Fine Young Cannibals

it's actually a spoof product. And it was supposedly supposed to be a soy based food product designed to resemble human flesh and taste and texture. And so the website was up for about a year, made two thousand and six, and it had all these great products that you just never could buy. So if you want to, you know, if you were really wanting a finger or an arm or something but didn't necessarily want to campbalize someone, you could in theory. So did they replicate and they replicated

the taste or the form, the taste and the texture. Yeah, well, you know, if you really get logical about it, I'm not sure there's anything that weird about it, not compared to say, well, okay, you're vegetarian, right, yes, okay, do you ever have like soysage or like a soy dog, or you know, any kind of or whatever. Yeah, I have like meat simulated products. We'll see like that seems like, I mean, it's not unlike that you you don't want

to actually eat meat, but you're okay with something that. Yeah, And yet there's a disconnect because sometimes when I pull out a piece of what's supposed to be bacon and I look at it and it's a little disconcerting. So I'm frying up the bacon, and yet I don't eat bacon, and I don't or they want bacon. But I do have to say, there is that that bacon taste that

you can never really replicate. Yeah, well even if you're but I guess even if you're frying up some soy bacon, it is going to look like bacon and not say, like a pig's face. Like you can't get a soy pig face, right, Maybe you can. Maybe it's a it's going to be a small market market that may actually carry that. They do some pretty funky stuff with it. So this you know, and in discussing like why is this creepy and this not you know, uh with the

with the HOOFU. I mean that really comes down to the basic question about cannibalism in in nature as a whole, because it's it's one of those things when you really look at it, there's kind of like the animal version and then well there's really only the animal version. But yes, well but but on top of the animal version. Um, And this is like, you know, as Kennels relates to just any kind of creature you might find might find

that practices it, and a lot of animals practice it. Um. If you layer human culture and human society and our complex web of emotions and values on top of that, it just really complicates the matter and you get into this this area where cannibalism is really this I mean, it's just you know, it's it's an outrageous thing. It's like it it raises outrage from people for us who would like to think that we have morals and uh, social values and we all cooperate with each other, we

we try not to eat each other humans. Yeah, yeah, I found this great. To quote from Tom Sorel from the University of Birmingham and uh, he said. Quote in intellectual history, cannibals stand for alien and exotic human being, specimens of our species who realize its darkest possibilities, usually in places far removed from civilization. Cannibalism. Cannibalism both expresses

natural law and and contravenes it. So right, so there that there's the rub, right, yeah, and it happens in nature and it's perfectly nut roll there, right, And yet we can't help but WinCE a little bit. Yeah, you hear that. You know, if you start hearing that, somebody's like certain, you know, grinding up corpses, you know, to

serving the restaurant, people just get outraged. There's a great money python skit where it involves like grinding up corpses and and and feeding it to people, and it's like the they break the fourth wall and like the the audience just starts throwing things. You know. It's it's it's that outrageous a concept. You want to know where your

meat pie came from. But it's very like I say, it's very widespread in the animal kingdom, and it is a major mortality factor in the biology of numerous species. So we're gonna sort of walk through the We're not really gonna go with pros and cons, but first of those, we're gonna look at the case for cannibalism in nature and some of the ways that it's practiced, and there then we're gonna look at the case against and for the most part we're gonna avoid the whole question of

cannibalism um within the larger human institution. But we do have an excellent article on the website by Josh Clark about that, so I highly recommend checking that out if you want to get more into the you know, the serial killer cannibal topics, right or endo cannibalism, all the

different types of cannibalism that exists. All right, So, um, the big thing for me when I when I was researching this is it a lot of it really comes down to energy, right, because if you're an organism on this planet, unless you're a plant that's generating a lot of its energy from photo through photosynthus um, and even that, you're not not all the energies necessarily coming from the sun.

