Still, most anthropologists assumed some ritualistic cannibalism took place until the publication in 1979 of “The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy” by William Arens of the State University of New York, Stony Brook. Arens challenged his colleagues to find real proof — not just the jottings of 14th century explorers — that such cannibalism ever occurred.

In 1992 UC-Berkeley archaeologist Tim White came up with what he and other scientists consider to be evidence of cannibalism in southwest Colorado 800 years ago. Aided by a new electron microscope, White analyzed bone fragments of an Anasazi site at Mancos and spotted what he says are cuts, marks and abrasions that could only come from the preparation of nearly 30 adults and children for consumption by other humans.

White’s book, “Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos” fanned the academic flames. Arens accused White of hunting for sexy publication material. White left anthropology altogether, lamenting that the field is “losing its way.”

Salon spoke to White, who now teaches at the Integrative Biology department at UC-Berkeley, about the cannibalism debate and whether the fierce argument surrounding it has had a chilling effect on scientific research.

Assuming that organized cannibalism existed in the past, why did people eat each other?

Obviously people eat each other if they’re starving to death. The Donner Party is a good example of that. In a case like Mancos, where you have a clear pattern of damage directly related to the nutritional value of the skeleton, you can presume they were being eaten to obtain nutrition.

Just for nutrition, or for ritual reasons as well?

Anthropologists like to categorize things, and they invent silly categories like “dietary cannibalism” and “ritual cannibalism,” when in fact if you’re going to eat another human being there’s probably going to be some kind of ritual involved. Spanish chronicles of the time established that the powerful Aztec state would raid, take captives, sacrifice them and cut up bodies to parcel out to soldiers. They obtained both nutrition and a military advantage from the practice. Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibal. What motivated this guy? Hunger? Some kind of pathological sickness? I don’t know.

Besides the Aztecs, where else was cannibalism practiced on a widespread scale?

The New Guinea Highlands, Fiji and a lot of the Pacific islands.

In a recent New Yorker article, Oliver Sacks wrote about the Fore people of New Guinea, who contracted “kuru,” which some scientists believe is related to “Mad Cow Disease” — it causes rapid neurological deterioration and kills a person in a matter of months. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Carleton Gajdusek determined that “kuru” was caused by cannibalism — that the Fore people ate each other’s brains.

Ethnographers disagree over Gajdusek’s conclusion. Some ethnographers believe that the disease was transmitted during the preparation of corpses, not necessarily through ingestion. I believe the disease was contracted through ingestion because the ethnographers who concluded that are familiar with New Guinea and watched this practice taking place.

If ethnographers “saw” certain practices take place, why is there still a debate about whether cannibalism is myth or reality?

Proof in any historical science is a very difficult thing to come by. It’s always about likelihood. O.J. did it. The prosecution knew he did it. Proving it, well that was a little more difficult.

How and why did you get interested in cannibalism?

I found cut marks on an old fossil in Africa in 1981 and I wanted to know how they got there. At Mancos I was trying to establish a methodology to study human remains that have been modified in the course of cannibalism. This is hard to do in the modern world because nobody’s doing cannibalism anymore, so you have to turn to the archaeological record and the best one we have is in the Southwest here.

What did you find there?

We found the remains of 17 adults and 12 children who had been cannibalized. Across the Southwest the numbers are in the hundreds. In the Southwest there are approximately 50 known sites.

Your critics have said that some burial practices, in which bones were buried and then dug up, broken and sometimes boiled, have been mistaken by you and others as evidence of cannibalism, when in fact such practices were part of a burial ritual.

Unfortunately the people who use that argument have never documented it. They should go off to Australia and actually study those bones, which they cite as proof of their argument. Those bones were broken in a different way to the bones we found in Mancos. Rather than the thin bone in the legs being broken — as they were in Australia — we found the larger leg bones broken, presumably because there’s marrow in those larger bones. Bones like the lower jaw that have no nutritional value are left intact. It’s the opposite of what one would expect if this were some kind of burial practice.

