Herodotus and the cannibals

I found an interesting article:
E. M. Murphy and J. P. Mallory, 'Herodotus and the cannibals'. Antiquity 74 (2000): 388–394.
Referring to various tribes of central Asia, Herodotus described their funerary cannibalistic rituals. According to Murphy and Mallory,

in at least a proportion of cases, the bodies of Iron Age steppe nomads, presumed to be Iranian-speakers, were deliberately defleshed and disarticulated rather than left to decay naturally. This process, which would have replicated many of the same procedures as one would have applied in the butchering of livestock, could easily have been mistaken for evidence of cannibalistic practices by an uninformed foreign onlooker. It would have required very little embellishment by Aristeas or Herodotus to render a genuine funerary ritual into one of our earliest descriptions of cannibalism.

The article contains good references and various possible interpretations for Herodotus' account.