[Sca-cooks] cannibalism and Kuru

[El Hermoso Dormido]

On Friday 10 May 2002 09:32 am, lilinah at earthlink.net wrote:
> Last summer i read a book by an anthropologist called "The Man-Eating
> Myth". As far as can be determined there has never been a culture
> that engaged in cannibalism. The author examined reports going back
> to at least the 16th century.
>
> The only documentable cases of cannibalism have occurred when people
> were in a life-threatening situation and there was no other food
> (such as the plane of soccer players that crashed in the Andes a
> decade or so ago) or when people are just really insane (Jeffrey
> Dahmer).
[...]

He's missing one small, relatively recent group.

There apparently is a tribe or group of tribes in New Guinea(?) that
were still occasionally practicing a ritual form of cannibalism of
members of the tribe who'd died of old age(? - this is from memory,
I haven't looked into it in years.  At any rate, it wasn't "captured
enemies" or anything of the sort.)  Doing this was apparently the vector
by which they spread Kuru, which is related to Creutzfeld-Jakob syndrome
(i.e. the "human version" of "Mad Cow Disease"...).  Naturally, Kuru
was a pretty rare disease....

Considering that Kuru is also a prion/"infectious amyloid" disease (really
more of a "poison" than a disease, but...) and the only way to catch it
SEEMS to be direct exposure to the prions themselves, it seems like pretty
strong evidence that the tribe(s) in question really did have occasional
contact with human brains of SOME sort.  The anthropologists claim that
members of the tribe had admitted to the ritual cannibalism at the time.

(What I recall is that it was a "sputtering out" practice - the tribe(s) had
evidently 'gotten' the connection between the cannibalism and "laughing
sickness", and were officially stopping it, but due to tradition it had
still happened off and on for a while).

Seems like an unhealthy practice anyway - an ounce of human brain has
almost 8 times as much cholesterol as a medium-sized chicken egg....

...uh....you know, or so I've been told.... :-)

signed
El Hermoso Dormido, Fountain of Useless Knowledge...