Short answers, pulled from the story.
The earliest evidence of human cannibalism dates back hundreds of thousands of years during the Pleistocene epoch. Archaeological findings suggest that Neanderthals and Homo antecessor consumed their own kind during this period.
Medical cannibalism was a widely practiced form of medicine from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries where human remains were sold openly in markets. Mummia, or ground-up mummies, served as a popular ingredient in remedies for various ailments alongside the consumption of human blood, brains, and organs.
The Fore tribe in New Guinea practiced mortuary cannibalism which resulted in the spread of the prion disease kuru. This institutionalized practice involved consuming human body parts as an accepted cultural tradition before the cause of the disease was recognized.
The ill-fated Donner Party of 1846 and 1847 resorted to eating the bodies of the dead to avoid starvation. This event stands as a well-known example of survival cannibalism where survivors consumed the dead to stay alive.
The word cannibal is derived from Spanish caníbal or caríbal originally used as a name variant for the Kalinago people from the West Indies. These people were said to have eaten human flesh and the term was later applied to other groups by outsiders during the colonialist epoch.