Speaking through Boas, Kembaren makes small talk about crops, the weather and past feasts. The man grips his bow and arrows and avoids my gaze. But now and then I catch him stealing glances in my direction. The fierce man leads the clan in fights. Lepeadon looks up to the task. After an hour of talk, the fierce man moves closer to me and, still unsmiling, speaks. A youngster tries to yank my pants off, and he almost succeeds amid a gale of laughter. I join in the laughing but keep a tight grip on my modesty.
Korowai seemed to have a hard time understanding clothing. They call it laleo-khal , "ghost-demon skin," and Veldhuizen told me they believed his shirt and pants to be a magical epidermis that he could don or remove at will. Lepeadon follows us to the ground and grabs both my hands.
He begins bouncing up and down and chanting, " nemayokh " "friend". I keep up with him in what seems a ritual farewell, and he swiftly increases the pace until it is frenzied, before he suddenly stops, leaving me breathless. In four decades of journeying among remote tribes, this is the first time I've encountered a clan that has evidently never seen anyone as light-skinned as me.
Enthralled, I find my eyes tearing up as we return to our hut. The next morning four Korowai women arrive at our hut carrying a squawking green frog, several locusts and a spider they say they just caught in the jungle. Two years in a Papuan town has taught him that we laleo wrinkle our noses at Korowai delicacies.
The young women have circular scars the size of large coins running the length of their arms, around the stomach and across their breasts.
He explains how they are made, saying circular pieces of bark embers are placed on the skin. It seems an odd way to add beauty to the female form, but no more bizarre than tattoos, stiletto-heel shoes, Botox injections or the not-so-ancient Chinese custom of slowly crushing infant girls' foot bones to make their feet as small as possible.
Kembaren and I spend the morning talking to Lepeadon and the young men about Korowai religion. Seeing spirits in nature, they find belief in a single god puzzling. But they too recognize a powerful spirit, named Ginol, who created the present world after having destroyed the previous four. For as long as the tribal memory reaches back, elders sitting around fires have told the younger ones that white-skinned ghost-demons will one day invade Korowai land.
Once the laleo arrive, Ginol will obliterate this fifth world. The land will split apart, there will be fire and thunder, and mountains will drop from the sky. This world will shatter, and a new one will take its place.
The prophecy is, in a way, bound to be fulfilled as more young Korowai move between their treehouses and downriver settlements, which saddens me as I return to our hut for the night. They divide the day into seven distinct periods—dawn, sunrise, midmorning, noon, midafternoon, dusk and night. They use their bodies to count numbers. Lepeadon shows me how, ticking off the fingers of his left hand, then touching his wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm, shoulder, neck, ear and the crown of the head, and moving down the other arm.
The tally comes to In the afternoon I go with the clan to the sago palm fields to harvest their staple food. Two men hack down a sago palm, each with a hand ax made from a fist-size chunk of hard, dark stone sharpened at one end and lashed with vine to a slim wooden handle. The men then pummel the sago pith to a pulp, which the women sluice with water to produce a dough they mold into bite-size pieces and grill.
A snake that falls from the toppling palm is swiftly killed. Lepeadon then loops a length of rattan about a stick and rapidly pulls it to and fro next to some shavings on the ground, producing tiny sparks that start a fire.
Blowing hard to fuel the growing flame, he places the snake under a pile of burning wood. When the meat is charred, I'm offered a piece of it. It tastes like chicken. On our return to the treehouse, we pass banyan trees, with their dramatic, aboveground root flares. The men slam their heels against these appendages, producing a thumping sound that travels across the jungle. My three days with the clan pass swiftly. When I feel they trust me, I ask when they last killed a khakhua.
Lepeadon says it was near the time of the last sago palm feast, when several hundred Korowai gathered to dance, eat vast quantities of sago palm maggots, trade goods, chant fertility songs and let the marriage-age youngsters eye one another. According to our porters, that dates the killing to just over a year ago. Lepeadon tells Boas he wants me to stay longer, but I have to return to Yaniruma to meet the Twin Otter.
As we board the pirogue, the fierce man squats by the riverside but refuses to look at me. When the boatmen push away, he leaps up, scowls, thrusts a cassowary-bone arrow across his bow, yanks on the rattan string and aims at me. After a few moments, he smiles and lowers the bow—a fierce man's way of saying goodbye. In midafternoon, the boatmen steer the pirogue to the edge of a swamp forest and tie it to a tree trunk.
