And when we were there, we were like, oh, you guys didn't really do cannibalism, did you?

And they were like, of course we fucking did. Of course we fucking did. So I think there's this sort of like whitewashing of like people being like, oh no, no, no. Like they just like colonial people just like made that up. And then the locals are like that. We fucking did it. We totally fucking did it. What could drive a person to seek out a little cannibalistic capatio?

We're going to talk about families gathering around at a funeral to chow down on a loved one as a mark of respect. about the medieval European craze for drinking liquefied, mummified human brains and of Chinese delicacies involving special fried human children. And we'll look into the question, what are the real risks of interpersonal dining? And why exactly do we as humans find the idea so very hard to swallow? This is the shorthand. Our history of man-eaters actually starts with the word cannibal,

popularised by explorer extraordinaire Mr Christopher Columbus. Columbus first arrived in the Caribbean in October 1492, and he was a big fan. Apart from its golden sands and crystal clear waters, it had natural resources, farmable land, and people that, quote, ought to make good servants. He wrote to Queen Isabella of Spain that the indigenous Taino people he met were friendly and peaceful.

But the Taino told him about another group, who were not so hospitable. They called them the Caribes, and the Taino warned Columbus's men that the Caribes were savage, violent beasts who carried out brutal raids on various islands, kidnapped women, and even cooked and ate their prisoners. When word got back to Queen Isabella about this, she was horrified. She sent word that anyone found to be eating human flesh should be captured and enslaved. On his second expedition, Columbus rocked up on the aisle of Guadalupe.

Where's the one in the Caribbean Guadalupe? Because the French took it in the end. I was going to ask you. I don't know. Sometimes it's Guadalupe. I don't know. I think the island in the Caribbean is Guadalupe. But in...

I trust you. There's a bunch of places in Spanish-speaking countries that are called Guadalupe. So maybe it was Guadalupe, and then I think the French took it later and changed it. Maybe. Because they've got loads of fingers in the Caribbean. Anyway, whatever he decided to call it at the time, all he found were abandoned villages, prisoners saying they had been captured from other islands, and quite a large amount of hacked off body parts were lying around.

So Columbus inferred a few things. A, this was clearly the work of the infamous caribates. And B, every corpse or dismembered body part was being stored for some kind of celebratory human barbecue to toast their win. And by this point, the honeymoon phase of Columbus's sun-soaked island adventure was already coming to an end. He hadn't found the gold he wanted. Plus, the indigenous people were starting to become rather difficult about him setting up shop there, enslaving them, taking all their shit.

So soon enough, anyone who resisted capture was labelled a caribé, which by then was a handy Spanish byword for people-eater. Back home, the word became canoebe and later cannibal. Not a single instance of actual person eating was actually witnessed on Guadalupe, but the concept had a solid rebrand. The existing Latiny word for person eating, Anthropopagus just didn't really have the same special exotic source and it's much harder to say.

And so was born the concept of the cannibal, a primitive barbaric savage who feasts on his enemies, and is therefore in desperate need of European colonisation. So this false attribution definitely did happen. It was used for centuries as an easy way to dehumanise Indigenous people to create what Professor Sylvia Mbello calls a moral distance from others. A piece of hearsay was wildly embellish to justify claiming the lands for Europe. The understanding of cultural cannibalism got so murky, in fact,

that some scholars argued it didn't exist. William Aaron's book in 1979, The Man-Eating Myth, famously argued that every well-known story about ritual cannibalism comes from colonists, denigrating other people. He said that there was actually no good evidence it was ever a consistent part of any human social structure. And on one hand, he significantly up the standards for scientific definitions of cannibalism. But luckily for us, he was wrong.

