Cannibalism

Why do you recoil when you hear the word cannibalism? In Bill Schutt’s book, what begins as a tour of taboo becomes a study of nature’s pragmatism and humanity’s moral complexity. Schutt argues that cannibalism isn’t monstrous—it’s a behavioral response with evolutionary logic, cultural meaning, and historical consequence. Across species and centuries, from tadpoles to T. rex to the Donner Party, the act reveals how biology, ecology, and belief shape what societies call “inhuman.”

Cannibalism throughout Nature

At its broadest, cannibalism is “the killing and consumption of all or part of an individual of the same species.” With this pragmatic definition, Schutt opens a window on its ecological functions. You find it in backswimmers, spadefoot toads, cichlid fishes, even in mammals. Females are often the primary participants; juveniles are most frequent victims. Conditions like hunger, crowding, and resource scarcity act as triggers. In nature, the act serves functions of nourishment, competition control, reproductive advantage, and survival under stress—always a calculation of benefit and cost.

Ecology, Plasticity, and Evolution

Schutt’s first major insight is about context dependency: cannibalism rises from ecological pressures and developmental flexibility. His field tours with biologist David Pfennig in Arizona show spadefoot toads transforming into cannibal morphs under environmental stress. These dramatic examples of phenotypic plasticity demonstrate how one genotype can yield different outcomes when survival is on the line. Cannibalism here isn’t pathology but adaptation—a short-term developmental solution with long-term evolutionary implications.

Over time, natural selection can fix these once-plastic traits into heritable forms—showing how adaptive behaviors today may become species-defining traits tomorrow. This pattern connects Schutt’s biology to evolutionary-developmental (“evo-devo”) ideas: plasticity provides raw material for evolution, and cannibalism sits on that continuum between environment, development, and inheritance.

Sex, Stress, and Survival

From animal biology, Schutt shifts to cannibalism tied to reproduction and crowding. You meet praying mantises and redback spiders whose sexual cannibalism reflects evolved tradeoffs: decapitated males often fertilize longer, maximizing genetic legacy at the price of life. Under overcrowding, Mormon crickets and chickens show how social stress amplifies feeding on conspecifics. In each, the act reflects a breakdown of usual constraints—ecology reshaping social rules.

Humans are no exception. From the Donner Party to the Leningrad Siege, starvation elicits the same shift from moral taboo to desperate calculus. Schutt reads these episodes not as scandals but case studies in physiological decline, social collapse, and the thinness of moral order when calories vanish. His use of forensic and historical evidence reminds you that survival cannibalism obeys natural law, not moral monstrosity.

Culture, Taboos, and Symbolism

As the lens moves from instinct to imagination, you see how culture reframes biology. Western taboo draws from Homer’s monsters, Christian resurrection beliefs, and literary warnings from Titus Andronicus to the Grimms. Cannibalism becomes a moral boundary signaling civilization itself. Yet societies elsewhere gave it layered meanings: for the Wari’ of Brazil, mortuary cannibalism honored the dead; in China, filial piety once sanctified the offering of one’s own flesh to elders. These contrasts prove Herodotus’s ancient maxim—custom is king—and force you to separate the act from the meaning assigned to it.

Colonial powers weaponized this moral logic. The accusation of “cannibal” justified conquest, slavery, and extermination from Columbus onward. In this sense, Schutt argues, cannibalism serves as both biological behavior and political metaphor: a way to mark other humans as monsters and thereby dehumanize them.

Disease and the Costs of Consumption

When feeding on one’s kind crosses into pathology, biology meets public health. The Fore people’s kuru epidemic, spread by ritual mortuary feasting, gave science its first window into transmissible spongiform encephalopathies—later echoed in Britain’s BSE crisis. Both episodes show that cannibalistic recycling of animal or human tissues can transmit fatal protein misfolding (“prion-like”) diseases. Schutt uses this to tie the behavioral and the biomedical: cannibalism’s evolutionary benefits often ride alongside biological risk.

Continuities and Modern Echoes

Surprisingly, Westerners once practiced a “respectable” form of cannibalism through medicinal corpse consumption: powdered mummy, blood tonics, and skull moss, prescribed by Renaissance physicians and consumed by royalty. In modern times, vestiges survive in movements like placentophagy, marketed as wellness ritual despite lack of evidence and potential infection risk. Both remind you that disgust and belief are culturally tuned, shifting with what medicine or religion deems legitimate.

