The division is odd on its face. The gods receive thigh bones, fat and smoke; the human beings receive all the meat. Hesiod supplies an aetiology: at Mekone, where gods and men divided an ox, Prometheus made two portions, hiding the good meat inside the stomach and dressing the bare bones in glistening fat, and Zeus chose the fat. The story explains the practice by making it the residue of a trick, and it also concedes that the Greeks themselves found the arrangement in need of explanation.
Modern accounts fall into camps. One line, running from Karl Meuli to Walter Burkert, reads the rite as the preserved structure of a palaeolithic hunting kill, with the concealed knife, the animal's staged consent and the collective scattering of grain functioning to distribute and defuse the guilt of killing. A second line, associated with Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, sets the guilt aside and reads the rite as a system of cooking: what the division establishes is the human place between gods who take only smoke and beasts that eat raw flesh, and what the distribution of portions establishes is the political shape of the community. A third position, developed most fully by Gunnel Ekroth, attacks the neat opposition between sacrifice to the Olympians, eaten, and sacrifice to heroes and the powers below, burned entire, and argues from the evidence of hero cult that the two shade into each other far more than the handbooks allow.
None of these is a minority view and none has displaced the others. The atlas records the practice as described and the interpretations as competing, because the interpretations are what the discipline is actually arguing about.