William Arens cites a story from his own fieldwork in Tanzania, where Africans believed Europeans were cannibals. He says it’s easy to level cannibalism charges against a culture with which we’re largely unfamiliar.

And he’s right to a considerable extent. I was a great supporter of Arens and I think he did a great service to scientific study by pointing out the shortcomings of the ethnological record. Where he stepped over the line is by saying that we shouldn’t be studying this at all, which is a political statement. The other thing is when he said that I only studied cannibalism to become famous. That, I found personally offensive.

How was he being political?

He seems to be saying that if it (cannibalism) is true, let’s close our eyes to it. I find that to be amazing for an anthropologist to say. My understanding of anthropology and science is that if it’s true, let’s go out and document it, and throw light on it and understand it.

Rather than saying that some discoveries are just too ugly to look at.

Exactly. It’s very similar to my other work on evolution. I have students in my classes who say, “Evolution may be true but if it is I don’t want to know about it because it’s not palatable to me.” There’s a political correctness going on. For example, we have the image of the American Indian as conservationist, but Lewis and Clark found large carcasses of giant rotting bison along the Missouri River, driven over the cliffs by the Indians. It was an effective method of hunting. Let’s not rewrite history and pretend that’s not true in an effort to make it appear that these guys were the first tree huggers. That’s turning our back on the evidence.

So, saying there was no such thing as cannibalism is another example of political correctness?

The whole issue over how anthropologists conduct studies of cannibalism is but one example of what I would call an identity crisis in anthropology over the last 10 or 15 years. They’re no longer attempting a scientific investigation into behavior but rather how they can become advocates of poor people, disenfranchised people and so forth. That’s fine, but it’s not anthropology, or at least it’s not my idea of what anthropology is.

Which is why you left it?

I didn’t get into anthropology to become an advocate. I got into it to find out what the truth was.

It’s ironic because the Lingua Franca article suggests that more anthropologists are on your side than on Arens’.

Arens is anomalous. Anthropologists before and after Arens have considered it a fairly obvious thing that cannibalism occurred. The Lingua Franca article established a false dichotomy with two factions of equal size in the field. That isn’t the case.

Apart from Jeffrey Dahmer, is there any evidence of organized cannibalism in modern times?

No. It was pretty much stamped out by missionaries before scientists got a chance to observe it very much.

You’ve changed academic disciplines, but are you still studying cannibalism?

Yes. In fact I had visiting at Berkeley an anthropologist who’s excavating one of the cave sites of Neanderthals in France that has cannibalized remains.

What difference does it make to us now whether our ancestors once practiced cannibalism? Is this an important question for anthropology?

I think so. Arens makes the argument that anthropology maintained its status in earlier centuries by perpetuating a myth of cannibalism. But cannibalism is a kind of human behavior which is rare. How rare was it? That’s a question we ought to ask if we’re interested in human behavior.

Network programmers and editors (The New Yorker ran a cover story by science writer Timothy Ferris on asteroids) have just discovered a subject that has fascinated astronomers even before they realized that it was a space rock crashing into Earth that killed off the dinosaurs millions of years ago. These days, astronomers call comets and asteroids — the garbage left over from the big bang — “Near Earth Objects.” And since comet Shoemaker-Levy blasted the surface of Jupiter in a series of fireballs two years ago, their interest in these unwelcome chunks of astral matter has become a bit less theoretical.

Are we really in for the really big disaster? Should we be building a Star Wars weapon to knock a speeding asteroid off course? In an attempt to find out if the truth really is out there, Salon spoke with Dr. David Morrison of the Office of Space at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

All these movies and documentaries on asteroids — are they millennium hysteria, or should we be heading for the hills?

We should be concerned about it because it is a very real, natural hazard and one that we need to understand. There’s no question, over time, that Earth will be hit many times by objects large and small, including ones as large as the one that did in the dinosaurs. The survival of humanity depends on us understanding and protecting ourselves from such impact.