The book closes where it begins: ecology and culture in tension. As climate stress and famine threats rise, cannibalism could—biologically, not morally—reappear as survival strategy. Its recurrence, Schutt warns, would signal not depravity but systemic failure: food systems collapsed, governance fractured, taboo overwhelmed by hunger. Through this mirror, you see your own species clearly—capable of reverence and horror, but always bound by nature’s quiet arithmetic of survival.

Core Premise

Once you stop treating cannibalism as moral aberration and start treating it as ecological event, you uncover both the evolutionary story you share with other species and the cultural superstructure that seeks to deny it.

Cannibalism pervades the natural world, not as pathology but as functional strategy. Across microbes, insects, fishes, and mammals, it appears wherever crowding, hunger, or reproduction reshape cost–benefit tradeoffs. Biologist Gary Polis distilled the common rules: juveniles are eaten more frequently than adults, females are more habitual cannibals, and rates increase with density and scarcity. When you observe nature through this lens, consumption of conspecifics emerges as one more ecological knob regulating population dynamics.

Adaptive Payoffs

Cannibalism saves energy in lean times, accelerates growth, and reduces rivals. In some fish, eating eggs serves as reproductive reset: parents reclaim energy to produce stronger next broods. Yet each benefit carries costs—risk of disease, injury, and genetic loss when kin are consumed. Schutt shows you the balancing act of evolution: behavior emerges only when expected rewards exceed these dangers. Natural selection may favor avoidance of kin (kin discrimination using chemical cues), but under pressure, even that moral of the genome can fail.

Phenotypic Plasticity as Evolution’s Leverage

Through the spadefoot toad, Schutt and Pfennig dramatize plasticity in action. Drying ponds and crowded larvae trigger transformation of some siblings into cannibal morphs—larger jaws, shorter guts, and predatory habits. This quick environmental shift rewrites their developmental destiny. When ecologies favor these traits repeatedly, genetic assimilation can eventually lock them in, producing new evolutionary pathways. Cannibalism thus becomes both developmental experiment and evolutionary tool.

By revealing these mechanics, Schutt redefines the behavior as conditional strategy—not madness but an evolutionary script adaptable across species, including our own under extreme duress.

When you shift focus from nutrition to reproduction and stress, cannibalism reveals a repertoire of delicate tradeoffs. In sexual contexts, as with praying mantises or redback spiders, the act enhances female nutrition and, perversely, male reproductive success. Decapitated males sometimes copulate longer, securing fertilization even while being eaten—evolution optimizing death itself. In rare reversals like Allocosa wolf spiders, larger males devour less-fit females, proving that ecological context, not gender alone, determines the predator.

Density, Domestication, and Stress

Beyond mating, environmental stress amplifies cannibalism’s frequency. The Mormon cricket swarms studied by Stephen Simpson exemplify emergent self-predation: overcrowded individuals chase one another for salt and protein, turning migration into moving feast. Domesticated animals echo this under confinement—poultry pecking at cagemates, hamsters attacking young. Each case points to the physiological roots of violence: when social or nutritional needs misalign with constructed environments, survival instincts override learned inhibition.

Takeaway

Cannibalism is a behavioral pressure valve. Reduce stress, restore nutrition, and restructure environment, and the behavior can vanish without moral intervention.

Peering into deep time, Schutt guides you through how scientists distinguish myth from physical proof. Early excitement about Coelophysis “stomach bones” mistakenly read crocodilian fossils as juveniles, creating a decades-long myth of dinosaur cannibalism. Later, Majungasaurus specimens from Madagascar provided firmer evidence—bite marks matching tooth dimensions and wear consistent with feeding. Yet even here, distinctions between scavenging and predation remain subtle.

Reading Bones Carefully

Schutt’s paleontological chapters teach scientific prudence: fossilization filters evidence, and taphonomic distortion turns absence into apparent innocence. He urges the “multiple line” rule—matching tooth impressions, digestion traces, and ecology before inferring behavior. The fossil record thus becomes not tabloid evidence but slow detective work.

For you, the takeaway is skepticism: extraordinary behavioral claims require converging data, not sensational headlines. Dinosaur cannibalism may have occurred, but proving it demands patience equal to nature’s own recording pace.