And we don't have to go to the Caribbean for evidence. We can start in Somerset. There there's a cave, known as Goff's Cave, in the UK's Cheddar Gorge, where prehistoric remains of several people have been found. Some of their bones had unusual cut marks, showing that soft tissue had been meticulously scrubs. graped out. Longer bones and ribs had been cracked open and gnawed at, suggesting that they had been chewed to extract marrow and grease. Archaeologists even found bones and skulls that had

been shaped into cups and bowls. This didn't seem like a desperate bid for survival during a period of famine. Instead, as Dr. Sylvia Bello at the Natural History Museum puts it, the evidence at Goff's cave points to a sophisticated culture of butchering and carving. human remains. And these were the Magdalanians, a very early group of homo sapiens. And Magdalanean remains have been found all over Northern Europe, suggesting ritual human cannibalism going back more than 23,000 years. And if you include Neanderthals, evidence of cannibalism goes back twice as far.

I always include the Neanderthals, you know, they had a hard enough time. Exactly. Let's not exclude them. Between modern archaeology and more reliable eyewitness accounts, we can say pretty confidently when a certain culture was ritually eating each other. Human blood proteins were found in fossilised feces in the American southwest. First-hand sources reported it among the Mesoamerican Aztecs and the Brazilian Tupinaba. Archaeologists will look at cut marks and burning patterns on bones, evidence of marrow extraction, and contextual evidence.

Sometimes you even get lucky enough to find fragments of human bones, in Earth ovens, which is a bit of a giveaway. The question of why people have eaten each other is where it gets really interesting. And we will come back to what was going on in Goff's Cave. Academics have actually come up with a lot of different classifications for types of human-on-human snacking. There's survival cannibalism, aggressive cannibalism,

sacrificial cannibalism, magical cannibalism, ceremonial cannibalism, affectionate cannibalism, gastronomic cannibalism, you dish your cannibalism and I really could go on but I shan't If you were going to be cannibalized Which of those categories would you like? I personally would like gastronomic cannibalism I don't want somebody hacking me up and then

you know turning me into like a fucking chicken pot noodle or something gross Like tell me it's something delicious A lovely Wellington perhaps Or a I don't know a dobo That would be delicious As we know from our old friend Isis Sigawa That's quite difficult to do with the human Ceremony or send me to heaven

Nice. Fun. So we are going to run you through a couple of the main subcategories. First and most obvious is, of course, survival cannibalism. From the Donner Party to the Siege of Leningrad to the Iroguyen rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes, there are plenty of stories of humans forced to eat each other after being left with no other chance of survival. And we know about these from first-hand accounts from survivors

and also from fragments of human remains found inside other remains. And the seven times I've watched the heart of the sea. That too. Now we've definitely talked about the terror before, which was another very good series that Hannah and I would both highly recommend people check out. And it's of course about Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1846 expedition to the Arctic, in which 129 men found themselves stuck in a sea of ice. Marks on the skeletons and accounts by Inuit witnesses revealed that the men had begun to eat each other.

other. Then there are events, like the extremely rough winter of 1314. For two years Britain was hammered by practically continuous rain, so much that crops died and rotted in the soil and livestock drowned. The ensuing famine claimed more than 10% of the entire population. In desperation, people turned to eating horse meat, and then their dogs. It wasn't long before someone started dying up the bodies of hanged criminals. And eventually cases of families killing and eating their youngest children were becoming more and more common.

There are stories of Roman infantrymen left leaderless and without any food miles from home. First boiling old leathers and hides to chew on and then they're dead. And sure, it's not like a great or gonna do you any favours speaking to St Peter, but

the average human body contains more than 125,000. calories. That's about 685 eggs in one Gaston. So if you're an entire army on the absolute last thread of desperation, and there's an already dead body sitting right there chock full of delicious calories, your old war buddy might just start to look like a giant cartoon hamburger. Now speaking of battles, cannibalism during warfare can also be less about survival and more about, well, gloating. From Meso-American societies to the Māoris in New Zealand,

there are plenty of cultures who practice what's known as aggressive cannibalism. That is, feasting on enemies after battle as an act of intentional terror. In 1098, after a successful siege and capture of the Syrian city of Mara, Christian soldiers ate the flesh of local Muslims. It was widely believed to be done as a fear tactic, and it worked. The story actually became a real thorn in the side of the victorious crusaders, whose whole thing was proving how noble and virtuous and civilized the new Christian world order was.

