stylistic:style_transfer
History

There is archaeological evidence that cannibalism has been practised for at least hundreds of thousands of years by early Homo sapiens and archaic hominins. Among modern humans, cannibalism has been practised by various groups. An incomplete list of cases where it is documented to have occurred in institutionalized form includes prehistoric and early modern Europe, South America, Mesoamerica, Iroquoian peoples in North America, parts of Western and Central Africa, China and Sumatra, among pre-contact Aboriginal Australians, among Māori in New Zealand, on some other Polynesian islands as well as in New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji. Evidence of cannibalism has also been found in ruins associated with the Ancestral Puebloans, at Cowboy Wash in the Southwestern United States.

After World War I, institutionalized cannibalism has become very rare, but cases were still reported during times of famine. Occasional cannibal acts committed by individual criminals also are documented throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.