>>213094352
cont:

>>213094458
Harner's theory that Aztec cannibalism was a way to make up for a protein deficiency has been debunked for ages, same for most of his ideas.

Harner really just relies on the assumption that their lack of large domesticated livestock taken for granted in Eurasia like pig, cattle, sheep, etc left them without enough protein sources. But they had domestic turkey and dog as foodstuff, frequently hunted deer and hare, and nixtamalized maize/corn and beans alone can provide enough protein (he mentions all of these but handwaves them away, mainly in that they wouldn't be enough in times of famine). But chia and amaranth (which also made up a ton their of tax income) were also huge dietary staples and were key protein sources, and they also made use of fish, insects, reptiles, amphibians, spirulina etc which were abundant in the lake system as chinampa farms retained the ecology for them, and Harner entirely or mostly ignores all of those.

There simply was not a protein deficiency to begin with. And even if there were, as other researchers have noted, cannibalism would not have worked as a way to resolve it: it's entirely inefficient and unsustainable since a person needs way more protein to grow and live (not to mention the energy you expand in going to war to capture them) then they yield if butchered, which also simply actually isn't even that much even if you disregard the cost (and studies on diet from remains has shown pretty low levels of meat intake by Mesoamerican populations, which wouldn't be the case if cannibalism was a common part of the diet). There's also not a correlation between say the occurrence of flower wars and famines, and to top it all off, even Harner himself admits that there's not actually evidence of widespread dietary scale cannibalism, just limited ritual cannibalism

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