Punch,  47 (1864), 265.

Cannibalism in the Land of Cakes

Anon

Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Anthropology, Human Development, Animal Behaviour, Race, Proof


    Discusses remarks made by 'a native of Caithness', M Clay, at a meeting of the Anthropological Society. Clay focused on evidence of a child's jawbone among shells and bones, found in Scotland, but denies that this constitutes proof that his ancestors were cannibals. Punch agrees that 'An isolated fact is no proof', but suggests that if it did 'prove cannibalism' then it 'would establish nothing more than the existence of a pre-historic Sawney Bean'—a late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Scottish cannibal.



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