At one place in the Valmiki Ramayana, Sita is afraid that the rakshasas will carry her away and eat her. She least expects that she will be asked to be a bride. The Uttarakanda of the Ramayana indicates that the Rakshasas are exogenous – not from India – and that they came to Sri Lanka from an “elsewhere called rasatala.” There are many theories as to where rasatala may have really been.
In the referenced article below, we see that evidence has been found of human cannibalism and sacrifice in Europe (In France and Germany), 6000 to 7500 years ago, during Europe’s early Neolithic period when farming was just beginning
Source and Reference for points below :
A new study suggests that mass cannibalism was practiced in south Germany in a village now called Herxheim.
- “Cannibalism at the village, now called Herxheim, may have occurred during ceremonies in which people from near and far brought slaves, war prisoners or other dependents for ritual sacrifice, propose anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux 1 in France and his colleagues.”
- “Human sacrifice at Herxheim is a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove right now, but we have evidence that several hundred people were eaten over a brief period,” Boulestin says.
- Skeletal markings indicate that human bodies were butchered in the same way as animals.
- Herxheim offers rare evidence of cannibalism during Europe’s early Neolithic period, when farming first spread, the researchers report in the December Antiquity.
- Artifacts found at Herxheim come from the Linear Pottery Culture, which flourished in western and central Europe from about 7,500 to 7,000 years ago.
- Until now, the only convincing evidence of Neolithic cannibalism came from 6,000-year-old bones in a French cave, Boulestin holds. A 1986 report concluded that the remains of various animals and at least six people were butchered and discarded there.
- Orschiedt and Haidle say, reburial rather than cannibalism may explain those findings.
- Herxheim was first excavated from 1996 to 1999, yielding remains of a large structure, pottery and what appeared to be two parallel ditches encircling the settlement.
- Boulestin’s notion of a Neolithic social and political crisis rests on generally accepted evidence of massacres of dozens of people at three central European sites approximately 7,000 years ago. Other regional settlements, including Herxheim, were abandoned around that time.”
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