Schutt’s historical chapters reveal how the word cannibal became a colonial instrument. From Columbus and Álvarez Chanca’s lurid letters about Caribbean “Caribs,” European authorities crafted rhetoric equating resistance with savagery. Papal decrees and royal edicts justified enslavement of any group labeled anthrophagous. The accusation stripped entire peoples of human status before a sword was drawn.

Anthropological Revision

In the twentieth century, anthropologist William Arens contested these myths in The Man-Eating Myth, claiming many accounts lacked eyewitness credibility. Schutt respects Arens’s skepticism but balances it with confirmed ritual cases—such as the Wari’ of Brazil, where endocannibalism honored kin. His distinction is careful: beliefs around cannibalism must be read through cultural logic, not colonial fear.

This sensitivity extends eastward: in China, Confucian filial cannibalism—children offering body pieces to ill parents—was once moral virtue, not horror, while state famines like the Great Leap Forward drove millions to survival consumption. The act’s meaning flips with social framework. The lesson: moral categories are contingent, wielded as power or compassion depending on narrator and need.

Ethical Reflection

To study cannibalism responsibly is to ask not “who did it,” but “who said they did it, and why?” Narrative itself can be predatory.

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Europe’s most learned physicians dispensed corpse medicine without irony. Mummy powder, human blood, bone ash, and skull-grown moss populated apothecaries under the authority of Galen and Paracelsus. Monarchs swallowed tinctures believing they transferred vitality. In this mirror of faith and science, you witness how necessity and symbolism merged: the body as reservoir of curative essence.

The Decline of the Remedy

By Enlightenment, medicine’s metaphysics shifted. The body became mechanism, not mystical vessel, draining these treatments of credibility. Historians like Karen Gordon-Grube and Richard Sugg frame the transition as moral as much as scientific: Western civilization didn’t stop eating people because it learned better science, but because its metaphors of purity and progress changed. Schutt adds that even today, symbolic ingestion persists—from cremation ash rituals to placenta encapsulation services. What changes is framing, not impulse.

Continuity

A practice once medical becomes monstrous only when the cultural story about bodies transforms.

Schutt interlaces anthropology and biomedicine through the kuru tragedy among the Fore and the BSE epidemic among British cattle. Both show that feeding species their own tissues completes a deadly feedback loop. When the Fore practiced mortuary cannibalism, prionlike proteins spread via ritual, infecting women and children. When industrial agriculture recycled meat-and-bone meal into livestock feed, an analogous epidemic erupted. In both, ecology ignored becomes biology avenged.

Scientific and Policy Lessons

Research by Prusiner (prion theory) and skeptics like Laura Manuelidis frames ongoing scientific debate—protein versus virus—but Schutt’s point is simpler: ignorance and delay compound danger. Britain’s slow public response to vCJD paralleled early colonial misunderstandings of kuru’s cause. Culture again mediated science: disbelief in “cultural channels” of transmission obstructed action.

If cannibalism teaches evolution’s ingenuity, prion diseases teach its price. Recycling flesh collapses the boundary evolution built between eater and eaten, reminding you that ecological shortcuts always collect interest in disease.

Schutt closes with two mirrors: fascination and forecast. Modern entertainment—zombie flicks, true-crime cannibal cases—reflects suppressed attraction mixed with revulsion. Anthropologist Andrew Silke reads this as harmless catharsis, yet Schutt sees creeping desensitization. Our symbolic consumption of cannibal stories mimics the biological act: moral digestion of others’ suffering for our own stimulation.

The Likelihood of Return

Cultural disgust may seem absolute, yet ecological shocks could resurrect survival cannibalism. Historical analogs—medieval European famines, the Chinese Great Leap Forward, or Arctic expeditions—prove that when food disappears, taboos collapse predictably. Environmental models of drought and desertification make this more than thought experiment. Schutt asks whether moral restraint can outlast hunger.

Prehistoric Echoes

Finally, the speculative frontier: models like Simon Underdown’s suggest that prion-like diseases from ritual cannibalism may have thinned Neanderthal genes, linking prehistory’s demise to epidemiological consequences of empathy rituals gone wrong. Anthropological humility demands you see cannibalism as evolutionary test—adaptive yet perilous.

In the end, Schutt’s message is not fear but awareness: cannibalism tracks the boundary between biology and morality. When famine, ideology, or curiosity breach that line, they reveal the same truth—humanity is always nearer to nature than its own myths admit.