A scientist has retold the chilling answer she received when she asked a cannibal tribe “what did you do with the bodies?”
In 1960, US anthropologist Shirely Lindenbaum was in Papua New Guinea was studying the Fore people - a tribe that practiced ritual cannibalism. To Lindenbaum’s horror she began to witness an awful and ultimately fatal disease named ‘kuru’ that was sweeping through the tribespeople.
Victims of kuru experienced severe limb pain, couldn’t swallow properly and would writhe and shake on the floor, unable to stop. Lindenbaum then found out the unique illness only affected the female members of the Fore.
Speaking exclusively to the Daily Star, she explained that cannibalism was “women were eating other women. It was a spiritual thing.”
READ MORE: Cannibal tribe ate humans whole except for one 'bitter' part – but it came at tragic cost
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Armed with this key piece of information Lindenbaum, 92, and her then husband Robert Glass went to work, asking the tribe pointed questions in order to get to the bottom of what was causing the disease.
It wasn’t long until Lindenbaum made the chilling link between cannibalism and kuru, when she asked the female members what they did with their dead relatives.
She said: “Finding out what was causing kuru was the result of a simple ethnographical question - ‘what did you do with the bodies?’ They said: ‘we ate them’.
"We went back to the Fore once we had that interesting information and started studying them."
Lindenbaum and her husband were the first people to make the link between kuru and cannibalism. They put forward the ‘hypothesis’ to other scientists, who began by being very disbelieving.
“The epidemiologists thought it was nonsense, they thought if you just put two anthropologists out in the field they’d come back with ‘cannibalism’ - but we were right,” she added.
Lindenbaum revealed the Fore people would eat "the entire body and all body parts…except one."
She said: "There was one part that they didn’t eat that was too bitter to eat. All body parts were eaten, except the gallbladder, which was considered too bitter."
Lindenbaum explained how it was viewed in the tribe as a positive thing to eat one's own in-laws, and how only women took part in the ritual. "We normally think of cannibalism as fighting with people and then eating them. This wasn’t like that at all, the men weren’t cannibals," she said.
"Only the women were eating other women. Their sisters and sisters-in-law, who were dying – they were grieving them, as they ate them. It was woman-to-woman, empathetic.
“You could say if you didn’t want to be eaten. But most people did want to be eaten because they said they didn’t want the worms to eat their bodies.”
Lindenbaum managed to persuade the tribe to lay off snacking on their dead family, helping stop the grim disease of kuru in its tracks.
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