What are you searching for? Is it really bad to eat people? 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. 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.
She is also an avid crafter. Working in the science communication field allows her to flex both her left and right brain hemispheres, which she enjoys immensely. Next up. Crunch time — would you eat an insect? Pint of Science events in Perth The global phenomenon Pint of Science heads to Perth with six fascinating talks over three nights.
Insta-worthy and ecofriendly — The Raw Kitchen The Particle team headed round the Perth region to find great cafes with the most innovative solutions to reduce their carbon footprint. And they were getting really sick. The disease, called kuru , caused the ill to lose control of their bodies and their emotions. Eventually, they died. What baffled researchers, according to NPR, was that kuru wasn't a virus or a living bacteria.
Instead, it was a strange process that researchers compared to Dr. Jekyll's transformation into Mr. Hyde—the thin line between good and evil crossed by a twisted protein, one that tricked other proteins in the brain to twist like it, damaging the brain's cerebellum. The Fore people stopped eating their dead half a century ago, but the epidemic spanned years, with the last victim of kuru dying in —the disease can lie dormant for years before attacking the brain.
But similarly confusing diseases are still out there, like mad cow disease, which also originates in infected meat. Many people might think of cannibalism in distant history and undeveloped countries. But cannibalism was a feature of early American history too. In , archaeologists revealed they'd found evidence of cannibalism in Colonial Jamestown — an indication of just how desperate early Colonial life had been.
Specifically, they discovered markings on the skull of a year-old girl that strongly indicated she'd been eaten by settlers during the particularly difficult winter of It was more concrete evidence for something historians had read stories about for years.
Driven thru insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian. An illustration depicting the desperate journey of the Donner Party. When most people think of cannibalism in America, they probably think of the Donner Party — the famous travelers who resorted to the practice when they were stuck in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains while traveling west in What's surprising, however, is contemporary accounts of the trip focused less on the lurid accounts of cannibalism and more on the breadth of hardship that the party endured.
As Donner Party historian Kristin Johnson notes : "Out of the more than newspaper articles about the Donner Party published in , the most common headline is a variation of 'From California' What's more, many people were just as interested in legends about the Donner Party's buried treasure as they were in the cannibalism.
In the s, a Sacramento newspaper reported that treasure rumors made the people of Truckee, California, "feverish with excitement" and included discoveries that would "delight the heart of a numismatist.
The treasure was probably a myth, but it shows that the story was considered far more complicated — and less purely shocking — than it is today. There are many horrifying examples of cannibalism in Europe throughout history. But one of the most bizarre is that cannibalism was occasionally seen as a remedy. To pick one example, in Germany from the s to s, executioners often had a bizarre side job that supplemented their income: selling leftover body parts as medicine.
As described in Kathy Stuart's Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts , human fat was sold as a remedy for broken bones, sprains, and arthritis. Usually, this human fat was rubbed as a balm, not eaten. However, apothecaries regularly stocked fat, flesh, and bone, and there are also examples of a human skull being ground into a fine powder and mixed with liquid to treat epilepsy.
That treatment may sound strange, but remember that eating placenta has become a modern-day health fad. Most of the time, the popular verdict on cannibalism is clear — don't do it. But occasionally, what's cannibalism and what isn't has been surprisingly hard to define. Further reading: For a more detailed story about cannibalism, try this one about the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. An engraving depicting cannibalism in Brazil. Getty Images Cannibalism can show up at the most unexpected points in history. Here are a few surprising things experts have learned: 1 Humans are mostly hard-wired against cannibalism — but not always There's a good biological reason why cannibalism is taboo in virtually every culture: Eating other humans can make you sick.
Not all of them fell victim to the disease Montaigne writes: I have a song composed by a prisoner which contains this challenge, that they should all come boldly and gather to dine off him, for they will be eating at the same time their own fathers and grandfathers, who have served to feed and nourish his body. As Howard Zinn excerpted in A People's History of the United States , one government report painted a grim picture of that winter: Driven thru insufferable hunger to eat those things which nature most abhorred, the flesh and excrements of man as well of our own nation as of an Indian.
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