Boas leaps out and leads the way, setting a brisk pace. Dominating it is a treehouse that soars about 75 feet into the sky. Its springy floor rests on several natural columns, tall trees cut off at the point where branches once flared out. Boas is waiting for us. Next to him stands his father, Khanduop, a middle-aged man clad in rattan strips about his waist and a leaf covering part of his penis.
He grabs my hand and thanks me for bringing his son home. He has killed a large pig for the occasion, and Bailom, with what seems to me to be superhuman strength, carries it on his back up a notched pole into the treehouse. Inside, every nook and cranny is crammed with bones from previous feasts—spiky fish skeletons, blockbuster pig jaws, the skulls of flying foxes and rats.
The bones dangle even from hooks strung along the ceiling, near bundles of many-colored parrot and cassowary feathers. I meet Yakor, a tall, kindly eyed tribesman from a treehouse upriver, who squats by the fire with Khanduop, Bailom and Kilikili. When the talk turns to khakhua meals they have enjoyed, Khanduop's eyes light up.
Beyond cannibalism, it appears that Neaderthals also made tools out of their comrades' remains. There are a few isolated cultures in Papua New Guinea known to have killed and eaten humans, although they likely haven't practiced cannibalism for several decades. In , British television host Piers Gibbon visited the Biami people — a group who once practiced cannibalism and "were very happy to talk about it," Gibbon said.
An older member of the tribe told Gibbon about one instance where members of the tribe killed two women suspected of speaking ill of a dying husband. The man said they roasted the women over the fire like pigs and cut up their flesh to eat it.
The practice of cannibalism in another Papua New Guinea tribe, the Fore people, led to the spread of a fatal brain disease called kuru that caused a devastating epidemic in the group. But not all members of the tribe died — some of them carry a gene that protects against kuru and other "prion diseases" such as mad cow.
The tribe stopped practicing cannibalism in the s, which led to a decline in kuru. But because the disease can take many years to show up, cases of kuru continued to pop up for decades.
Researchers are working to understand how the genetic mutation works to prevent kuru and gather new insights into how to prevent prion diseases. In , archaeologists reported finding dozens of human bones bearing marks of cannibalism at the ancient Xiximes settlement of Cuevas del Maguey in northern Mexico.
The bones were found inside shelters dating back to the early s, National Geographic reported. Within this data, Cole found values for water content, protein content and fat content for a variety of organs and body parts.
From there, the math is easy. Those fat deposits are located all over the body, so if you want to reduce the prep time, try the skeleton 25, calories , the thigh muscles 13, calories or the skin 10, calories. The calorific values of the skeleton, skin, teeth, skeletal muscle and adipose tissue. Due to the nature of the original data, Cole grouped the butt muscles with the head and torso, which had a caloric value of 5, Next, Cole compared the caloric values of humans with those of prehistoric animals found in the same archaeological layers as the remains of early hominins.
Think bison, mammoths, woolly rhinos and deer. Based on his calculations, it seemed unlikely that all of our early relatives conducted cannibalism purely for nutritional reasons. The calorific values of the digestive system and alimentary canal. A horse is almost , calories. Human motivations for cannibalism likely evolved over time, he continued. But over time, sophistication started likely to emerge both in Homo sapiens and our close relatives.
Kirsten Flint. Eating other humans is an ultimate taboo—but is it really that bad? Ethically, it raises a lot of questions. Legally, the implications can be quite complex. But what about biologically speaking? Not at all. Cannibalism occurs in every corner of the animal kingdom. View Larger Image Adapted from Carine So if you like pooping, cannibalism is probably not for you. View Larger The plane crash site where a Uruguayan rugby team turned to cannibalism to survive.
Yes, definitely. Prion diseases affect the brain, giving it a sponge-esque form, not unlike Swiss cheese. View Larger Mad Cow Disease causes cows to lose muscle control before they ultimately die. Republish this article Republish.
Recommended from Food Crunch time — would you eat an insect? Santa calorie counting. Kirsten Flint Digital Content Creator. Kirsten takes great pride in being a Science Nerd. She is not biased in her nerdiness — she loves all science equally.
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