Dr. Cole found that human thighs come in at a beefy 13,350 calories, while the calves are about 4,490 calories. The upper arms are around 7,450 calories, and the forearms about 1,660 calories. Within the chest cavity beats a heart that is about 650 calories. There are also the lungs, which come in around 1,600 calories, and below them the liver sits at around 2,570 calories. The kidneys total about 380 calories together.

He concludes that humans are not really worth eating purely for nutritional reasons. The meat on one human’s body could have provided a group of 25 modern adult males with enough calories to survive for only about half a day, he found. In contrast, that same tribe during Paleolithic times could have feasted on a mammoth, which with 3.6 million calories would have provided enough sustenance for 60 days. Even a steppe bison would offer 612,000 calories, enough for 10 days of nourishment.

He said that because humans offered such a comparatively low amount of calories, his findings suggested that some examples of Paleolithic cannibalism that had been interpreted as “nutritional” may have occurred for social or cultural reasons.

Dr. Cole is clear about his paper’s shortcomings, and there are several. First, the sample size is very small. The human calorie calculations were based off cadavers from only four adult males, so there were not any specific insights into women or younger people. Dr. Cole said the papers, which were all from the 1940s and ’50s, were the only studies he found that used the same format to share full body composition data as percentages for body weight, fat and protein content. Using those percentages, he was able to calculate the calories for each body part.

Some nutritionists were critical of this approach.

“The energy contents of lean tissue, fat and body carbohydrate are well established, and using four cadavers to get to estimates of quantities is a terrible way to go about calculating the human body,” said Susan Roberts, a nutrition scientist at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University.

But other nutritionists felt the paper’s methods and calculations were valid.

David Levitsky, a nutrition scientist at Cornell University, said the way the paper calculated the caloric value of the human body was precisely the same method researchers used to determine the energetic value of beef or other animals that people consumed.

“The human calorie charts, as gross as they are, are about the best approximation to the true energetic value of the human body we can obtain,” he said in an email.