In her book Cannibalism, The First Crusade and the Genesis of Medieval Romance, Geraldine Heng writes, which his Jews, savages, Orientals and pagans are conceivable, as indeed must be, cannibals. But in the 12th century medieval imagery, the Christian European subject cannot. Sometimes, though, eating your enemies after battle was more about stealing their mojo. Some cultures believed that eating a person meant you could absorb their strength and bravery. In parts of Africa, it was considered a form of witchcraft or sorcery. The organs, hands or heads of the enemy would be ritually eaten

in an effort to absorb their power, vitality or other qualities. It was also believed to reduce their capacity for revenge in the afterlife. And then there's gastronomic cannibalism, which is exactly what it sounds like. Because yes, there are cultures who just ate dead human bodies because they thought they were tasty. In Navaratu, Fiji, human bones were found thrown away alongside other food waste, including fish, birds and mammals. And the human bones showed exactly the same treatment as butchered animals. Some sources suggest that during the Yuan dynasty in parts of China, human-based dishes were considered a luxury. Sao Singh Yi, a writer from the time, wrote this.

Children's meat was the best food of all in taste. Well, that makes sense. I understand what veal is the way it is. Yeah. I mean, they call breast milk, luxury milk. Why not luxury long pork? And it's an example of endocannibalism, an umbrella term for any practice where people eat others within the same group as them,

which brings us nicely back to cheddar. Gorge. Like we said, the evidence from Goff's Cave showed that this cannibalism was pretty habitual. And that is because Goff's Cave is the oldest example of what is known as mortuary cannibalism. That is, ritualistically eating someone from your own group after they've died. And there is loads of ethnographic evidence of this kind of cannibalism. It's odd, but they do have their reasons. I actually think, out of all of them, it makes the most sense. Way back in Goffs Cave, it could have been just a way to make the most of all those lovely fresh calories, but it really seems like it was a part of an important ceremonial tradition.

The University of Manchester's Sarah Louise Flowers calls this type of ritual an act of affection and respect for the dead person, as well as being a means of helping survivors to cope with their grief. Some Aboriginal Australians ate their loved ones as a mark of respect too, and Aztecs were known to eat a body that had been sacrificed to the gods because the corpse was considered sacred. One of the best known examples of mortuary cannibalism was the Foray people of New Guinea.

Not because of how they did it, but because they serve as the ultimate cautionary tale of what can go wrong if eating people becomes too big a part of your life. The Foray would, if possible, make their funeral preferences known in advance. And whereas nowadays, that might include, your choice of coffin or perhaps a tasteful playlist. There's might well include a line item saying, My dying wish is that you all get together and eat me.

If so, the family members would gather around and take it in turns to consume parts of the body and brain. It was an act of love, preventing the corpse from being devoured by insects and protecting it from many dangerous spirits. This happened way into the 20th century, until something very bad happened. I was waiting for this.

Yeah, can't avoid it. At some point, one for a person who made this request had died in the early stages of a disease they call Kuru. Kuru translates to shivering or trembling. And it's actually a form of transmissible, spongiform, encephalopathy, or T-S-E. And if that sounds familiar, you might have heard of other T-S-Ees like Mad Cowan, disease, which is exactly the same thing, or Croitsdelf Jacob disease. These are incredibly rare neurological disorders caused by prions, misfolded proteins that spread like wildfire. They cause

spongy holes where your brain tissue used to be, and they make you slowly, agonizingly, lose brain function until you're dead. It almost made the cut in our zombie virus is shorthand, because it is horrifying, deadly, and can turn people into aggressive, degenerated half-beings before killing them. The saving grace is that it is phenomenally difficult to pass on. Unless that is, you eat an infected brain. Isn't that how mad cow happened we were feeding cows to other cows? Yeah.

Cows were being given animal feed that contained parts of other infected cows. Bad, bad news. Sokuro, which should have died with that first corpse, went on to kill hundreds of foray people. So, that's your answer to the question, is cannibalism actually bad for you? Yes, it is. If that person has a blood-borne disease, prion disease, or parasite. In those cases, you're doing the pathogens job for it, introducing it directly to your bloodstream, without any need for airborne contagion.

