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Mostly it's ritualistic, often after a natural death.
You're just making that statement up. You have no evidence whatsoever whether ancient hominids ate other humans ritualistically, after a natural death, or otherwise.
Plus, we have plenty of more contemporary evidence of cannibalism that almost never occurred after natural death. For example, the Texas Karankawas apparently practiced cannibalism. They may not have done it while "hunting" other humans, but it did follow them killing their enemies. There's not any practical difference between cannibalism after hunting or after killing an enemy.
You also fall into the trap of extrapolating from contemporary examples to ancient ones. That extrapolation may or may not be accurate. An example of where historians and archaeologists have been shown to be wrong in making such extrapolations is using the "modern" Berbers to make erroneous conclusions about ancient nomadic civilizations.
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Early humans were pretty dispersed. Hunting each other would have logistically been difficult and could quickly have spiraled into population-ending territory as it did with our hunting of some big game during the last Ice Age.
But we have overwhelming evidence that population-ending activities by humans against each other did occur. Until now, we have not associated cannibalism with that activity, but evidence is emerging that cannibalism was associated. As I mentioned above, the evidence is that the western cliff-dwellers were driven out of their cliffs by enemies and cannibalism was associated with that warfare. There are zillions of other examples of humans wiping out competing tribes throughout history and pre-history.
And the debate is still raging as to whether the loss of large animals during the last Ice Age was caused by humans, by climate change, by other factors, or by some combination of multiple factors.
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Evidence of actively hunting humans for food is rare to the point of near-nonexistent.
What about hunting them because they're an enemy and then eating them after successfully killing them?
Up until recently, there was not much written about the evidence for cannibalism. Was it because it wasn't there, because it was overlooked, or because scholars didn't want to talk about it? You are making the common mistake of assuming that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Based on your reasoning, we would have to conclude that neither the Anglo-Saxons nor the Normans ever invaded England because the archaeological evidence for those invasions is almost completely absent.
Finally, how can you make such a definitive statement? Have you reviewed all of the anthropological reports to verify your assertion? I know that you are a historian specializing in American history, but wasn't aware that you were an authority on anthropology, as well.