But for the rest of us, we're having to consume other little bundles of energy to to keep our energy going. So we're having to eat other organisms. Now we might we might not eat um, you know, we might only eat plants, or we might only eat animals, but we're having to eat something. So it's this constant. This is huge pyramid you know of of predators preying on other forms of energy, and even bugs. Let's not discount bugs. Some bugs and they like them quite a bit. Well,

they're supposedly quite good. I've never had one. Have you had a bug? No? No, but it isn't I think it's a street food Vietnam. Yeah, suppose there was supposedly some in Thailand. I didn't get to try it when I was there. Yeah, it's supposed to be incredibly nutritious. Yeah, I tried if I if I had the chance, But it's never offered on you know, the local menus. No, it's not your in Atlanta where the palmeta bug salads. I don't know. You'll have to start a food truck

based on that. So, like we said, the it all comes down to energy, it comes down to predation, and cannibalism is basically a pet predator prey interaction within a species. So it's well a member of this species preying on a member of another of the same species. So like, you know, when you get into discussions of odd, uh, did you know humans eat neder nehnderthals and did neahnderthals

eat humans? That's not really cannibalism. It's kind of creepy, but it's still it's it would be two different species eating each other or one. You know, that's that's a whole separate podcast there, but like me eating you same species. Right, yeah, don't worry, but let's hope it doesn't come to that. Right, So there are different types of cannibalism, right, So there's um something called sybil side. Yes, this is the most

commonly seen in the sand tiger shark um. And this is a situation where the animal has to uteri and each one produces a number of eggs, and but each each litter yields just two pups, one for each uterus. Okay, so there's some competitiveness there. Yeah. These uh, the little embryos have embryonic teeth, So you have all these little you know, unborn brothers and sisters in there, and it's, uh, it's kind of like a it's like each one is like a battle royale of you know, who's going to

be the toughest. So it's slay just kind of you know, chopped down on each other. And in the end of it, you have one shark pup left standing huh okay, and so they're hungry, they've got teeth. Um. It actually reminds me of Dwight Shrewt from the Office. Um. I don't know if you ever watch I do watch it, I don't remember the quote. Yeah, he said that he actually absorbed his own twin brother, so he therefore had the

strength of a man and a baby. Yeah, so I guess it would be like the Dwight Shrewts of the animal world. Yeah, yeah, you can. You can think of this as the Shrewt factor. So so the so these two uh santiger sharks end up emerging with the strength with it with a very shrewd like veracity to help them,

you know, ensure their survival. Yeah. Approximately fourteen species of sharker thought to practice some form of this cannibalism, but the santiger shark is the It's the one that we've studied the most and we have the most down on m Now, you know, one of the things to keep in mind about procreation in the animal kingdom. Is that

especially sexual reproduction. It's like a huge energy um waste, not necessarily waste, but let's say incident investment, huge investment because just look at humans for instance, think of all the energy that goes into sexual selection, you know, whole products, you know, people especially you know, how much time do teenagers waste on sexual selection? Enormous amount of time And I don't know how they get anything done, and how do they study? I know, apparently they don't, but I

don't know. I guess they do. But anyway, energy UH for the sex act itself. Then there's then on the mother's part, there's the energy to bring the offspring to term, the energy to give birth, and then the energy to

raise the child till I can find for itself. Because the genetic mission is basically create another UM, you know, another creature, replicate your DNA, replicate the DNA, keep that strain of DNA going, and then you know, put this new UH product on the market and let it, you know, carry on on its own, right, Right, It's all these niceties like playing it um you know, mose art in the uterus aren't necessarily their focus, right, Just get it out there get it going, but in a in a

way it's like make sure it's like the best, you know,

the best possible. Um and instead of eating of the sharks in the womb, is you know, potentially listening to Mozar, right, so um, I also like to think of think of this in terms of of like a business, like if if how stuff works for to launch like a like some sort of separate entity like I don't know, um how crabs work, or something like we're gonna do a site is just about crabs, and we're like, this is gonna be It's gonna be like how stuff works, except

it's only gonna focus on crabs. It's wood would be kind of like the company's offspring, right, so be like all crabs all the time, crab fashions, crab recipes, crab science. But the but the but the existing business has a certain amount of energy already tied out of it. Doo, a certain number of employees. Right, So let's say, well, okay, we're gonna have one one employee go out to be the editor of this new side, and another to be the writer, another to be the marketing guide, another to

