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I don't think many soldiers are anatomy experts. Chopping somebody up in combat is different than taking a body apart piece by piece and studying the way the organs are.

Accurate knowledge of human anatomy in the modern era can be credited to the sometimes clandestine dissection of cadavers by doctors and other medical researchers, not the armies who merely chopped people up.

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I'm just pointing out that we don't have to postulate human sacrifice to account for people knowing what organs looked like. They would have had occasion to see them for themselves often enough during wartime, and cleaning up after battles.

> Accurate knowledge of human anatomy in the modern era can be credited to the sometimes clandestine dissection of cadavers by doctors and other medical researchers, not the armies who merely chopped people up.

Sure, sure, but we're talking about fairly accurate sculptures (? I haven't looked yet) of organs from an earlier era, eh?

Not at all. The piacenza liver is a blob for all I know.

Everybody in those days would have butchered their own animals. A pig or deer has the same compliment of organs that a person does. Anatomists were not the first people to discover or catalog organs.

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