Ancient Apocalypse - Ancient types sacrificing and eating children? Really?

[likelysuspect]

Ive just started watching a series on Iplayer about the downfall of various ancient civilisations and only halfway through the series to find each one seems to end or have some degree of cannabilism and child sacrifice of some degree

I mean I know its good drama and people love a bit of blood and gore but as I get older I find it harder to believe that these things happen.

AIBU to believe its a bit exaggerated, I mean how come we hear about it in very very very ancient civilisations but not really in later ones. I dont recall this about the Romans, ME peoples or the Chinese dynasties. (for example)

It's all about cultural norms. We're all kidding ourselves if we think we'd be objecting to cannibalism if we lived in a society where it was normal. Maybe current vegetarians could plausible claim they wouldn't eat people.

It sees to me that people lack self-awareness when they object to things that other cultures do. Eating dogs is a really obviously example of that.

I also wonder what things we do that will horrify generations to come. It's really easy to look backward and see the racism, homophobia, slavery etc. But we can't predict easily what we are doing that will be seen in the same light.

Well, I wouldn't open with it.

There's also the aspect of desperate people in times of famine with cannibalism. Finding bones with evidence of butchery does not necessarily mean groups happily carved up children - it could also mean that people were starving and either did this to newly deceased people or became more predatory, as humans do, in order to try and save themselves.

Happens in many parts of the Africa today,especiallywest, central and southern regions. In South Africa, children are regularly kidnapped for muti (traditional medicine) by witchdoctors. That is likely what happened with Adam, the young boy found in the Thames PP have referenced (who was likely from Nigeria).

It happens now, not systematically but certainly as an outbreak within a group/society. In the Congo it seems to resurface occasionally as a weapon of war.

In the last decades, cannibalism in the Democratic Republic of Congo: https://news.un.org/en/story/2003/07/75822 UN reports. Seems to be a weapon of fear https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/aug/17/congo.theobserver

In China in living memory in one of the more extreme excesses of the Cultural Revolution: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/comparative-studies-in-society-and-history/article/abs/consuming-counterrevolution-the-ritual-and-culture-of-cannibalism-in-wuxuan-guangxi-china-may-to-july-1968/9D7B3DD84CF53C31B35E8C97D99BF9AE

In Pompeii or Rome, I forget which, they found the sewer gates near the brothels were clogged with the bones of newborn males. That's what we were told anyway. There seems to be some evidence to back it up.

I don't think there's any doubt that unwanted newborns in Victorian times were sometimes disposed of in rainbarrels if you read some of the out-of-favour, but not alarmist, literature (McDonald). It was referred to in passing very matter of factly by someone who worked in the worst of the slums as well as with lesser nobility.

Bear in mind that the Romans were so rapacious that the children of the nobility of Bithynia were sold into slavery as they only way they could survive, according to the historian Tom Holland in Rubicon (presumably well researched). The nobility presumably were the most well off, so god knows what happened to the rest of the population.

I know, but am not going to cite the sources, that cannibalism has taken place on at least several occasions among some groups of Russian soldiers invading Ukraine in the last years due simply to no food supplies getting through to them. I don't know if Ukrainian soldiers have resorted to this.

The islands off Australia still dabble, I believe. Papua new guinea, is it?

Mesoamerica? Notably the Aztecs (although they were far from the only ones). Actually there was a belief that Spanish accounts were sensationalized, but archaeologists, relatively recently, did find evidence that supported some of the claims considered most unbelievable.

www.science.org/content/article/feeding-gods-hundreds-skulls-reveal-massive-scale-human-sacrifice-aztec-capital

Yes, ritualistic cannibalism created an (recorded) epidemic of kuru, prion disease, in the 1950s, with the last documented death occurring in 2009.