===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network.

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're going to sink our teeth into a topic we've tasted before, but not yet made a meal of. I'm talking, of course, about cannibalism, one of the most taboo taboos up there with touching kids and loving Die Hard 2 more than Die Hard 1.

Okay, those seem equal footing.

It's the territory of serial killers, of cults, of horror movies, of barbarians, of the desperate and the damned. Rumors of cannibalism are so taboo that they've been used as a way to demonize and vilify different groups of people all around the world. There's a lot here. It's a chewy conversation and one we're dying to have. So take a seat at our table. Dinner is served.

Now it is time for Time for Scared All The Time.

Holy shit, guys. Welcome back to the show. Ed and I wanna kick off housekeeping with just a quick reminder to go and support the podcast if you can to sign up for our premium. We've got lots of good rewards coming out this month and we're having a lot of fun over there, so sign up if you haven't.

Yeah, the live shows are getting better and better too, in the sense that they're more fun, like fun for everyone and not just like a mini episode.

Yeah, we've only done two, so we gotta warm up a little bit. We gotta figure out what works live as opposed to what works recorded, but yeah, we're having a ton of fun. This last one was very interactive and I think we're gonna keep it that way because it's way more fun than us just basically doing a live show and not being interactive. Speaking of interacting, we went to Monster Fest in Canton, Ohio and had one of the best weekends of our lives.

It was definitely fun.

Well, maybe Ed's life is more exciting than mine. I loved it. It was so cool to hang out in a room, not just with fans of our show, but to hang out in a hotel with ghost hunters, monster hunters, psychics, maybe some skeptics, although I didn't meet any, but they might have been there too. Yeah, it was an incredible time. We met so many fans, so many cool people, so many booths. We went on a 1 a.m. ghost tour of the Hotel Basement with the XV Planis podcast and a super eager security guard. He photocopied old blueprints of the hotel from when it was still the McKinley Grand. And I don't think he was part of the convention. I think he was just a security guy who worked at the hotel who was excited about it.

He was like, hell yeah, let's go. And I wouldn't even say it's a ghost tour. It just kind of felt like a ghost hunt, if anything. Like it didn't.

Sure.

It was very little in the form of, I guess there was some touring. We had some documentation, but it was really just about John and those guys just being like, you wanna do this? Get real hands on. So that was awesome.

Yeah, they gave, we went down there. They put a Geiger counter in my hand and what, an EMF measure in your hand or something?

Something like that, yeah.

Yeah, we're gonna get better at these terms because no dates, no promises, nothing imminent, but we are gonna try to do at least one.

Crossover with them.

Crossover with XP Plantis and go on an investigation somewhere. They're on the East Coast and we're on the West Coast, so it's a little bit tricky to plan, but we're trying to figure some stuff out because I think that would be so fun. And if it's anything like the hour we spent in the basement of that hotel, it'll be another great weekend to remember. So thank you to everybody who came out. Ed, did you have any particular moments that stood out for you?

I mean, obviously doing the live show with Scott and Forrest was a lot of fun. I get nervous at those types of things. So, you know, that's something to get through, but it was great seeing everybody. I mean, really that show was a lot of fun, but more, I think for me, it was just, you know, about meeting the fans, you know, our four fans. Thank you for coming. No, like meeting the fans. And then like, it was really cool that a lot of them had their families. So it was nice to see that families were out doing things together and we'll give like proper shout outs. We're gonna do like a blog post, I think, about like really laying out our experience and we'll do like proper shout outs when we have everyone's name in front of us and stuff.

I know there were a couple of people who posted to the Facebook group that they were like nervous to say hi to us. Ed and I are like zoo animals. We are much more afraid of you than you are of us. So please, please come say hi. We don't bite. We just wanna hang out and have a good time. That's our whole vibe.

Yeah, it was really just a super enjoyable weekend and we're so thankful for Scott and Forrest and Astonished Legends for like telling us to come out and having us hang and giving us a spot at their table. And it was really, really rad, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And we're gonna, for anyone who is a fan in LA, we are working on possibly doing an LA convention as well or anyone who's within driving distance of LA that feels like coming out, but more on that in a few weeks. In the meantime, we should wrap up our Monsterfest recap with a kind of spooky story.

