Incest, Appetite and the Cannibalism Taboo
There is speculation among cultural anthropologists that the incest taboo was established in concert with the cannibalism taboo in some prehistoric human societies, ultimately making it taboo to eat the infants and vulnerable individuals in one’s own family, clan, or tribe. Making exogamy necessary in order to avoid the incest taboo also entrained the cannibalization taboo, making it a ‘polluted act’ to devour the neighbouring communities’ kids also, as they were now in your clan, and vice versa, spreading the dual taboo’s purview by exporting it through marriage. Such social taboos and behavioural conventions would have been initiated by Clan Mothers, Elders, shamans or other figures of spiritual and magical authority, probably spurred by the need to preserve clan progeny from the predations of hungry or renegade adult males.
Basically, if you can’t eat your relatives, and you make the neighbouring tribes and clans in your area your relatives by means of exogamy, you just can’t eat those of your own species anymore at all, in case they are, unbeknownst to you, your distant relative, meaning you’d download a torrent of dangerous ‘pollution’ (taboo, ill-luck, risk, death, sickness, poor mating success, etc.) upon your head by doing so. Taboo pollution would fall upon your entire family, clan and tribe, magical and spiritual pollution being very contagious. Though dealing with extremely primitive and basic human behaviours, the dual taboo, still going strong in most human societies, actually represents the extremely wise and cunning seeding of sacred ideology toward social ends.
