Mortal Rituals: What the Story of the Andes Survivors Tells Us About Human Evolution

An aircraft crash in a remote area, survivors left undiscovered for 10 weeks, cannibalism and much more besides. This is the grisly if not gripping story in this book that looks behind what happened from an evolutionary perspective to discover what it can really mean to be human.The author carefully weaves together a number of findings and thoughts taken from the various fields of academia to come forward with a belief of how and why the survivors survived. It is not a religious-orientated "God's Will" sort of conclusion but an interesting mixture of circumstance, experience, determination and perhaps good fortune. Small things possibly helped play their part, such as the survivors being known to each other and members of the same rugby team, whilst other factors were more ingrained, more basic, subconsciously taken from our collective past.Teamwork, a hierarchy, a sense of urgency, survival and leadership all contributed as well, helping mask (rather than overcome) the sense of loss, of sorrow and desperation. Necessity was the keyword in a desperate attempt to survive that possibly led to the unpalatable breaking of one of society's strongest taboos - cannibalism.But despite the icky-ness of the headline subject, this book is no gore-fest. It is a sensible, articulate look at a subject through a mature, measured prism. As much as one can "benefit" from what happened, perhaps we are able to in any case get a slightly better understanding at what makes mankind tick in extreme situations, where help is not just a call away, where one really has just deal with what is in front of them. Of course, aircraft still crash, but thankfully technological advances may mean that there would be no similar occurrence in the future. One can and must learn from the past and this book gives a great insight into matters.Whilst this book features the crash as the central plank of its consideration, it is not about the crash. There are many other books that deal with that. The crash was the catalyst to what happened afterwards and that is the focus.This is a book written predominantly for an academic audience and features a mass of bibliographic references and sources for further research and consideration. Yet thankfully it has been written in a fairly accessible text so that the more curious "average" reader can follow along with. One doesn't want to trivialise or downplay the seriousness of this book but it is accessible and gripping like a good novel, yet the content is more real, more considerate and based purely in fact. This book deserves a wider audience and hopefully the price (before any discounting) will not be off-putting to the broader market. Some of the detail might be mentally skipped over by the generalist reader, but the essential core message and thoughts will surely be glued permanently into the consciousness of the reader. That is the sign of a good book and this is a great example of a good book.