be the you know, the programmer, et cetera. All the things that that can make it what it is, and it has to in in where it's like forming this new entity of itself. Right, So it's this this huge energy in h this huge energy investment, and if that doesn't work, then one of two things are gonna happen. Either all those people are gonna lose their jobs or they're going to be absorbed back into the parent company, or at least that's my my understands, they're gonna be Yeah,

they're gonna be shrewded. So that leads us to another type of cannibalism that's pretty calm, really very common, and that's the eating of one's own young, which again is one of these kind of like terrifying type of things. There's the classic image, is it Chronus the god, Yeah,

eating his own son? I think so yeah, And then like then I'm I'm a little shaky in this particular story from mythology, but there's a famous painting of it, and there's I think Zeus like I was able to like somebody snug SEUs away by putting a rock in there so that so that he would eat the rock instead of baby Zeus. Of course, Yeah, Zeus was all about killing the young, his young. Yeah, so um so anyway,

it's it's another sort of terrifying idea. You know that the oh my goodness, the mother is the lifebringer and then you know, and if you've ever had hamsters or or any other you know, kind of animal like that that ends up killing it's young and or eating them, it can be kind of a terrifying moment. But it makes a lot of sense from an energy standpoint, right,

from a survival basic Yeah. There, you know, there's energy has been expended to create these uh these new creatures and their calories wrapped up in them, so you bring them back into the fold, right right, Okay, well I'm actually thinking too. Um sort of related to that, there's the masked booby, which is a bur Yes, I knew it. I knew that. I couldn't just say masked booby. Yeah you've got you can run these by me and uh yeah, I know, I've got to give you a hint therapy.

But um, okay, So getting that aside, the masked booby is actual way a bird and it's indigenous to the Galopico silence and uh that's a case where the parents it's a case of stib eating. Right there, there are two siblings. Um, but that's a case where the parents actually step in and they encourage them to kill one

of the other off. Yeah, and they actually that the odds are stacked, um in favor of their eldest, so they it's sort of like a kid to getting them into a match and seeing like a chicken fight and seeing who's going to come out best. And the reason for that is the very same, which is, you know, you want to put all your effort into the sibling that's going to survive and has the best chance of carrying on. It's I mean, it sounds harsh, but it

comes back to that. So anybody out there that is in kind of a blue family type situation where they feel like their mom and or dad are stirring competition, uh, just be glad that they're not encouraging you to kill and eat each other. Be glad that you're not. I'm masked Bob, Yes, um. But just to give you an idea of how many different animals engage in this, and it's also uh you also see uh. For instance, sharks

will practice um uh eating. They'll end up eating eggs that haven't been fertilized um, and sometimes the eggs will be eating that have been fertilized. But you'll see you'll see this form of catabalism in protozoa, slime, molds, sea slugs, insects, spiders, fish, reptiles. They they've observed it in dinosaur fossils, um, bats, seals, sea lions, otters, polar bears, even otters. Yes, they're cute. Imagine one, you know, cannibalizing another. It's we're eating it's young.

It happens. It never shows up in the cute pictures. But tigers, chimpanzees, uh, you know, amphibians, at least a hundred species of mammals and all, and of course hamsters, well yeah, they're most known for it. Don't tap on the glass, which leads us to the some of the reasons. Um, you know, why would a mother hamster suddenly decide that she needs to slay all her offspring and eat some of them. I don't know. Maybe she had way too many and that's too much energy to expend on abroad.

That big Yeah, it's kind of like if you you know, to use the sort of clunky business analogy from earlier, it's like if you suddenly created this enormous side project with way too many employees. You're like, WHOA, this is going to fail. This doesn't make it makes sense. It's not gonna bring in enough money on its own to support that. So we gotta we gotta bring some, if

not all, of these employees back into the fold. Yeah. Yeah, and some of them too if they're if they're born with um A disease or they're not quite up to par Isn't that another reason to sort of call down the broad is to take out the ones that are the weakest and and use them for energy for everybody else you have. Like a female rattlesnakes, for instance, will consume on average about of their postpartum mass um. Mostly these are going to be still born or just non

viable offspring. So again it's like they have all these offspring. It's all about like, let's keep the species going, let's keep the DNA going. You're gonna want to invest in the ones that are the best candidates. I mean, you know, it's disgusting to us, but it really is practical if you think about it. Yeah, if you take the anthropomorphic

ness out of it. Yeah, it's like, you know, it's the basic it's the basic mission, the genetic mission, and the the the energy logic tied to it, and you have you strip away all the layers that human cultures put on top of it. Then yeah, it's it makes perfect sense, you know, just as a as a side

observation or question. I was thinking about this, and I was thinking about mammals who eat their placentas after birth, and I'm wondering if they ever cannibalize they're young, if maybe carry away well no, I'm wondering if maybe the eating the placenta actually um serves the need of eating some sort of protein and getting some energy source back, and and instead of eating their young they eat their pa I think would would make perfect sense. I don't know,

