Ha! Maybe, but one thing’s for sure and that’s that they did eat lots of porkies – even if they didn’t do it at one sitting.

Why the housewife cut off the leg bone is different. She was following a tradition whose meaning she didn’t understand but thought she had to do it anyway; and there’s a danger of us doing the same thing – seeing sites as sacred when they’re just as likely to have been purely utilitarian.

Holy cow, we do it all the time. We’re almost programmed to read into the purely practical something sacred...