So kind of a crazy call we got in the drive home.

Yeah, so we went on this ghost hunt, and there's lots of lore around ghost hunts of hitchhikers, ghost energies that follow you back. So we didn't experience any of that, but driving back from Ohio to Connecticut, Scott Philbrook from Astonishing Legends blows up Ed's phone. And he'd been on the phone with the hotel figuring out, I don't know, some hotel stuff. And the hotel asked him, hey, those guys, the Scared All The Time guys, what time did they check out of their room? And Ed was like, I don't know, like 9, 9.30?

Because he was like, oh, it was 9, 9.30. And they were like, oh, okay, thank you. And then we're weird about it. And he was like, why? And they're like, no reason. And they got off the phone. And so now I'm sure Scott's like, what do they do to embarrass the show, the brand with the fucking idiots? You know, because they wouldn't tell him.

Yeah, we took shits on the floor. We were like, we're rock stars now, baby.

So I was like, oh, geez. So he told us that when he was calling to be like, that was a weird call. And they were like, well, cool. And we talked about some other podcast business. And then he left. And then like what, like an hour later, we get another call from Scott.

Yeah, we get another call from Scott. And he's like, hey, so the reason they were asking is because when housekeeping opened the door, there was an old man sitting at the desk in your room. And apparently housekeeping freaked out, left. And then when they went back, of course, the guy was gone.

No one saw him leave, they said.

No one saw him leave. No one saw him go in. No one saw him leave. He was just an old man sitting at the desk in our room. So we were either, Ed and I talked about this the rest of the way back in Ohio.

Well, for a huge portion, yeah.

Yeah, we were either haunted. There was either a ghost that we brought back with us from the basement.

And I was drunk enough to not notice a ghost on me.

By the time we got back to that room, we could have brought an elephant back with us. And I'm not sure either of us would have noticed. But we were either haunted or frogged. We may have been frogged.

Yeah, that old man could have been in the closet the whole time.

He could not have been under the beds because when I was cleaning some stuff up, I noticed I checked under the bed to make sure I didn't leave anything. And you couldn't go under the beds. There were like wooden slats or whatever. So he couldn't have been under the bed. He definitely wasn't in the bathroom, but there was a closet that we never opened. So I guess at some point he could have frogged into the closet. I don't know. It's very weird. I'm now back in LA and I have not seen an old man in my apartment. So hopefully if he was a hitchhiker, I hope we left him at the McKinley Grand and we love you, man. Whatever you're getting up to, keep it cool.

Yeah, RIP, God bless.

RIP, God bless.

But if it was a regular guy and if he took the tip I left for housekeeping, I'll be pissed.

Yeah, fuck off. If that happened.

Then we hope you fucking become a ghost tonight. Piece of shit.

So yeah, what a weekend.

Oh, I have one more shout out before we hit start this episode. The craziest, like we got tagged in the craziest, not crazy in a crazy person way, but like.

Crazy in a cool person way.

Crazy in a cool person way. We got tagged, somebody made a physical fear tier.

Yes.

That they put a ton of work into. Like there's drawings, all the episodes up to that point.

Yes.

Are like established and they have their own drawings. And there was all these different categories that are awesome. And it was just like, holy shit. So we reached out to them being like, this rules, but they never heard back. So hopefully they got those. And if they didn't, and they obviously listened to the show. So if they're hearing this now, huge shout out to you. Feel free to hit us up anytime. What a cool thing to have done. And we'll get your permission soon and then put it on the blog post.

I've got their name here. It's at loaded underscore Lexicon, RJA.

Okay, well, thanks again, loaded underscore Lexicon. Fucking, it rules. It's so, so cool. And way to just do it, because we probably would never have.

Yeah, the bar for fan art has now been set very high and we expect the rest of you to clear it.

So fucking high. Yeah, get working.