We’re already receiving small hits on a regular basis?

We get hit by something with the energy of the Hiroshima atom bomb about every week or two. Fortunately, these all break up and explode high in the atmosphere, so they do no damage on the ground. They blow up very high and are observed regularly by the Defense Department’s satellite. Something that does real damage to us happens, on average, every few hundred years.

Including this century?

Yes, in Tunguska in Siberia. In 1908 a stony meteorite of about 15 megatons blasted more than a 1,000-square-mile area and killed one person. It would have killed more, but it was a place where nobody lived. The unlucky victim was picked up by the blast wave, smashed into a tree and pierced by a limb on the tree.

Statistically, when could we be in for a similar-sized event?

Any time. You don’t have a grace period following an impact. The chances in any one year that we’ll be hit by one large enough to produce a global catastrophe — but smaller than the one that destroyed the dinosaurs — is about one in a million.

What kind of damage would it cause?

It would not produce a global firestorm and mass extinction, but it would produce a climate fluctuation that would lead to crop loss and mass starvation, perhaps killing a billion people.

Leaving human civilization as we know it …

Not in very good shape.

What do scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago?

An object about 10 miles across landed in shallow water in the Yucatan area, creating an immediate impact 150 miles across. It also created a large tsunami wave which contributed to the destruction. But the big effects were not local, they were global. The plume of ejected material fell back down over the whole planet and in re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere was heated to incandescence and produced a global firestorm. Nearly all the grasslands and forests of the Earth caught fire. The dinosaurs were probably made extinct in half an hour. The dust that was injected into the atmosphere lasted about a year, blocking out sunlight and causing a drop in temperature. The whole chain of food production stopped.

Like a nuclear winter.

Only worse.

Do you think there’s more cause for alarm now, after Shoemaker-Levy?

I would not use the term alarm. Concern is a little more like it. We don’t know of any object heading toward the Earth right now, and the chances that there will be a catastrophe next year are quite small. But it would be prudent to carry out a survey and see if there really is anything headed our way.

Actually watching 20 pieces of a comet crash into Jupiter and seeing the dramatic effects of those impacts was a sobering thing for scientists and should be for lay people as well.

What do we know about what’s cutting through our orbit now?

There are about 50,000 pieces that are 300 meters in size, the size of three football fields. There are some as big as 10 miles in size, and others in between.

You’ve spoken of the need for more study of what’s out there. How many astronomers are engaged in this work now?

A handful. My usual phrase is less than the staff of a McDonald’s restaurant. There are two international teams operating, one in Arizona and one on Maui.

In your work as chair of the Spaceguard Survey in 1992, you reported to Congress that we would need three or four telescopes scanning the heavens at a cost of about $5 million a year for 10 years to do a complete study. Assuming this work was funded, what do you think you’d find?

Chances are we’d find that none of those objects pose us any threat. But we won’t know until we look.

And if we found a rather large object …

If we found an object that did threaten us, then I have no doubt that we would use our technology to develop a defense system and would actually use nuclear explosives to change its orbit so it would miss the planet entirely. This is the only natural hazard that we know how to protect against. The debate is whether we should go ahead and develop such a defense system in advance of discovering such an object.

The late Carl Sagan, for one, was opposed to it.

Sagan said if you have the technology to steer an asteroid away from the Earth then you would also implicitly have the technology to place one into an Earth collision orbit — if such a technology fell into the hands of a madman.

The counter-argument, which I feel is correct, is that the technology we’re talking about is very crude. You could not characterize it as “steering” an asteroid. So there’s no danger of that technology being used to precisely adjust the orbit of an asteroid to make it into a weapon. Maybe, long in the future, if we really ever did have the technology to make these minute adjustments in orbit, Sagan’s concerns would be legitimate, but it’s not relevant to the concerns we have right now.

And you feel that our technology is good enough as it is to avert catastrophe?

Yes.

Some people have suggested that a Near Earth Object was responsible for the crash of TWA flight 800.

