What are thr worst instances of this happening throughout history
The Donner Party - 19th century USA. Idiots who don't take advice from those with experience get caught in a blizzard while trekking to California. Even murdered a couple of their Native American guides for food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party?wprov=sfla1
The Alaskan explorers who were too racist to take advice from the inuit people always comes to mind.
Ah franklin expedition and Donner party always comes to mind. Good one forgot about this one for a bit
Uruguayan Air Force flight 571.
I’m headed out the door for some errands so no time to give an explanation, but it’s worth searching on the net.
Edit - apparently this is not technically cannibalism since there was no rituals, no murder for eating of humans. This is technically called anthropophagy. Donner Party is an actual example of survival cannibalism.
Footie team crashes in the Andes. They eat their crash mates to survive. Tons of reading material, podcasts, and even a movie (Alive!) about it. Despite it being a Hollywood thing the movie is pretty accurate to what happened. 40 something in the plane, something like 15 survived to rescue. Like 10k foot elevation in the Chilean Andes for 70+ days.
Fucking harrowing. I am doing it zero justice, and not doing justice to the survivors stories. It’s worth the rabbit hole.
ETA - I think Last Podcast On The Left did something about it. It’s worth the listen.
The part of the book with the poop stick is the best part.
it happened during the Irish famine, I haven't done any real reading about it though but would be interested. we learn in school that people ate grass which is a fun euphemism for they ate each other
One example I can think of that was pretty bad was during the Great Famine of 1315-1317, which coincided with the end of the Medieval Warm Period. Several bad harvests over those years devastated the people of Northern Europe a generation and a half before the coming of the Black Plague. Even the aristocracy, the people at the top of the feudal mode of production, had episodes in which they found food harder to come by. Anecdotally, the King of England himself, when taking up residence in a town, found it without enough food to feed his entire group of followers.
The very young were abandoned and sometimes the very old volunteered to starve themselves to spare the able-bodied. After the people exhausted their reserves of food, ate their seed grain, and slaughtered their draft animals, it's not hard to imagine at least some instances of cannibalizing the recently deceased, if stray animals could not be found. It was reported in the chronicles of the era.
Another I can think of off the top of my head is the Jamestown colony during it's early history, which was called the Starving Time. During the winter of 1609-1610, less than a fifth of the original 500 colonists were still there, and recent archeological findings show clear evidence of survival cannibalism.
