Does New Guinea cannibalism have nutritional value?

Disease transmission by cannibalism: rare event or common occurrence?

“…Historically, members of families or a village often shared captured individuals in ritualized meals ( Volhard 1968;Sahlins 1983;Wendt 1989), and the group size of individuals sharing one victim was often very large. Additionally, some human societies practiced cannibalism across groups and necrophagy within the group ( Volhard 1968;Conklin 2001). This seems to have been the case for the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, in which both intraspecific necrophagy and cross-group cannibalism were common (Lindenbaum 1979;Rumsey 1999).…”

A Small Footnote to the ‘Big Walk‘: Environment and Change among the Miyanmin1 of Papua New Guinea

“…well as essential amino acids. Second, I referred also to other work (Dornstreich andMorren 1975, Morren 1974) that described the contingencies effecting occasional meat scarcity fo~the Miyanmin; it occurs seasonally (Morren 1980), may also be related to penod and density of settlement, and hence can be associated with the relocation of villages under emergency conditions or in response to development as I describe later in this paper. The charge that I have substituted a 'protein obsession' for a 'calorific obsession' is simply untrue.…”

Cannibalism

“…For tropical people living at low-medium population densities exploiting a diverse range of animal foods, the answer was yes (Dornstreich & Morren 1974). For prehistoric cannibalism, probably not, as the value of human meat compared unfavourably with the nutritional value of huge animals, such as mammoths consumed during Paleolithic times (Cole 2017).…”