PJ Vogt

But also they felt that...

By consuming the person, they might be consuming not parts like body parts, but aspects of the person's personality might transfer them or their soul might be protected in some way.

It feels like they have a sense of protecting life and it's causing them to do this thing that in our culture is associated with a deep disrespect for life.

Yeah.

So what's interesting about where this foray story ends is these anthropologists generally knew there was some debate, but the sort of weight of evidence was on the side of the idea that the foray were eating their dead.

Because they knew that, what they were able to figure out is...

is that when they ate their dead, sometimes what was happening is they were spreading Kuru.

It's a prion disease, which was a relatively not understood kind of disease, but it's like an infection of brain protein.

And so when they ate brain tissue from a dead foray, they were getting this disease.

The strange thing about Kuru is it doesn't show up right away.

You can carry it for something like

as long as 40 years before the time bomb explodes.

And so it wasn't, person dies, we hold a funeral for them, the next week everyone's ill.

It was like, person dies, we hold a funeral for them, maybe many years later someone's ill.

But the actual ending of the story was the foray decided to change the rules around cannibalism.

But it wasn't because cannibalism was wrong or gross, it was just like, we're dying from it.

This would be interesting if the cannibalism taboo, which we assume is about protecting others, might turn out to be also about protecting ourselves.

But, hypothetically, what if there was a safe way for us to consume people?

This is something that had come up in conversation with Hannah, too.

Synthetically created human meat.