Get to it.

Right now.

So yeah, I think that's pretty much it. It was a great time. And yeah, I mean, other random stuff. Merch store online coming soon. We sold some shirts, we had some bags at the event, but we're gonna have a store up for you to buy those off the internet. And we'll still be, Ed will still be making them all by hand.

Yeah, that's my lot in life.

Yeah, so awesome. We're gonna do more live stuff as much as we can. We're working on ways to get out, see people. It was a great weekend. We love you guys. Thanks for listening. Sign up for premium. And without further ado, let's take a bite out of crime.

Yeah, this episode's really fun. I like this. It's pretty dense in the sense that it's got science, but I liked it a lot recording this episode.

Yeah, me too. Cannibalism, part one. Here we go. So Ed, I take it you've probably never tasted the sweet chew of human flesh.

I don't think I'm wealthy enough.

Well, in the interest of full transparency, I haven't either. I'm also not wealthy enough, which is why I was kind of hoping you would say yes, just to keep this interesting.

Shit, I mean, honestly, I think I'd try it.

I mean, right?

I shouldn't say honestly, but I mean, like, who knows if we've ever, you know how long McDonald's was selling horse meat without people knowing?

Yeah.

Like, for all we know, we've eaten humans.

Yeah, well, and as we will soon learn by the end of this episode, we would be in a pretty good, well, maybe not good, but pretty common company, more common than you might think.

Sure.

Maybe someday we could have a cannibal on the show because I have a lot of questions about, like, what is it that's so alluring? I assume it's at least partially taste.

I don't know, it can't be taste. It can't be taste, because you don't know what it tastes like until you do it, so it can't just, it's gotta just be curiosity. Are any of the guys, are any of the people from Alive, like that rugby team still with us?

Do you mean are any of the guys from Alive alive? Some of them might be, I don't know.

Yeah, we can try and get them on. Try and get them on the show.

We should. Well, maybe this is an easier question to answer. Cannibalism, does it break the social contract?

Yes.

Okay, a resounding yes.

Unless it's a situation like your plane goes down in the Himalayas or something and it's cold, and then everybody says, hey, if I go first, just eat me, it's fine. It's a survival thing. Then I think that there's no wrong. No wrong was done there. But I think if you're that dude in Berlin or whatever, or you're just somebody, I don't know. It's weird. It's, I don't even know if it's a moral issue. I think we're just, it's the ultimate social contract, I guess, just to don't eat people.

Well, it is. And I suspect that as we get deeper into this episode, well, I don't suspect, spoiler guys, I researched this whole show and know what's happening before I get there. But it's interesting because for as much as we would consider cannibalism in the modern day being like the ultimate breach of the social contract.

But also like actual breach of laws.

That's true, that's true.

There's gotta be something on the books that says you can't eat your neighbor.

That too.

Besides the like fucking Ten Commandments or whatever. That's one of the commandments, right? Don't eat your neighbor.

Well, we get into that too. In a Catholic church, you know, the consumption of human flesh is part of the conversation.

Oh yeah, that's a big part of it.

What I was gonna say is, while in the present day, we would consider the act of cannibalism to be the ultimate breach of the social contract. In the past, there were times in places around the world where cannibalism actually served to reinforce the social contract. But we've got a lot to get to before we get to that. So a heads up for our more squeamish listeners. We are going to explore this topic loosely from least gross to most gross. So you'll get plenty of off-ramps in places to tap out if you start to be like, nah, I'm good. I don't need to hear more about cannibalism than this. Although I would recommend that you, of course, listen to the whole episode. And for the gore hounds, that means hold tight. You gotta eat your vegetables first before you get to the people. So to start off, I think it's worth noting for the uninitiated and the non-flesh hungry that the word cannibalism doesn't apply exclusively to humans eating humans. Although that's how it's portrayed in popular culture most often. The word, the term cannibalism, does describe any species feasting on its own kind. And as off-putting as we find the practice in humans, cannibalism is not really all that unusual in the natural world. It's been documented in over 1,500 different species with some species of fish being the leading culprits.

