BRAINS!!!!!!

We have a couple of prion scientists at my institute, including a really famous emeritus professor who was the first person to demonstrate that the prion protein was the infectious agent. As a result, I have met the lead author of the study in the article, John Collinge, many times and even had dinner with him (not brains). He is a fascinating guy to talk with, as he actually goes to the Fore in Papua and interacts with the (formerly) cannibalistic tribes to collect family histories and samples and such. His many trips there have made him a bit of an anthropologist as well as an infectious disease scientist, and his stories of the people of the Fore are really interesting. The people who live there are often geogrpahically separated by rivers and ravines from neighboring villages, to the point that they have zero idea what goes on outside of their village and each little village will have a unique language, religious practices, social norms and the like. The people of the Fore also lack a proper chronological calendar and measure things as time elapsed from big events. Like someone might tell you there age as 12 seasons since the big flood, and the events used for record keeping change as new big events happen, so old people can't really tell there age exactly. They may tell you they were born the year of the big earthquake, but no one knows what year that was, or how to convert the current year back through the many events used to keep time. The reference events change from village to village, making determining dates and ages impossible. They just don't need to keep track of these things, so they don't.

The brain eating thing isn't like the classic vision of cannibals catching and eating outsiders, but rather part of a common religious belief that eating the brains of your ancestors imparts you with wisdom. So, it is more a funerary practice than any crazy hunting humans for meat kind of thing. I believe it is mostly women and children that do the brain eating stuff. Well, DID the brain eating, as this practice hasn't been a thing for a while there.
 
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i seem to remember reading that HIV was first introduced to humans because the humans were eating a particular monkey's brains as a delicacy, not realizing the monkey carried that virus.
 
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