[Intro Music]
Welcome listeners to yet another unsettling episode of Beyond the Unknown. I’m your host Joli, and I’m Quinn, and today, we’re going to talk about a mystery that caused the steady decline in women until near extinction for one tribe in Papaua New Guinea. Today we’re talking about that mysterious thing which is now called Kuru.
[Transition Music]
Ok guys, we’ve have a new theme we’re testing out if you can't tell by the title. Morbid. It’s a chance for me to tell more stories that don’t necessarily fit the haunted or murder theme but are still creepy as hell and stay true to the vibes we want to bring.
Ok so today we’re talking about a native tribe in Papua New Guinea called the Fore people. For those unacquainted with a map or spinning globe, Papua New Guinea is North to North East of Australia. It’s actually way closer than I expected, at least from like the northern tip of Australia to the most southern part of Papua New Guinea.
Wanna guess how close in Kilometres?
Quinn: Real guess
Joli: It’s around 4.3km away. However, the part that is the closest to Australia is not where the Fore people live that we’re going to talk about today. They live in the Eastern Highlands Province between two mountains, Mount Kabangama and Mount Piora.
And before I jump into the story I need to share more about Papua New Guinea because I learned so much while researching this story that truly surprised me.
Papua New Guinea is apparently the most linguistically diverse country in the world, where there are around 840 spoken languages in the country. These are languages and not dialects either. They have four official languages: Tok Pisin, English, Hiri Motu, and Papua New Guinea Sign Language. Isn’t that cool that sign language made it to one of their official languages?
Ok, now back to the main story. We’re talking about The Fore tribe, a group of around 20,000 people today that live in an isolated and mountainous region of the country. This tribe has a basic economy and support themselves by hunting, gathering, and slash-and-burn style farming.
Do you know what slash and burn farming is?
Quinn: Real response
Joli: I didn’t know what this was when I first heard it but I do remember learning about this a long time ago in school. It’s when farmers burn crops after a few years when the soil becomes less fertile. And the reason why they burn their crops is because it creates a really nutrient rich ash layer that will be absorbed over time, so in a few years they can reuse that area to grow again. Apparently this is sustainable but only for smaller isolated groups but not large populations. Makes sense, could you imagine a quarter of North America would be on fire.
So until the 1930’s, the Fore people were pretty isolated from not only others within the country but also foreigners. That is, until the gold rush.
In the late 1800’s people identified that Papua New Guinea had gold because they found particles within old pottery. So naturally, people started to flock to the country in search of gold and in the 1930’s is when it blew up, and around 1 million people were living within the Highlands area.
Just a side fact since I'm full of them today - Papua New Guinea is the 18th largest gold producer in the world, producing over 50 metric tonnes of gold. So like 50,000 pounds of gold, or 7 elephants.
By the 1950s, over 20 years into this gold rush, people became more interested in the local culture and tribes. So, researchers started to visit to the highlands to learn more about these groups and document their findings. One tribe, the Fore people, had a population at the time of about 11,000 people which was amazing, however something peculiar was happening to the tribe where 200 people a year were dying of an unknown illness.
The illness presented itself with muscle twitching, loss of coordination, and severe mood changes, where one moment the person would be calm but almost lifeless, the next they’re hysterically laughing. Once someone started to present these symptoms, the people knew that death loomed near, as people would typically die within the year of showing symptoms. And no herbal medicines or rituals seemed to help.
And the weirdest part that researchers were stumped by, was that this disproportionately affected the women of the tribe.
This caught the attention of an American virologist and physician, Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who wanted to understand if a virus was at play. So he started to investigate potential causes common to other cases he’s studies like contaminated drinking water, food, or genetic conditions that have been passed down. But his investigations couldn’t identify a particular issue.
That is until he dug deeper into understanding the Fore people’s cultural practices, specifically their funerary rituals. And what he learned was, well, shocking to say the least. Because he learned that the Fore people would cannibalize their dead…
This practice of eating their loved ones wasn’t out of necessity. Like I mentioned earlier, they were self sustaining through hunting and growing crops. Instead, they consumed the dead because they believed they were giving their loved ones a safer place to rest, rather than being buried and eaten by maggots and also that they were freeing their spirit by giving them a way to carry on through them.
This practice of endo-cannibalism was practiced tribe-wide by both men and women, however because of cultural practices women typically consumed more often, because the men were involved in other forms of funeral practices like praying or burying the bones.
Unknown to the Fore people, when they ate their loved ones, they were contracting a form of prions disease when consuming infected brains. And since women were more commonly the ones to eat this as part of the ritual, it was infecting and killing them at a much faster rate than their male counterparts.
So, what is prions disease. Do you know, Quinn?
Quinn: Explains?
Joli: It’s when the proteins of the brain start to mis-fold, causing neuro degeneration, which starts with tremors and loss of coordination, and leads to the inability to eat which causes malnutrition, and subsequently death.
Kuru, just like other forms of prions disease, cannot be stopped by cooking their food, just like mad cows disease, which is also a form of prions disease. So, undercooked or raw human isn’t the cause. In fact, the Fore people did cook the meat before they consume it. The real issue is that these prions were present and consumed. And to top it off, there’s no known cure for it, even to this day.
If someone contracts Kuru, they can only be given treatment to manage symptoms and to improve their quality of life for as long as possible, but their neurological functions are still on a steady decline. So prevention is the only cure in a way.
So to stop the transmission of Kuru within the Fore tribe, he needed to educate them on the dangers of their funerary customs and try to stop the Fore people from eating their dead. And that he did.
Today, Kuru is super rare. For the most part, this practice was stopped in the 1960’s because of Dr. Gadjusek, but it lingered for over 30 years because the disease has a long incubation period which could last for decades before symptoms appeared.
For his groundbreaking work on kuru and prion diseases, Dr. Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1976, sharing it with Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.
So, there you have it. The mysterious Kuru epidemic caused by endocannibalism that almost eradicated the females within the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea until the 1960’s.
If you’re interested in learning the details of their funerary practices, I strongly recommend the paper that’s linked in our show notes. It’s a paper by Whitfield, Pako, Collinge, and Alpers called Mortuary rites of the South Fore and Kuru. It goes into so much detail about their beliefs on the four souls they think we have and their multi-day rituals. It’s super interesting. For time sake, I gave the most extreme Coles notes version I could. So definitely give it a read if you’re curious.
[Outro]
Quinn: Thank you for joining us for another episode of "Beyond the Unknown." If you have a story you’d like to share, please email us at moody.mediaprod@gmail.com. You can reach out on our website, and who knows, your story might be featured in our next episode.
Joli: All of our sources for this episode can be found on our website: beyondtheunknownpod.com.
And don’t forget, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review.
Quinn: Until next time, listeners. Stay curious and remember that the unknown is always just beyond the shadows.
Both: BYEEEE