I have that's a question. If anybody knows the answer

to that that I would love to know. Um. Another great example of this comes in invasive cane toads in Australia, and uh, these are just some These are some some crazy animals because you'll have a small and medium size but not large cane toes and they'll wave a long middle toe off their hind butt up and down in the water and they're doing this uh to to to catch other toads, and then the cane toe larva will actively seek out toad eggs of the same species to eat.

So there's just like a lot of cannibals and going on in cane toes in fact um. And again they're invasive and they're a huge problem in Australia, and they they found a two thousand tents study found that this was actually uh encouraging them to spread, because a mother toad would end up um and wanting to lay her eggs in a virgin um pond or or a little stream or whatever just to encourage just just to protect

it from other cane toes. Yeah, so it's like, you know, you're it just ends up, you know, oh, we've got to find new water, new water to uh for these eggs to developments so they're not eaten by all the other cane toes. But they think that that they might be able to to draw the chemical that the eggs shed, that that that attracts the other cane todes and use that as some sort of a bait, like a pheromone

or something, yeah, similar to that. I just can't get over the image of like all these toes pointing out in the water like synchronized swimmers. Sure that's happening. This presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow. See, we could keep going and just listing all sorts of weird and growth tesque examples of mothers eating their own young, but we should probably move on it and into another fascinating area of cannibalism. Uh, and definitely a sexier area

of cannibalism. Sexual cannibalism. Oh yeah, which sounds like a great, great name for a band if it is not used already. To drawback to a to an example that we brought up in a previous podcast or one about Ladies Night on Planet Earth about the role that the male has in any given species. We mentioned the the brown and tecanus, which is also known as mclahy's marsupial mouse. And this is the male that mates for twelve hours at a

time and eventually he humps himself to death. Uh, and then he's you know, his mouth, he's not another mouth to feed through the winter like. The species can then just focus on the mother raising the young. All the men are dead, uh, you know until next season. Yeah. I think maybe I said that he was that sort of relegated to like being the pool boy for the female. So that being the case, sexual cannibalism occurs when the female eats her mate dearing or immediately after the sex act,

which happens a lot. Yeah, apparently. And again it's like, if you look at the mail as merely a mutation necessary for a sexual reproduction, he doesn't necessarily have a lot of use after that that sexual encounter. So again that's that's energy that's just wasted. So it reminds me of like when a company brings on contract workers for a project that has a like a short term goal.

They're like, we need to get this project done, but we don't want to like hire six guys and then have to pay them or and gals and have to pay them benefits, etcetera. So let's just bring them on his contract workers and then in six months we're done. So it's kind of like the mail. In these cases, it's a contract worker, and at the when they're not needed anymore, they're like go, and they're they're submitting themselves to this process willingly because they want to make sure

that their offspring survive. Is that the idea behind this with the mating. Yeah, that they would say, okay, yeah, I will meet with you, knowing that you're going to say, you're praying mantis. You're going to rip my head off and then consume me as I'm meeting you. Well, it's interesting. I was reading some stuff about this, and uh, most in most cases, the male, I mean, the male is gonna mate. That's uh, I'm all right, ladies, that the male is that I mean, that's the male's mission. So

he's he's going to engage in that. But you'll also see, like with praying manaces, the males will try and survive, uh, within you know, their limited ability to do so. Uh. And it's also there's kind of it's kind of exaggerated in most praying manasis. I understand because a lot of the the early studies into this you had females in captivity who had not eaten as much as they want to.

