A genetic study in an extraordinarily remote community in Papua New Guinea has uncovered new insights into a brain disease spread by people eating their dead relatives, which killed thousands of people in the 20Strewn with mountains, gorges and fast-flowing rivers, the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea is so isolated from the rest of the world that it wasn’t until early in the 20Some of the tribes, known as the Fore, practised a form of cannibalism called “mortuary feasts”, where...
By the 1950s, the epidemic of kuru began to subside as mortuary feasts became illegal, but visitors noted that in some villages the number of females was depleted because so many had died from kuru. Mead says women and children were probably most susceptible to contracting the disease because they ate the brains of their dead relatives.
“It seems likely to us that the sex bias caused by kuru led bachelors within kuru-affected communities to seek wives from further afield than usual due to the lack of availability of potential wives more locally,” says Mead.Fossil evidence shows that humans have been practising cannibalism for a million years.
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