Certainly there’s a chance. Given all the uncertainties around the TWA crash I don’t think we can exclude the possibility that it was hit by a meteorite. That’s not very likely, but it seems that they haven’t had much luck with the other hypotheses either. I think it’s reasonable to at least ask the question of whether that might have happened.

They may have been members of a nomadic group of tribes called Sarmatians who roamed the Russia-Kazakhstan region from the sixth to the second centuries B.C. While “Amazons” may be an exaggeration, Davis-Kimball says her findings suggest that female-dominant cultures were more widespread than previously thought.

Salon spoke with Davis-Kimball at her office at the Center for the Study of Eurasian Nomads at UC-Berkeley.

The media have had a field day describing “amazing tales of ancient Amazon tribes,” and so forth. What exactly did you find?

Basically we found three categories of women based on their artifacts. One group were warriors. They had bronze arrowheads and a quiver and amulets which indicated prowess — like a boar’s tusk or a bronze arrowhead worn in a leather bag around her neck. Iron daggers or an iron sword were also indicative of the warriors. Then there were priestesses, who had seashells that were fossilized in the burial areas and certain animal-style ornaments, among other things. The third category were women who had a lot of beads and a lot of wealth but weren’t necessarily warriors or priestesses. But a lot of them were overlapping. We found artifacts that clearly belonged to a priestess in a warrior burial.

Can you make any guesses about what their lives were really like?

The tribes would have been taking care of their animals mostly. Their primary purpose wasn’t to run out and start slashing and burning. The only time I think there would have been any fighting would be over territory, where some group of nomads decide to move in and take over some other tribe’s pasture land. I don’t think these women were trying to create a war. I think what they were doing was protecting their territory.

Did you find other examples of gender role-reversals?

It’s hard to say, but we did find several male burials with children right by the guy’s arm or near his leg. We never found any females buried with children like that. I can’t explain this. It’s not the norm. Maybe there was something in this segment of society where a child was buried with the male for some particular reason.

So, are these the Amazon women Herodotus wrote of in his histories?

No, I should make that clear. I don’t think these are the Amazons at all. Herodotus was talking about women north of the Black Sea who then married with Scythians and went on a three days’ march northeast, putting them possibly in the Don River area. What we do have is a phenomenon of tribes where the female is dominant covering a much larger geographic area than we expected. And history has never spoken of them. It’s as if they didn’t exist.

Except in myth.

The Greeks mythologized the Amazons as the antithesis of the Greek woman, who was supposed to stay home and take care of the kids and the household. Orators would even say that the Amazon got what was coming to her when she got killed in battle. Hercules fought the Amazons, raped the Amazon queen, and this gave him power. If you beat a woman up, it gave you special power? It’s a little hard for me to understand but it caught the imagination. Cervantes writes in “Don Quixote” about the Amazons coming to the aid of the Turks fighting at Constantinople. Then it’s passed on to the conquistadors who come over to the New World, who supposedly see matriarchal societies along the river they then name the Amazon. California is named after an Amazon queen, Califa.

And they’ve always been portrayed as pretty fearsome?

The Amazon women were portrayed as sorceresses, as fury and wrath. They terrified men.

Does post-feminist, late-20th century society have anything to learn from what you’ve found?

There’s a lot of comment about how women don’t do what they used to do: They don’t stay home with the kids necessarily anymore. I think we can extrapolate from what we found that it’s not always the norm for women to stay home and take care of the children. They held strong positions in society. They controlled wealth, going back a long time. We’re talking 2,500 years ago.

Q U O T E O F T H E D A Y

“Robin Williams’ addiction”

Many people just don’t understand the Web; they think it’s a waste of time, but they haven’t explored enough to understand how amazing it is. I think that, with the sheer volume of it, it’s like finding gold. You find things after a lot of digging. I think it’s like cocaine in that sense; you can spend hours.

– Robin Williams, in conversation with Yahoo! Internet Life