The leaders.

The leaders, the hungriest for themselves are mosquito fish.

Oh wow.

According to a study from 2022, mosquito fish have a cannibalism rate of 0.3%, which doesn't really seem all that high to me.

Yeah, I'll take that unemployment rate.

Yeah, they noted that that's only 35 out of the 11,000 fish that they observed, but I guess it's relatively high compared to rates of cannibalism in other species. We'll probably never know the rate of cannibalism in humans because most people are going to keep that shit to themselves, but I assume in the past more than 35 out of 11,000 people must have chowed down on each other.

Oh yeah, 100%.

Maybe naturally the mosquito fish is the most cannibalistic animal, but I feel like once you involve culture the way we did, that rate skyrockets in people. The scientists who study cannibalism in nature ascribe the practice to competition for resources and usually only see it happening in environments where there is very little food. I think one of the weird things that I stumbled across is that a lack of predators can actually increase rates of cannibalism in different species because fewer predators means a higher population spike and a population spike means more competition for resources, which leads to increased instances of cannibalism within whatever particular group of animals you're studying or looking at.

Interesting. So the free market leads to cannibalism.

I mean, look, you said it. You said it, not me. Interestingly, and this I don't think I actually, like I knew that animals eat each other. That wasn't like mind boggling to me, but I was pretty fascinated to find out that cannibalism is not restricted to carnivorous or even omnivorous species of animals. It also occurs in herbivores and detritivores, which are like worms and bugs that feed on decaying matter usually. When any species gets desperate enough, it apparently will find nutrition wherever it can. In my research, I found hippos have been found to scavenge each other's flesh when faced with starvation.

I mean, they're pretty famously hungry, hungry, so I'm not surprised that they would do shit like this.

Yeah. Prairie dogs have been observed raiding each other's dens and even tearing into their own siblings. Scientists theorize that that was possibly in the times that that's been observed that it is a way to decrease competition for resources. And rat snakes have been known to try eating themselves, which is auto cannibalism.

Wow.

And I assume must be the snake eating its own tail.

That's what I was thinking, as soon as you said it, I thought of it, and then the same as you did, I go, what is that called? I guess I'll have to just describe it, that's what you did. Because neither of us I think know what that, it has a term, it's a term, that symbol, that logo has a term.

The Ouroboros?

That sounds right, that sounds right enough.

I think so. We'll get an email calling us dumb if that's wrong.

Oh, so this is actually maybe a good spot to put this because you know, kind of catch people off guard with show information. Someone did email recently that, I haven't gotten back to them. So by the time they hear this, they'll probably have gotten back from us.

Why are we, we're awful at getting back to emails. You guys, we read the emails.

Email is the one, we're great on social, but like we're pretty good on social media, but emails has been tough. That said, someone emailed, or at least I saw the headline, they didn't know how to find the show notes. So maybe we should just tell people, the show notes are in the description. So we're gonna put, if we're gonna put a snake eating itself in the show notes, you can just go to the description of the episode on whatever app you're listening to and there's a link to the show notes. It's like a Google Drive link. But since there's some, I don't know, element of difficulty, maybe we will implement it on the website as well.

We should, because I put way too much time into making the show notes funny for no one to be reading them.

Turns out people can't even find it. I write all my best jokes, I put them in a bottle and throw them in the ocean. That's, I hope people see how good this is.

It's about the sense of personal satisfaction, whether or not anyone ever sees it.

Go get your puns. If you can't find the show notes in the description of each episode, then maybe soon there will be a tab on the website for all of Chris's portmanteaus and shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So anyway, this has been Tech Trivia. That's a Tech Trivia corner.

Biddy, biddy, biddy, biddy.

And now we will leave Tech Trivia corner, return to the center of the Cannibalism ballroom.

Yep, and we're returning to this ballroom to find it filled with caterpillars.

Go back to the corner, go back to the corner.

