By Sarah Rense, Esquire
For
all our many admirable traits and talents, human beings are not good
sources of calories. "We just aren't that nutritionally viable,"
according to researcher James Cole, who just wrote a paper on
cannibalism and human meat for Scientific Reports. Bummer.
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Nevertheless,
human muscle and tissue is not ... nothing. According to Cole, who
calculated based on four men weighing an average of 145 pounds, humans
organs are equivalent to 125,822 calories, or roughly 50 times the
recommended daily caloric intake for an adult male. Here's the
approximate breakdown, body part by body part:
- Torso and head: 5,400 calories
- Thighs: 13,400 calories
- Skeleton: 25,300 calories
- Liver: 2,600 calories
- Teeth: 36 calories
- Skin: 10,300 calories
- Lungs: 1,600 calories
- Brain, spinal cord, and nerve trunks: 2,700 calories
The
body part with the most calories per kilogram—besides straight body
fat—that humans would likely eat is the skeleton, which has 2,457
calories for every kilogram of bone. That's followed by the brain,
spinal cord, and nerve trunks, with 1,600 calories per single kilogram.
This caloric count, despite being a really strange way to think about
the human body, is ultimately the reason Cole wrote the study in the
first place; he wanted to assess why human beings were ever cannibals.
[post_ads]As the The Verge
points out, there are early human bones scattered around Europe with
obvious signs of butchering cuts and gnaw marks, meaning early humans
were eating each other. Some anthropologists assume they did so for an
easy source of meat. But Cole's research indicates that human meat
wasn't the most efficient food available. Other hunt-able animals were
much better sources of calories: Mammoth muscles alone totaled 3.6
million calories and red deer were 163,680 calories, but human muscles
only offered 32,376 calories—not that impressive, and therefore not a
solid justification for cannibalism. (But then you also have to consider
taking down a full-size mammoth.)
Other
anthropologists, including Cole after conducting his research, assume
humans were cannibalistic for ritualistic or religious reasons. In fact,
that's the reason why a tribe of indigenous peoples in Papua New Guinea
ate their dead as recent as a half century ago.
They believed that
consuming their loved ones was a better way to tame their souls than
leaving them to decompose in the ground. (They also got super sick with the "laughing death" and started dying,
so let that serve as a warning about eating other people.) Which seems
considerably less grisly than hunting, butchering, and eating other
people for a quick—but not nutritionally beneficial—meal.
