He also eats them, thus contravening one of our deepest and most ancient taboos: that to consume human flesh is the ultimate betrayal of our humanity. But as zoologist and author Bill Schutt shows in his new book, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History , not all cultures have shared this taboo. In ancient China, for instance, human body parts would appear on Imperial menus.
When National Geographic caught up with Schutt by phone at his home on Long Island, the author explained how, in the animal kingdom, cannibalism is extremely common ; why mad cow disease and a degenerative brain condition found in the highlands of New Guinea were both caused by cannibalism ; and how climate change could trigger mass cannibalism. It came as a surprise to me that cannibalism was so widespread across nature.
Initially, the party line was that the only times you would see cannibalism—unless you were dealing with black widow spiders or praying mantises —would be when it was stress-related or due to a lack of alternative forms of food.
For instance, spadefoot toads , in the American Southwest, lay their eggs in transient ponds, some no larger than puddles. Because of the climate, these ponds are in danger of drying up at any moment.
So if you are a tadpole, it pays, from an evolutionary perspective, to get out of the pool as quickly as possible. What they are doing is eating their brethren in the ponds. By doing so, they mature faster and are able to get out quicker than their herbivorous brothers and sisters.
Since Homer and the Greeks, we have been taught that cannibalism is the ultimate taboo. You had this snowball effect where we were taught that cannibalism is this horror.
If you combine this ultimate taboo with our fascination with food, what you get is a fascination with the topic.
When Columbus first arrived in the New World, he described the indigenous people as friendly and causing no problems. He had been told by Queen Isabella to treat these people with respect and kindness, except if it became clear they are cannibals, in which case, all bets were off.
Lo and behold, when Columbus came back, the indigenous people who had previously been classified as friendly were suddenly described as cannibals, so you could do anything to them. You could enslave them, take their land, murder them, and treat them like pestilence. The idea of cannibalism as a taboo was used to de-humanize the people encountered on these conquests. During the Cultural Revolution, privately owned farms were collectivized.
These techniques did not work, though, which resulted in a lot of people starving. China is a special case because it was never exposed to the taboo against cannibalism.
This is a Western taboo. There are numerous descriptions of emperors and other members of the imperial court enjoying humans as a type of food, prepared in all different ways. In , the Donner Party set out to go to California, and wound up getting stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Rather than backtracking to the flatlands, they decided to over-winter in the Sierras with the hope that they might be able to push through at a later date. That became impossible, and there were a number of rescue missions that also ran into problems with the weather. The Donners split the party into two camps about seven miles apart, and there was cannibalism at both of them. Do we have bones?
Is there physical evidence? But there were descriptions by many members of the Donner Party themselves and the rescue teams that went in. There was no controversy at the time.
In a paper for the Lancet , Sugg shared how a Franciscan monk in the 17th century made marmalade out of human blood, and even wrote a recipe for it. By the late 18th century, hostility toward it became widespread and effective.
The folklore about it, however, may persist in certain cultures, and not just due to health reasons. Modern science, however, suggests that humans are far from being good eats for our own species. Diseases can spread more readily, with some being particularly gruesome. Prion diseases, for example, are thought to have inflicted prehistoric cannibals.
At the very least, red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, cardiovascular and cancer mortality.
But even he has never been this far upriver, because, he says, some Korowai threaten to kill outsiders who enter their territory. Some clans are said to fear those of us with pale skin, and Kembaren says many Korowai have never laid eyes on a white person.
They call outsiders laleo "ghost-demons". Suddenly, screams erupt from around the bend. Moments later, I see a throng of naked men brandishing bows and arrows on the riverbank. Kembaren murmurs to the boatmen to stop paddling. They'd quickly catch us if we tried. As the tribesmen's uproar bangs at my ears, our pirogue glides toward the far side of the river. As they near, I see that their arrows are barbed.
Cannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji. But today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh. They live about miles inland from the Arafura Sea, which is where Michael Rockefeller, a son of then-New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared in while collecting artifacts from another Papuan tribe; his body was never found.
Most Korowai still live with little knowledge of the world beyond their homelands and frequently feud with one another. Some are said to kill and eat male witches they call khakhua. The island of New Guinea, the second largest in the world after Greenland, is a mountainous, sparsely populated tropical landmass divided between two countries: the independent nation of Papua New Guinea in the east, and the Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Irian Jaya in the west.
The Korowai live in southeastern Papua. My journey begins at Bali, where I catch a flight across the Banda Sea to the Papuan town of Timika; an American mining company's subsidiary, PT Freeport Indonesia, operates the world's largest copper and gold mine nearby. The Free Papua Movement, which consists of a few hundred rebels equipped with bows and arrows, has been fighting for independence from Indonesia since Because Indonesia has banned foreign journalists from visiting the province, I entered as a tourist.
After a stopover in Timika, our jet climbs above a swampy marsh past the airport and heads toward a high mountain. Beyond the coast, the sheer slopes rise as high as 16, feet above sea level and stretch for miles. Waiting for me at Jayapura, a city of , on the northern coast near the border with Papua New Guinea, is Kembaren, 46, a Sumatran who came to Papua seeking adventure 16 years ago. He first visited the Korowai in , and has come to know much about their culture, including some of their language.
He is clad in khaki shorts and trekking boots, and his unflinching gaze and rock-hard jaw give him the look of a drill sergeant. The best estimate is that there are some 4, Korowai. Traditionally, they have lived in treehouses, in groups of a dozen or so people in scattered clearings in the jungle; their attachment to their treehouses and surrounding land lies at the core of their identity, Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Paul Taylor noted in his documentary film about them, Lords of the Garden.