I found a study in a National Geographic article that I think is super interesting. The National Geographic article discusses a study that was published in Nature, Ecology and Evolution, which is a scientific journal. And it found that when some plants are under attack from hungry, hungry caterpillars, they emit defenses that make themselves taste awful to the caterpillars, which then spurs the caterpillars to eat each other.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. That's more going on with whatever this pheromone is than just makes them itchy.

I mean, if you asked me to name the least cannibalistic species I could think of, I probably would have come up with caterpillar. They're not an animal I think of as eating each other, but they do. John Orrock, the author of the study and a researcher in the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said, plants can defend themselves so much that they food stress the herbivore. And then the herbivore is determined that rather than have plants on their menu, they should have caterpillars at the top of the menu. The way that they did this was that they sprayed tomato plants with methyl jasmineate, which I guess I'm not a gardener, but apparently it's a substance that plants produce in response to environmental stresses. And spraying the plants with this triggered the plant's defense mechanisms. And when that happens, the plant changes its chemistry and becomes less appetizing to the beet armyworm caterpillars that were the center of the study. And Oroch summed up the choice the caterpillars have as you can either eat this plant or you can turn on your comrades. The choice is clear.

Okay, so this is like a controlled study where they have like a glass case with just a plant and some caterpillars. So the caterpillar can't be like, this tree became gross. Let's mosey on down the forest to a new thing. There are options where glass wall, they can't get out, tree or each other.

Yeah, and it actually noted that in this experiment, the caterpillars were not given the option to try another plant before resorting to cannibalism, which sounds like a sick fuck move to be like, well, in reality.

This is Jigsaw's lab.

Yeah, truly. What do these caterpillars do to Oroch's family?

I don't know, something.

John Oroch.

John, come on, man.

They are conducting research apparently in larger settings where the caterpillars are given a choice to move on to plants before eating each other, which I sort of feel like should have been the first study.

Yeah, but you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and give you a spoiler alert. They're gonna go to the other plant. Like they're not just gonna immediately start, unless the plant gives you, what was that movie, The Crazies? Unless it gives you like some sort of like, hits you with that pheromone that just makes you insane. I think they're gonna be like, let's try a few more plants.

Well, the study's not complete, but the article did say that even in this new setting, the cannibalism trends appear to be similar. The quote from Oroch's research partner was, even with the capacity to disperse a little bit further and especially escape your hungry buddies, they do end up consuming each other with the same sort of patterns. And they did also note in the article that the caterpillars that consumed the plants and the caterpillars that consumed each other grew at the same rate. So they were able to compensate, like eating each other didn't provide, it wasn't like a biological deficit or failure or anything, like it nutritionally served its purpose.

I mean, that's pretty good. It's hard enough to get protein in your diet.

It's true.

You're supposed to eat like your body weight and protein every day basically. And it's insane. I don't know, it's why people resort to protein shakes, but I guess it's better than resorting to cannibalism.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and then the last quote from this article that made me chuckle was, as you can imagine, this is something we've sort of switched gears and has become a top priority. So we're in the process of actually evaluating that data right now. A top priority. Yeah, what? My God, the caterpillars can't stop eating each other. This is a top priority. Put your best men on it.

Put your best fucking people on this, dude. Also, who wants to come over? We're gonna watch these cowpeppers eat each other. It's kind of funny. It just quickly devolves into like a weird party, a hedonistic party. They're all drinking wine, betting on cowpeppers eating each other.

Yeah, someone breaks the glass and they all start screaming and running because the caterpillars are loose. I couldn't leave the section of the natural cannibalism show without dropping some frog knowledge. So there are frogs that eat each other. A couple different ways that this happens. Cane toads, which is the one that came to mind when I was researching animal cannibals. And this fact was kicking around in my head somewhere. And sure, cane toads are not technically frogs, but close enough for Chris' frog corner for this episode.

Most rooms have four corners, so we got room for two more after this, so don't worry. Let's go to frog corner.

That's true, we've got frog corner, toad corner, tadpole corner, and then I guess choose your own amphibian corner. It's the last, whatever you like, salamanders, newts.

