A ritual? A laughing death? Or something more sinister? The Fore people of Papua New Guinea have
practiced ritualized cannibalism for generations, and have suffered some devastating side effects.
According to NPR, the remote areas of Papua New Guinea were far from
uninhabited. When gold prospectors from Australia explored the remote highlands,
they came across what they estimated to be around a million people who
called the place ‘home’. Two decades later, researchers began to arrive in
this remote region to study these formerly isolated people who lived in small villages.
The tribe they were gathering information on was called Fore. There were only about
11,000 members, making up a tiny percentage of the highland population. Locals believed
that this tribe was the target of some sort of spell or curse,
as more than 200 of them died every year from what the Fore called "kuru."
Kuru is a Fore word that means "shaking" or "trembling." Little did they know those were
actually some of the very first signs that the disease infected one of their
members. What would happen is the person would begin to slowly lose control of their muscles
and eventually become immobile. As the disease progressed, the person would be unable to walk,
feed themselves, and would lose control of their bodily functions.
Perhaps the eeriest part of what the researchers observed was the loss of
emotional control. The Fore would refer to it as the "laughing death." Why? Well,
the infected would sometimes laugh maniacally as they slowly withered away. Creepy, right?
With an estimated 200 members of the Fore tribe dying from this condition each year,
NPR reports that researchers feared that they were threatened to become
extinct. Researchers noticed that whatever the ailment was,
it had taken a particular toll on the females in the tribal population.
Several villages seemed to have no women left at all. Young children were also suspiciously
targeted by whatever it was that was causing kuru. For years, kuru was studied as researchers tried
to isolate a cause, and for a time it was believed to be a rare genetic condition only they had.
This prompted medical anthropologist Dr. Shirley Lindenbaum to visit the
Fore villages and put together family trees in hopes of settling whether kuru
was an inherited disease or not. What she discovered was something that might
shock people in the Western world, who are… less accustomed to the stories.
"I killed a man, slaughtered him, and ate him. Since then, he is always with me."
The Fore practiced a custom known as funerary cannibalism. They held
the belief that the bodies were sacred and better to be consumed
by the people who loved them than by scavengers, bugs, or larvae.
The women were believed to be the ones who could take the body into their own and keep
it safe from any evil spirits that might have contaminated it. They would cook the brain
and the flesh and dine on them as a religious rite. Their young children would often tend to
these ceremonies with them and were given the cooked remains to consume with their mothers.
Dr. Lindenbaum was able to persuade other researchers that kuru was rooted in the
Fore practice of funerary cannibalism. According to NPR, several years later,
the National Institutes of Health injected chimpanzees with matter from
an infected human brain to see if there was any correlation. Much to their expectations,
it worked its way slowly through the apes, but the ones injected with it developed kuru.
The experiments and research were conducted by a team that was headed by Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek,
who won a Nobel Prize in the 1970s for his work with kuru.
Scientists knew the cause of kuru, but they still weren't sure of what
it was. A disease? A virus? The jury was still out on that until two decades later
when biologist Stanley B. Prusiner made a groundbreaking discovery.
Prusiner had discovered proteins that had unusual characteristics — the protein strands he observed
were folded over and performed both normal and disease-carrying functions. The American
Association of Immunologists explains that these proteins, which Prusiner named prions,
would transmit the disease-carrying function to nearby proteins in the brain. This would
generate an infectious chain reaction that led to brain damage over time.
His discovery of prions and the subsequent work he performed to identify kuru and other,
more familiar, diseases earned him the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. These
other diseases, as Johns Hopkins says, are also affected by prions. These brain
eating proteins were identified as the culprit for the rare Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease and fatal insomnia. Prions may also be a cause of Alzheimer's disease.
It's not possible to say exactly how kuru began infecting the Fore people of New Guinea,
but researchers do have one pretty solid theory. They noted the spread of kuru cases
from one part of the highlands to another… then, to another. They suggest it shows
a slow chain reaction of the fatal disease traveling from Fore village to Fore village.
NPR explains that researchers now surmise that at one point, a member of the Fore tribe contracted
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Loved ones ate the body of the stricken person after they died and became
infected with kuru. Kuru symptoms don’t occur overnight. The condition is very slow-moving,
sometimes taking more than a decade to kill the person who contracts it.
Medical News Today explains that women were the ones tasked with the preparation and cleaning of
the bodies of loved ones. After the body was laid out, the brain was removed and cooked
inside bamboo with some ferns. The rest of the body was fire-roasted and eaten as well.
“Are we talking… cannibalism here?”
The men believed that eating the flesh of other humans would make them less able to perform in
battle, so they largely abstained from the practice. Meanwhile, the women would eat the
brain and the body, passing along little bits of what they had cooked to their young children. And
it could mean a long, slow death for mother and child, all in the name of keeping ancestors safe.
For more than 50 years, NPR reports that the ritual of funerary cannibalism has been halted
among the Fore. But though the practice of dining on the brain and flesh of dead relatives hasn't
been a thing for a long time, it took decades before the ravages of kuru came to a full stop.
Kuru is a condition that can progress so slowly that a person can be infected with
it and not show a single symptom for years. The last known death from kuru occurred in 2009,
but the years of exposure to prions might have had at least one silver
lining. According to The Washington Post, the Fore people are now believed
to be less susceptible to prion-related diseases based on genetic resistance.
Today, the Fore tribe has doubled in size from the days when its villages
were being ravaged by kuru. Now numbering more than 20,000 and
growing and they still reside in the highlands of Papua New Guinea.