They were voracious, yeah they were. Yeah, And so here's this um, this mantis, and you know, there he's done his part or is doing his part, and he can continue doing his part generally pretty well even with his head heat no off. So they just go for it. They say that typically uh, praying manus. Uh, cannibalistic mating process only occurs five of the time and uh, and it occurs most often if the female is hungry. Yeah, and so most most species are only going to cannibalize

regularly in captivity. But there's one species, uh, the mantis religiosa um, which is which is really into and it's necessary that the head be removed for the mating process to to to take effect properly. So and in these cases, the female typically eats a third of her partners and that she eats even more in the lab if the male can't escape. But that's the thing. The male will try and escape. Uh, it's just you know, a third of the time he's uh, he doesn't have a chance. Yeah,

I think it was the mantisys I was reading about that. Uh. There's some suggestion that they had evolved to sort of almost create a belt like effect in their abdomen regions so that they were drawing in all of their major organs as tightly inward as possible so that the things wouldn't get them very easily. So they can keep processes going at least two completely Yeah, yeah, exactly, so they

can they can mate longer without dying. But it's interesting. Um. I was actually thinking about this to Harvard biologists Stephen Jay Gould. He had thought that that it wasn't as widespread as it actually we know it is now. And his idea was that, are you saying sexual cannibalism or cannibalism in general? Sexual cannibal cannibalism. I think it was.

It must have been very troubling to him because he sort of came up with all these different ideas about it, but the main crux of it was that maybe it wasn't as widespread as it actually is, and that the female had just mistaken her mate as prey, which I thought was really funny because I mean, moments before the pray Nantis was you know, filling his wings and showing his abs a six pack, and you know, then began mating with her, and the idea that she just sort

of forgot what she was doing and turned around and went wow, wow. Maybe maybe he just said he had like a really horrible, you know girlfriend at some point and he was like like, wow, it's like somebody that just like snaps at the you know, and so he's like all women must be like this regardless of species. It's possible. There's just there's definitely some overreaching there. Now

there's one. You'll you'll find a sexual cannibalism in a number of arachnids and insects, but it's particularly interesting in the red back spider. Yeah, this is a relative of the black widow. And the males, first of all, are really tiny. Like it's one of these cases where where the whole are you know, the whole case for males is just being a you know, a mutation necessary appropriation

and not being the species itself. Really opposite, I mean, really, it's really obvious in this particular species because the male is just tiny, looks like an entirely different animal in the in the the female is enormous, and the male is a willing participant in the sexual cannibalism. Alright, So during copulation, this u the little male guy, he'll position himself above the female's jaws, all right, and uh and uh and and you know, basically like shove himself into

her jaws so that she gets to eat him. Uh and uh. And they believe that it's uh, it's favored in sexual selection because the sexual the cannibalized spiders received two different advantages. First of all, cannibalized males copulate longer and fertilize more eggs than those that survive. And then also the females were more likely to reject subsequent suitors if they consumed mate. So this makes sense. I think they were talking about it as a sort of like

a sperm plug. Yeah, yeah, I mean, not to get racy about it or anything, but basically that you know, they had made their deposit in that you know, any other males after that wouldn't necessarily be successful, right Yeah.

And it's and it's interesting because like we're looking at these other cases of sexual cannibalism and the male really doesn't necessarily have any there's no argument for the male sticking around and being eaten for the you know, the advancement of the species and the and him passing on his d n A. But this is a case where there's a definite advantage if he gives himself up to

you know, to the appetite of his mate. Yeah. And I thought something that um was really dramatic that I read is that they want account so that they actually somersault onto the things, which is like take me, please eat me. And then the other thing that I read is that during the mating process that they pluck the strings on the female's web for like eight hours. And I know, and I thought that is kind of sweet. But then I kind of thought, well maybe she was

like that is driving me crazy. I'm gonna eat you. These these these guys are so nice. And then the lady spiders are so hard on him. It's just a it's just a rough life. And then there's the orb weight weaving spider or weaving um in which the male sexual organ gets stuck in the female. And this is by design. Again, it's the same idea of this sort of a sperm plug. So although she can polish him off and you know, snack on him, she's stuck with him, so to speak, and that just make sure that she