That's a trick, by the way. Take your newt-loving ass down the fucking road if you love newts.

Kantoes have been found to not only eat their own egg clutches, but they actually do prefer their own eggs to the eggs of other species of amphibians. That has also, that's been studied in labs, much like the caterpillars, and no one's sure why, but the kantoes, the thing that I like the most, or the kind of cruelest thing that they do, is they perform this cruel trick on baby toads, where when there's all these baby toads popping around, the kantoes will wiggle their toes to simulate prey, and when the toadlets hop over to check out the prey, the grown kantoes will eat them.

What? Okay, they're not simulating prey, they fucking are prey.

Well, no, the-

I'm sorry, predators, I'm sorry.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, I just, I got those two mixed up.

Hey, it happens. Don't get it mixed up in the wild, though. Keep it straight when you're out in the woods. Remember which is predator, which is prey.

Starbird, port, got it.

Yeah. I was also pretty sure somewhere in the back of my head that there was some dumb fact about tadpoles being cannibals, so I dug into that too, and it turns out there's a pretty recent study out of Canada that tried to get to the bottom of why wood frog tadpoles specifically resort to cannibalism. So there's this article in Scientific American about it, and according to Scientific American, quote, researchers based at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada wondered whether cannibalism was the most nutritious dietary option for tadpoles. Pause, right there. For as much as I love frogs, I don't know. Again, everyone who's investigating this cannibalism is trying to frame it scientifically, but it just seems, who's sitting there being like, you know, is cannibalism the most nutritious dietary option for tadpoles? Let's find out.

Yeah, and is that the most important question?

True.

I mean, it seems like they're putting top people on it, but it is.

Top people.

But it's also like, I don't know. Remember you used to put reports in those like plastic sleeves when we were kids, like book reports and stuff? If you sent me like a plastic sleeve, you know, six page document that was like why we think cannibalism in the tadpole community may or may not be the most nutritious, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'd be like, you're not getting any grant money for this. This is ridiculous. Go back and get literally any other idea. Like we're not gonna, you don't get to fuck, that's just stupid. Get out of here, idiot. Hard cut to huge fans of the show and now they hate us.

Yeah, even if you gave me that report right in the trash, don't care, don't care.

Oh, I would save the plastic.

Sure, right. I mean, you can.

I'm not made of money. I made my own report.

Come on, yeah, you could use that plastic to guard, you know, your shins maybe if you're in a fight or flight scenario. There's all kinds of things.

Plastic is, it's not like we have a lot of it.

Okay, so the researchers thought that this would make sense that cannibalism would be the most nutritious dietary option for tadpoles because theoretically, the meat of one's own species should contain vitamins and nutrients in quantities well suited for an individual's physiology. And I guess I would say, maybe these folks read The Caterpillar Report and it would seem that the caterpillars that ate each other did well. So I guess it's not a completely out there thought.

Well, two things. One, The Caterpillar Report definitely sounds like a red herring in like a law movie, like a Michael Crichton law novel about like, it's like, oh, so you've seen The Caterpillar Report? No, well, I haven't personally seen The Caterpillar Report. Not my time with this witness has done, but like, it's just, you know, it's to be like the heart of like, the Caterpillar Report goes higher than we ever thought it would, but that's one.

Okay, noted, noted.

And then two, don't babies like feed off the nutrients of the mother? Like they take all the shit that, you know, you gotta eat right or something, and then the babies, in utero I'm saying.

Sure.

Like they take your vitamins, they take your shit.

That's what the umbilical cord's for, right? Isn't that where they get through?

I think that might be, I don't know. We're both childless by choice. So I never had to learn this. And I went to Catholic schools. They don't fucking.

And some babies, don't they?

Twins eat each other?

Yeah, they eat each other.

I think that might just be in movies.

I don't know if that's true. That's probably not a real thing.

But I'm saying if you extrapolate that and really make it a point to nitpick, then I guess babies are cannibals in the sense that they get their nutrition from another human. So babies are siphoning part of a human.

Yes.

