15th century Europeans believed  they had hit upon a miracle cure: a remedy for epilepsy, hemorrhage,  bruising, nausea, and virtually any other  medical ailment. This brown powder could be mixed  into drinks, made into salves or eaten straight up. It was known as mumia and made  by grinding up mummified human flesh. The word "cannibal" dates from the  time of Christopher Columbus; in fact, Columbus may even have  coined it himself. After coming ashore on the  island of Guadaloupe, Columbus' initial reports back  to the Queen of Spain described the indigenous people as  friendly and peaceful— though he did mention rumors of a  group called the Caribs, who made violent raids and then cooked  and ate their prisoners. In response, Queen Isabella granted  permission to capture and enslave anyone who ate human flesh. When the island failed to produce the gold Columbus was looking for, he began to label anyone who resisted his  plundering and kidnapping as a Caribe. Somewhere along the way, the word "Carib"  became "Canibe" and then "Cannibal." First used by colonizers to dehumanize  indigenous people, it has since been applied to anyone  who eats human flesh. So the term comes from an account that  wasn't based on hard evidence, but cannibalism does have a real and  much more complex history. It has taken diverse forms— sometimes,  as with mumia, it doesn't involved recognizable parts  of the human body. The reasons for cannibalistic practices  have varied, too. Across cultures and time periods, there's  evidence of survival cannibalism, when people living through a famine,  siege or ill-fated expedition had to either eat the bodies of the dead  or starve to death themselves. But it's also been quite common  for cultures to normalize some form of eating human  flesh under ordinary circumstances. Because of false accounts  like Columbus's, it's difficult to say exactly how common  cultural cannibalism has been— but there are still some examples of  accepted cannibalistic practices from within the cultures practicing them. Take the medicinal cannibalism in Europe  during Columbus's time. Starting in the 15th century, the demand  for mumia increased. At first, stolen mummies from Egypt  supplied the mumia craze, but soon the demand was too great to be  sustained on Egyptian mummies alone, and opportunists stole bodies from  European cemeteries to turn into mumia. Use of mumia continued for  hundreds of years. It was listed in the Merck index,  a popular medical encyclopedia, into the 20th century. And ground up mummies were far from  the only remedy made from human flesh that was common throughout Europe. Blood, in either liquid or powdered form,  was used to treat epilepsy, while human liver, gall stones, oil  distilled from human brains, and pulverized hearts were popular  medical concoctions. In China, the written record of socially accepted  cannibalism goes back almost 2,000 years. One particularly common  form of cannibalism appears to have been filial cannibalism, where adult sons and daughters would  offer a piece of their own flesh to their parents. This was typically offered as a last-ditch attempt to cure a sick parent, and wasn't fatal to their offspring— it usually involved flesh from the thigh  or, less often, a finger. Cannibalistic funerary rites are another  form of culturally sanctioned cannibalism. Perhaps the best-known example came  from the Fore people of New Guinea. Through the mid-20th century, members  of the community would, if possible, make their funerary  preferences known in advance, sometimes requesting that family members gather to consume the body after death. Tragically, though these rituals  honored the deceased, they also spread a deadly disease known  as kuru through the community. Between the fictionalized stories,  verifiable practices, and big gaps that still exist  in our knowledge, there's no one history of cannibalism. But we do know that people have  been eating each other, volunteering themselves to be eaten, and accusing others of eating  people for millennia.