can't mate with someone else afterwards. So there's definite design behind this. I don't think that they're just being masochistic here. Yeah, it's not the situation where the insect world is just like you know, evil or anything. It all makes makes

sense the grand scheme of things now. Um, moving away from from sexual cannibalism, you will also find plenty of animals that just seem to be kind of jerks, like kind of an any social jerks, and if they encounter anything, they're probably you know, they're either going to run from it or try and kill it. And if it's one of their own, they're probably going to try and either mate with it or kill it, or mate with it and kill it. So um the score. Like various scorpions

are great examples of it. Like scorpions tend to live very solitary lives, and if they encounter another scorpion of the same variety, then there's a very good chance that they'll that one will eat the other one. And if they're opposite sex and uh you know, and it's uh you know, and they see it as a good time to mate, then they may mate and then one will

eat the other. Yeah. Uh. The Komodo dragon is of course, another great example of of just being a cannibal just for the heck of it, because the the young, uh, the komodo dragon young are just considered prey, um you know, up until they're certain size, primarily raised for prey one

or not primarily raised for prey. But they're they're just the parents have no role in rearing them after they've been born, so they just have to climb the trees to escape, to escape their parents otherose, some parents will eat them. They're like, oh, look at those guys, they look tasty. I'm hungry. Let's do this. Interestingly enough, the one thing they can do to besides hiding in the

treetops is that they smear themselves an excrement. Then then that will keep the the their parents from potentially eating them. That does actually work too. Yeah, okay, um come out with dragons too. I remember something with Sharon Stone's husband some years back. Oh, I forgot about that, didn't Didn't they dine on her husband's foot? I think so. Yeah. I think they went like a behind the scenes or something and he went to go pett it. Yeah. It just seems like a bad idea. Yeah, I understand it

really scarred him. He's been uh I mean emotionally to the point where he always keeps himself smeared in Komoto experiment, especially on vacation. I guess that's why their relationship didn't work. Yeah. And of course you'll find plenty of cases where um animals of a various form will be more than willing to eat their own dead after they've been killed by another you know species. You know, alligator, crocodile comes across the dead, um, you know, creature of the same species.

It's food, they'll eat it. Number of gavengers, vultures, et cetera. They see the food, they'll eat it. And even you know humans, UM. Throughout throughout history, you have a situations where humans have eaten their own dead in cases of survival cannibalism. UM. Some of those cases are a little controversial, like I've I've read cases for and against the the Donner Party cannibalism thing actually happening, right because there were

no actual witnesses. Yeah, but then you also have the case of the soccer team and Alive UM, and the then the actual events that that movie and book were based on, where you know, they're they're in a horrible situation.

The the these they are these dead bodies, and really, on a very logical level, those bodies are energy and you're in a situation where it's life or death, You're going to consume that energy, right, And I think that's the important thing to think about, is that it really is an extreme conditions right in with humans as it has happened. And in nature, I mean, food is scared, um, but you know you can always look over at someone and say, hmm, it would be a good protein source. Yeah,

And in nature it tends to be a lot. It's a lot more life and death obviously, especially these cases we're looking at in the ocean, where where competition is tremendous. And you know, I think a lot of our our fascination with cannibalism is that it is we we largely a lot of us anyway, live in a time where it's really hard to imagine such a desperate situation, and it's and that would necessitate this kind of return to our primal roots and our basic programming. Yeah, actually, wasn't it.

Ted Turner, who not too long ago warned everybody that we become cannibalists if if we didn't address the global warming situations. That Yeah, yeah, there was. I mean, of course it drew outrage, but it was certainly a way to get people to pay attention to the problem. Oh yeah, I actually, um, yeah, I actually heard that they the Ted's Montana grills. They actually had these these statues of people that they were going to start rolling out in

place of the buffalo. You have that cannibalism things because you know, I mean, Ted's the savvy businesses. So cannibalism becomes a new thing, then Ted's montana grill is gonna pick up on it. Of course that's a brilliant idea. But what about primates. I mean, that's to me, primates and cannibalism is um, that's one of those things I can't help but anthropomorphisize because I think that we look at them and see so much of ourselves in them, and they do cannibalize one another from time to time.