Over the past few decades, however, some Korowai have moved to settlements established by Dutch missionaries, and in more recent years, some tourists have ventured into Korowai lands. But the deeper into the rain forest one goes, the less exposure the Korowai have had to cultures alien to their own. After we fly from Jayapura southwest to Wamena, a jumping-off point in the Papuan highlands, a wiry young Korowai approaches us. In Bahasa Indonesia, he says that his name is Boas and that two years ago, eager to see life beyond his treehouse, he hitched a ride on a charter flight from Yaniruma, a settlement at the edge of Korowai territory.
He has tried to return home, he says, but no one will take him. Boas says a returning guide has told him that his father was so upset by his son's absence that he has twice burned down his own treehouse.
We tell him he can come with us. The next morning eight of us board a chartered Twin Otter, a workhorse whose short takeoff and landing ability will get us to Yaniruma. Once we're airborne, Kembaren shows me a map: spidery lines marking lowland rivers and thousands of square miles of green jungle.
Dutch missionaries who came to convert the Korowai in the late s called it "the hell in the south. After 90 minutes we come in low, following the snaking Ndeiram Kabur River. At Yaniruma, a line of stilt huts that Dutch missionaries established in , we thump down on a dirt strip carved out of the jungle.
Now, to my surprise, Boas says he will postpone his homecoming to continue with us, lured by the promise of adventure with a laleo, and he cheerfully lifts a sack of foodstuffs onto his shoulders. As the pilot hurls the Twin Otter back into the sky, a dozen Korowai men hoist our packs and supplies and trudge toward the jungle in single file bound for the river.
Most carry bows and arrows. The Rev. Johannes Veldhuizen, a Dutch missionary with the Mission of the Reformed Churches, first made contact with the Korowai in and dropped plans to convert them to Christianity. Gerrit van Enk, another Dutch missionary and co-author of The Korowai of Irian Jaya , coined the term "pacification line" for the imaginary border separating Korowai clans accustomed to outsiders from those farther north.
In a separate phone interview from the Netherlands, he told me that he had never gone beyond the pacification line because of possible danger from Korowai clans there hostile to the presence of laleo in their territory. Entering the Korowai rain forest is like stepping into a giant watery cave. With the bright sun overhead I breathe easily, but as the porters push through the undergrowth, the tree canopy's dense weave plunges the world into a verdant gloom.
The heat is stifling and the air drips with humidity. This is the haunt of giant spiders, killer snakes and lethal microbes. High in the canopy, parrots screech as I follow the porters along a barely visible track winding around rain-soaked trees and primeval palms. My shirt clings to my back, and I take frequent swigs at my water bottle.
The annual rainfall here is around inches, making it one of the wettest places on earth. A sudden downpour sends raindrops spearing through gaps in the canopy, but we keep walking. The local Korowai have laid logs on the mud, and the barefoot porters cross these with ease. But, desperately trying to balance as I edge along each log, time and again I slip, stumble and fall into the sometimes waist-deep mud, bruising and scratching my legs and arms. Slippery logs as long as ten yards bridge the many dips in the land.
Inching across like a tightrope walker, I wonder how the porters would get me out of the jungle were I to fall and break a leg. Hour melts into hour as we push on, stopping briefly now and then to rest. With night near, my heart surges with relief when shafts of silvery light slip through the trees ahead: a clearing. Korowai children with beads about their necks come running to point and giggle as I stagger into the village—several straw huts perched on stilts and overlooking the river.
I notice there are no old people here. After we eat a dinner of river fish and rice, Boas joins me in a hut and sits cross-legged on the thatched floor, his dark eyes reflecting the gleam from my flashlight, our only source of light. Using Kembaren as translator, he explains why the Korowai kill and eat their fellow tribesmen. It's because of the khakhua, which comes disguised as a relative or friend of a person he wants to kill. The khakhua finally kills the person by shooting a magical arrow into his heart.
I ask Boas whether the Korowai eat people for any other reason or eat the bodies of enemies they've killed in battle. The killing and eating of khakhua has reportedly declined among tribespeople in and near the settlements. Rupert Stasch, an anthropologist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who has lived among the Korowai for 16 months and studied their culture, writes in the journal Oceania that Korowai say they have "given up" killing witches partly because they were growing ambivalent about the practice and partly in reaction to several incidents with police.
In one in the early '90s, Stasch writes, a Yaniruma man killed his sister's husband for being a khakhua. The police arrested the killer, an accomplice and a village head. Word of such treatment, combined with Korowais' own ambivalence, prompted some to limit witch-killing even in places where police do not venture.
Still, the eating of khakhua persists, according to my guide, Kembaren. On our third day of trekking, after hiking from soon after sunrise to dusk, we reach Yafufla, another line of stilt huts set up by Dutch missionaries.
That night, Kembaren takes me to an open hut overlooking the river, and we sit by a small campfire. Two men approach through the gloom, one in shorts, the other naked save for a necklace of prized pigs' teeth and a leaf wrapped about the tip of his penis. His eyes are empty of expression, his lips are drawn in a grimace and he walks as soundlessly as a shadow. The other man, who turns out to be Kilikili's brother Bailom, pulls a human skull from a bag.
A jagged hole mars the forehead. Bailom passes the skull to me. I don't want to touch it, but neither do I want to offend him.
My blood chills at the feel of naked bone. I have read stories and watched documentaries about the Korowai, but as far as I know none of the reporters and filmmakers had ever gone as far upriver as we're about to go, and none I know of had ever seen a khakhua's skull. The fire's reflection flickers on the brothers' faces as Bailom tells me how he killed the khakhua, who lived in Yafufla, two years ago.
0コメント