Perhaps Hannibal Lecter was just trying to ward off dementia.
A tribe in Papua New Guinea has developed a gene that’s resistant to degenerative brain diseases – after years of eating their dead.
Women and children of the tribe, called the Fore, used to eat their deceased relatives’ brains at funerals as a sign of respect. Eating brains left members of the tribe regularly afflicted with a mad cow-like disease called kuru. At the epidemic’s peak during the 1950s, at which point the tradition of eating their dead was banned, the disease claimed 2% of the population per year.
But now, a new study by Nature Publishing Group observes that those years of cannibalism led the Fore to develop a gene that’s resistant to prions, the kuru-causing proteins that rip through its victims’ brains. They’re linked to other degenerative illnesses such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
“This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans,” John Collinge, who co-led the study, told Reuters.
The findings are expected to be key in furthering the understanding and treatment of such devastating diseases.
Currently, about 47.5 million people are living with dementia, according to the World Health Organization. That number is expected to triple to 135.5 million by 2050.