It's um. Especially um with primates, you see some very disturbing acts, you know, and and they're more disturbing because they resemble us more. And um, you know, you'll see you know, see you'll see chimpanzees, even gorillas and orangutans. There are cases where they're you know, suspected of eating their own young. Um. You know, and we've seen plenty of cases of where chimpanzees have have have demonstrated their

capacity for quote unquote cruelty towards other chimpanzees. But will they I know that sometimes when they're fighting that they'll kill each other. But when they're fighting them, don't necessarily eat the body afterward, is that right? Right? Or yeah, not necessarily will they eat it? So it's it's more, um, I guess if they come along a deceased chimpanzee or other type of ape and they actually just eat it. Yeah.

In chimpanzees, typically the males will kill and eat the infant of another female, usually in their own group, but occasionally in another. And when chimps kill adults from other groups in a fight, they don't eat they okay, And I remember this too, that they might eat the infant to um force the chimpanzee into estrus so that they can go ahead and propagate again. Is that right? So the infant may not have been their infant, but they want to go ahead and mate and get the process

rolling right. Um. Now, it's uh, it's interesting when you start looking at especially at at primates eating one another in different cases, you know, throughout history, and that they're confidantly studies arguing for and against the um. You know just how much cannibalism was going on with prehistory, with

you know, prehistoric humans. But anthropologist William R. N's suggest it's simply bad strategy as far as evolution goes, though, like since the under evolutionary theory, we're fuel fueled by that you know, innate desire to see our gene survived, you know, eating another one of your you know, your tribe and your species. That doesn't really make sense, you know, it's just going it's working against our our basic programming.

And uh and and another interesting thing to keep in mind is, uh you know, you may think, well, why don't humans just raise you know, why why don't humans raise humans for food? Right? Or or how how come you don't have you know, cases where um cannibalism becomes a stapable staple of any species diet um. Though, it is worth pointing out that cannibalism can play a huge role in the diet. I think I'm gonna go back

to the scorpions here for a second. There's a nineteen eight study of desert scorpions and they found that cannibals and provided only the fourth most common meal for a scorpion. But in but as far as body mask goes, it was the number one, representing more than of its total food intake. Okay, so so yeah, so in in the case of the scorpion, yes, cannibalism can provide a large part of its diet. But in humans you see a different situation. Yeah, and humans nature does not necessarily like

for us to practice cannibalism. And I think that you can see that pretty well illustrated in the four Tribe, is that right with the carew Yes, Curu is a it's a rare breed of disorder caused by what are called prions, and these are abnormal proteins which induce irregular protein folding in brain cells, and this leads to flawed

brain tissue which results in progressive, incurable brain damage. The word itself, curu means laughing disease in its name because the scientists observed fits of hysterical laughing in those affected. So it's pretty uh, pretty traumatic stuff. Um. And so this is this came on because the tribe was basically

practicing endocannibalism right with the funeral rights. They were consuming the body, which you know isn't because they were looking for a source of protein, but because they there was a way to respect the deceased, to literally absorb them, right. And it's it's interesting this is a case where if you if you start thinking about cannibalism in a very logical you know, energy sort of uh, you know a thing. Then eating one's ancestors does kind of make it makes sense.

It's like a way to honor them. It's like I'm inviting their energy back into me. And uh and that's that's pretty much how would be great? Yes, symbolically it's great. Um, And on a basic energy level, it's it's not bad either. But the thing is, it's kind of it really opens the door for the passage of disease. Right, And so this is sort of like the mad cow equivalent, is

that right? Yes? Yeah, mad cow is a similar disorder as is I'm going to just take a shot at this, uh crewtive fed as Jacob's disease felt Yeah, that sounds good, I did, uh. And this is a human variant of bad cow disease. And they basically, like with the four A, they were basically able to to to wipe out the disease by simply getting them to stop practicing this communal cannibalism, right like literally overnight. Yeah, they got them to to

eradicate this from tried. Yeah. Basically it's like, hey, guys, you know, when you're your family members go stark, raving mad and are laughing at nothing and then die. Well, that comes from the cannibalism, so let's cut that out. What they're like, Well, you know, we weren't too, We weren't that crazy about the cannibalism. We can we can set that aside. Well, I guess it's also in Nate. You're a little bit of a concern for primates too, because they sometimes will consume a body as a group,

