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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pullman Brown" data-source="post: 6037832" data-attributes="member: 73012">It is a well-established fact among anthropologists and historians that many tribal groups around the world have engaged in cannibalism; this was far more common than squeamish first-world academics want to allow. Cannibalism was common for a very simple reason. In hunter-gatherer societies, protein is always at a premium, and eating one’s enemies might well make the difference between survival and extinction. Other reasons for cannibalism include intimidation, the building of a reputation for fierceness in battle, and also a sort of ritual in which one dominates one’s enemies utterly, while appeasing some sort of divine command. Compared with groups like the Aztecs, many North American Indians engaged in cannibalism only sporadically, out of necessity rather than as a matter of course. Still, such things are known to have happened; for example, the French writer Chateaubriand tells the story of a certain Captain Wells, whose heart was supposedly eaten in the vicinity of Chicago during the War of 1812.For many years, Left-leaning academics attempted to deny the mounting evidence that Indians of the southwestern United States—including the oft-fetishized Hopi—were, in fact, cannibals. In recent decades, however, our ability to forensically analyze human feces at the molecular level has provided the smoking gun, if you will. As reported in the Seattle Times in the year 2000: As many as 40 sites scattered around the Southwest contain human bones that show distinctive evidence of having been butchered and cooked—signs consistent with cannibalism. Until now, however, most archaeologists have shied away from con-ceding the evidence proves cannibalism—favoring explanations such as ritual burial or the execution of people believed to be witches.The new, conclusive evidence comes from preserved pieces of human excrement that were found at the site. The pieces contain human proteins that could be there only if the subjects had eaten human flesh. Researchers believe that if cannibalism has been definitively proven at this one Southwestern site, it is overwhelmingly likely that cannibalism was common enough to have taken place at the other sites where butchered bones have been found. The report in Nature is certain to add fuel to a bitter argument among scholars and Native Americans over cannibalism among the Anasazi, regarded as the ancestors of the modern Hopi, Zuni and other Puebloan peoples in the North American Southwest.74 It is now hypothesized that the cliff-dwelling Anasazi people of the American southwest built their homes in such out-of-the-way places because they were being actively hunted by cannibalistic groups who had moved into the neighboring lowlands. The Aztecs engaged in cannibalism on a far grander scale. This was on account of the sheer number of excess human corpses that their culture created on an annual basis.The very first group of Spaniards captured by Mexican Indians in 1520 were ritually slaughtered and cannibalized along with their Indigenous allies. As reported by the Guardian in 2015, a group of fifteen Spaniards, forty-five colonial soldiers, fifty women, ten children, and “hundreds of their Indigenous allies” were captured and put in cages. Like a scene out of a particularly disturbing movie, one or two per day of the Europeans and captured Indians were chosen at random and sacrificed in a gruesome manner, within earshot of the other prisoners. The bodies were then dismembered and cooked, and the flesh distributed to the people of the town. The slow, steady pace of human sacrifice, which occurred over the course of many months, shows a desire to propitiate different gods on their feast days—for example, rain gods preferred children. But archaeologists also speculate that it served to provide an ongoing source of protein for the people of the town.The Aztecs were notoriously short of large domesticable animals to use for food, so this steady ritual of human sacrifice met a social need for protein. The town where this occurred was previously named Zultapec—but after this windfall of sacrificial victims, its name was changed to “Tecoaque,” which meant “the place where they ate them.”The Left-wing fantasy of Amerindians as peaceful, or even as “moderate and reasonable” in warfare, is a product of the 1960s and 70s peace movement, and it simply does not square with the majority of evidence coming from all parts of the Americas for the better part of the past two thousand years. Nor indeed does it square with the view that both Native and non-Native Americans had of Indian civilization, right up to the 1970s.Jeff Paul-Flynn</blockquote>

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