We’ve probably all heard about the Donner Party, right? They were a group of American pioneers who were traveling to California from the Midwest from 1846-1847. It is said that delays occurred due to multiple issues, resulting in the party becoming snowbound in Sierra Nevada’s mountain range. Due to the lack of resources, particularly other animals to eat, people began to starve. Others ended up dying from the extreme cold or even due to some sort of sickness. That led to several bodies, already dead, that were just going to sit and rot. Thus, most of the remaining people decided to eat the bodies of these dead pioneers. While eating already deceased members was one thing, they also killed two Native American guides for food too.
[Image via LoulouVonGlup/Shutterstock.com]Cannibalism in this era was seen as a pretty bad thing to do, especially killing someone for this purpose. However, cannibalism was a pretty common practice and certainly a dark side of human evolution. This practice was relatively common among the Neanderthals as well as other human species. Notably, several major South American and African societies took part in this. Some of them were even part of rituals or ceremonies. In fact, the name comes from the Caribs or CanÃbales, which was a name given by the Spanish (or Christopher Columbus) to a Caribbean tribe thought to have ritualistically eaten other humans. Again, this might be a dark side of human evolution to us today but for many ancient societies, it was pretty normal to see.
If there is one dark side of human evolution that is possibly worse than most, it’d be this one. Slavery was and still is a crime against humanity. However, slavery has some chapters we’re not quite as familiar with. For example, someone who owed a debt to another but could not afford to pay it would pay it off through slave labor. This was a common practice in Ancient Greece and even Egypt for a long time. Of course, some were not released from this and were kept as slaves even after paying their debt. Yet this was more uncommon. Overall, we practiced slavery in some form or another for at least 11,000 years now. Women were some of the most common slaves among the rich, especially in monarchies. They might also be taken as “wives” as spoils of war for invading armies too. Other people, more often than not poorer classes, were taken as property.
[Image via Everett Collection/Shutterstock.com]The Roman Empire was known for having “Chattel Slave Classes.” This was a class of people that became the property of the enslaver. Slavery took on a different look by the 1200s when Europeans began to start forcing African black men and women, even children, to be slaves. Of course, other Africans used people as slaves both before, during, and after Europeans came in. The American slave trade stands as a profoundly dark and disturbing chapter in human evolution, characterized by the forced enslavement, brutal treatment, and dehumanization of millions of African people. This abhorrent practice not only caused immeasurable suffering and loss of life but also perpetuated systemic racism and inequalities that continue to reverberate through society today.
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