To be honest, outside of that, human meat, I guess, is just meat. still the possibility of a massive outbreak of disease, is probably a big part of why cannibalism became such a big taboo. That is, outside of its association with death and, well, murder. Michael Miseki of the University of Rotsloff wrote this. Taboo acts as an evolutionary safeguard. It is a biologically justified response to the growing risk of epidemics. Communities that didn't curb cannibalism simply didn't survive.

But then some society, these missed the memo on the disease element in a big way. In fact, there are many instances of quite the opposite, cannibalism as medicine. In the Tang Dynasty in China, compounds made from human hair, nails and organs were used as medicines. And they took this even further with a practice called filial cannibalism, whereby adult sons and daughters would offer a piece of their flesh to sick parents. Usually a sliced off bit of thigh or an upper arm. Maybe. And then in an absolute classic case of colonial hypocrisy, there was the 15th century European craze for

Mummia, not Mamma Mia. That was several hundred years later. At the very same time as Columbus was out branding everyone and their Mama Cannibal in the new world, a new miracle cure was sweeping Europe. Mummified bodies were being imported from Egypt, pulverized and turned into drinks, salves and tonics. Mummia was thought to treat everything from headaches to gout. Thing is, there weren't all that many mummies

actually knocking about. And they're quite difficult to mass produce. So when demand outstrips apply, people started heading down to their local graveyards, digging up bodies and making a little homebrew. It was all the rage. And before long, the flesh, skin, bone, blood, fat and urine of local cadavers

were being imbibed as remedies for all sorts. sorts of ailments. Richard Sugg, who published a book about corpse medicine called mummies, cannibals and vampires, said that it's certainly possible that Europeans were consuming more human flesh at the time than the people in the new world. And the mumma-mea craze carried on for hundreds of years. It's even listed in the Merck Index, a popular medical encyclopedia, well into the 20th century. The Europeans also had a not insignificant period of time thinking that drinking human blood was a quick-fire cure for epilepsy. And consuming process human livers, gallstones, powdered hearts and oil distilled from human brains

were prescribed as remedies for everything, from stomach aches to nosebleeds. So the whole time that they were calling the Caribbean's people eating savages, they were knocking back a vial of liquefied dead criminal brain to cure a headache. So now you know, almost everything we wanted to tell you about the history of cannibalism. And maybe you're thinking of giving it a try. Well, if you're in the UK or the US, you're in luck because it's not actually illegal. In fact, Idaho is the only US state that even mentions it, and not in the way that you'd think.

Cannibalism in Idaho is legally defensible in cases of, quote, extreme life-threatening conditions, as the only apparent means of survival. It does go on to say that non-survivable cannibalism can get you up to 14 years in prison. Outside of Idaho, it doesn't really have to be said. Well, you'd think that. Unless your arm in myvis. Eating people tends to go hand in hand with a string of other very illegal things. Desecration of a corpse, murder, grave robbing.

But with full consent, it's green lights all the way, especially when it comes to having a little taste of your own medicine. You can eat as much of yourself as you want. Oh, I'm going to be sick. So yeah, I don't know. Unless you're stuck on a mountain in Idaho, So I guess I don't condone cannibalism. But purely because I'm very squeamish to that kind of thing.

It's disgusting. I don't want any private. I can't even eat my dinner and watch a nature documentary with animals in. It's too much. It's too much. Yeah. I'm not a particularly squeamish person. But, I mean, no, obviously I don't condone cannibalism,

unless you're going to absolve me of all of my sins, in which case then please take me. Sure, sure, sure, sure. Perfect. Well, that's it, guys. So, you know, if you're in a horrible plane crash and you have to, eat people. Wait a couple of days

because you can definitely survive a couple of days like eating and then you know chow down until you're rescued but it will be very embarrassing if you die and then they just find that you're full of like

your best pal and you still died but never mind that's it we'll see you next week for another shorthand goodbye goodbye