spreading potentially a disease, something like hepatitis um. And I did want to add a side note about Bnobo's um, which is an ape, and uh, they're sometimes called the hippie ape because they um are fun loving and they love to mate without discretion. It's like the Key parties in the seventies. They are the venobo along with the humans and the dolphins, only animals that actually enjoy sex. Right, Yeah, so um, hence called the hippie ape. I don't know, Um,

do hippie apes enjoy sex one other? I don't know, but uh, something that was pretty disconcerting is that they were observed pretty recently in the wild to have consumed one of their own. And again, this is the anthropomorphic thing where we look at them when we sell. But they're just peace loving and they just love to have sex with each other. Why are they eating each other? Um?

But they would be a good example of primates um taking the body and eating it, and they actually ate that body for more than seven hours, um, which is a lot longer than they would take on any other body. And some of the people in the group or the individuals, I guess you would say, people, we're actually playing with the food. So um, it's a it's an interesting side note in that, uh, it's an odd occurrence for Bonobo's to be doing that and in the way that they did.

And of course you could extrapolate that it was some sort of uh funeral, right, but then that wouldn't really be correct because if we just don't know what they were doing. But it's also a good example of how

that disease could be transmitted through the group. Now, and it's easy to to fall into the trap of saying, well, then this is a great case of where you know, you know, nature of whore's cannibalism and you know cannibalism of this nature of this you know, community communal cannibalism is just poison um and and you know, maybe maybe

you know, you could still make that case. But I was looking at a two thousand and six University of Virginia study and they found that cannibalism UH is actually only documented as the predominant transmission mode of a disease

in very few species. Um yeah, even even through you know, specific instances of cannibalistic transmission UM that have been noted um Like, basically it The only two cases they found were the prion transmission in humans that we mentioned earlier and a a kind of protozoa based illness in lizards. And if do you think this is because most cannibalism is one on one as opposed to a group situation

like that, the group cannibalism is more an outlier. Um yeah, well yeah, And also I think it's it also comes down to like cannibalism, like, you know, a disease is gonna needs to spread. It's got the same genetic mission as as as any organism, so it needs it needs a road it can count on. Right, So the the idea of some sort of disease depending exclusively on cannibalism, it it largely doesn't make sense. It's just not not

an economic way of going about it. So like so, um, you know, for instance, in the study, in other cases of cannibalistic disease transmission, uh, and there were others alternate disease transmission modes existed. Um. So it's like the you know, hepatitis or something hapitize isn't depending exclusively on group cannibalism to spread. But if that door's open, it'll gladly, gladly take it. Not to personify the illness too much, So

I guess that the talking about not trying to anthropomorphosize. Ultimately, you can't get back around to this question. Aren't we sort of all cannibals on some level or another? Yeah? I mean you know you look at things like, um, you know, anything from a blood transfusion to you know, organ transplant. I mean it's it again kind of comes down to, uh, the the energy uh situation. It's like

we're we're taking energy out and storing it. We're harvesting energy that it can that is otherwise going to be wasted and bringing it back into ourselves. Um. There are a few interesting cases in the in the traditional Chinese medicine where you have what they call tibo. Let's t A I b A. Oh, nothing to do with the martial arts exercise, nothing to do with that. But but this is a particular medicine that involves something UH also referred to as a bortist because it's uh it's harvested

from from fetuses. Um. And this is according to UH Mary Roach in her book Stiff, She goes into this a little and explores this whole chapter on cannibalism UH in the use of materials from corpses in medicine in that book. So highly recommend checking that out. Yeah, and there's regenerative medicine to basically taking tissue to grow new tissue, right, yeah,

so I don't know chew on that. I suppose yes, indeed, so hey, if you want to uh to learn more about this again, check out Josh Clark's article how Cannibalism Works. It's great. It's a multi page feast and you'll want to eat up every page of it and uh it. Come check us out on Twitter and Facebook where you can find us as Blow the Mind and inde And indeed I encourage if you're a fan of the show, check out that Facebook page and click the like button.

UH you'll make us very happy. Yeah, that would be great. And if you've got thoughts on cannibalism, you can also email us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The how stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today on iTunes.