The Donner Party, the Franklin Expedition, and the Rugby team whose plane crashed in the Chilean Andes Mountains were all struck with the same ethical decision of whether to eat human flesh in order to survive or to starve to death. Within our social structure society has deemed that eating other humans as a means of a regular diet is dead wrong (criminal cannibalism). However, some individuals rebel, like serial killer Jeff Dahmer, who ate his victims to get rid of the evidence (criminal cannibalism). With continuous excavations, anthropologists have discovered that many ancient tribes participated in this behavior, even during the time when Neanderthals roamed the earth.
The widespread investigation of where and how anthropophagy began may lie in the French caves of some Neanderthals who inhabited them 120,000 years ago. When new evidence of cannibalism was found in the Baume Moula-Geurcy cave in 1991, anthropologists since then have discovered seventy-eight Neanderthal bone fragments that exhibit the same cut marks found on deer bones. Since the "bountiful deer bone fragments suggest the Neanderthals weren't starving, and there are no hints of the cannibalism being part of funeral rituals,"" one can only assume that in certain regions Neanderthals ate Neanderthals (Chang 2).
At the beginning of the exploration era, a diverse collection of tribes located in the tropical lowlands of South America and the farthest regions of Australia practiced cannibalism in one form or another. Since Western society was disgusted by this "primitive- behavior, it provided a ploy to attack and conquer. Most tribes, like the Tupinamba (an ethnic group in Brazil), would invade other tribes due to a disagreement concerning land rights and then feast on their enemy's corpses if they were victorious. Researchers have drawn the conclusion that the Tupinamba resorted to cannibalism because it was "an expression of fierceness that elevated the status of the warrior and struck fear into his enemies.
