The smallest fullerene

PRO: Because myoglobin comes only from heart and skeletal muscle, myoglobin was not detected in 20 'control' faeces from other Puebloan archaeological sites, nor in modern faeces from 29 healthy individuals and 10 patients with blood in their faeces. The myo-globin-specific antibody used does not detect the related blood protein haemoglobin 1. CON: Okay, you've proved one case of cannibalism, but it's still a rare aberration. Instead of denigrating Indians by looking for proof of bad behaviour, why don't you look for proof of good behaviour 4 ? I ask instead, why is the evidence for cannibalism — which suggests that this practice was once widespread — now so desperately denied? I can think of at least four reasons. First, because Westerners abhor cannibalism , some of us cannot believe that other societies practised (or still practise) it. But many behaviours accepted by one society are abhorred by another. The horror of my New Guinea friends when I described circum-cision, US treatment of the elderly, and US funeral customs matched Westerners' horror at cannibalism. Some widespread Western practices are far more destructive than cannibalism. There are good reasons why cannibalism might have been customary in some societies but abhorrent in others 5. Second, because Westerners abhor cannibalism , Western missionaries and government officers who encounter a society practising cannibalism immediately forbid it. So it is no surprise that there are few first-hand accounts of cannibalism by twentieth-century Westerners: would you invite someone to watch you doing something if it would get you arrested? Once Western control is established , cannibalism quickly dies out. Third, those Westerners who obtain evidence of cannibalism are condemned as slandering the non-Western society reported as having practised it — condemned not only by anthropologists offended at perceived insults to 'their' people whom they study, but also by the cannibals' descendants who have absorbed Western values. Finally, any society has practices considered acceptable in private but inappropriate to practise in public, in the presence either of anyone else (for example, sex or defecation) or of non-clan members (for example, initiation rites or cannibalism). The abundance of New Guinea babies, my knowledge that babies are conceived by sexual intercourse, and secondhand accounts persuade me that New Guineans practise sex, but I have no first-hand observations of it even after many years there. When I read how vigorously cannibalism's critics deny its existence in the absence of first-hand …