So write in, write in if you have a baby, write in if you've ever read a book. I don't know. We don't fucking know.

Has your baby ever chewed on you outside of the womb for nutrients? Has your child ever looked up at you and said, any species that's the same as your own would theoretically be an ideal diet because they're going to contain all the nutrients you require.

Hold on, wait, I'm pulling that plastic covered report out of my trash can right now. Oh, Dr. Baby. It was Dr. Baby wrote it. Shit.

Well, according to the article, to determine whether or not tadpoles preferentially eat tadpole meat over other food sources, the team conducted a series of feeding experiments in which they offered the animals different combinations of frozen brine shrimp meat, corn meal, tadpole meat, or no food at all, which I would say, your first problem here is those are all disgusting choices of food. I guess maybe tadpoles would feel differently, but that's not selling any tickets to anyone else.

And what do you guys do in this lab? We basically reenact fear factor, but with like not, like with tiny species. We give them a bunch of shit options and then maybe they could win some prize money. But then at the end, we take away the prize money.

And would you believe we get paid for this?

Yeah, by fucking government grants.

Yeah, this is what the guy, Matthew Lesko, the guy that wore the question mark suit, would be like, do you know what kind of sources of money?

Oh my God.

These guys saw that and they were like, do tadpoles eat each other?

I forgot about the fucking, he was always like walking in like the fucking Washington DC mall, like by the reflecting pool. And he had that crazy like Riddler suit.

Yeah, well his whole thing was like how to get obscure government grant money. Like that was the gig.

It's not the hero we need, it's the hero we deserve.

I wish these tadpoles had the hero Matthew Lesko because they got trapped and forced to eat each other instead. In the wild, the study says, tadpoles may choose to eat algae or other smaller aquatic animals when not feeding on each other. And again, what are we talking about here? It says when not feeding on each other as if tadpoles are often eating each other. And I don't think they eat each other that often.

Well, we don't know. I mean, we should get past this because people are gonna realize how little we do know. Especially since you like fucking big-timed everyone in the beginning being like, hey, by the way, I researched all this. And now it seems like we have no knowledge of anything.

Well, I researched this article that seems like it's selling me some bullshit, but you know what? Maybe it's the fear-mongering media. They're stoking fears of frog cannibalism day and night.

These are the streets of San Francisco is tadpole cannibalism every night. I mean, that place is, it has gone downhill, but I don't think there's tadpole cannibalism.

No, no. The team found that tadpoles consumed tadpole meat under conditions of starvation and when competition for food was high due to the presence of other tadpoles, but otherwise, the animals chose alternative food sources. They preferred brine shrimp over cornmeal and tended to grow and develop faster when fed brine shrimp versus tadpole meat, so.

Yeah, they sleep better because they're not up all night thinking about what they just did. Yeah, give me that brine shrimp or whatever. I'll sleep like a baby. If I have to eat another sibling, I might just fucking be anxious all the time.

Throw myself up on the dry land before my legs have developed. The study concluded that tadpole cannibalism, like much cannibalism in nature, is driven by competition for resources. And it also leads to the spread of pathogens throughout groups of tadpoles. That's because members of the same species are susceptible to the same set of pathogens, whereas more distantly related species often cannot catch those types of infections, which is how you get rumors about Hillary Clinton being a cannibal and having Kuru disease, which I think is a cannibalism part two topic.

Oh, shit, like knock on effects of being a cannibal?

Yeah, and there's a movie too. I forget if it's Wrong Turn or... There's a cannibalism movie where they figure out who was eating human meat because they all-

Had jaundice.

Have this degenerative brain disease.

Oh, wow.

Ravenous, maybe?

Sounds like a title for what? That could be a plot point.

Yeah.

It's a good movie?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I can't remember if Kuru's in it or not, but it's a good movie.

Did you ever find out if Joe Biden's grandpa was a cannibal or whatever the hell I was told before we started recording?

No, I should have looked that up. So Ed's dad, shout out Ed's dad, told Ed that Joe Biden's grandfather was a cannibal?

Or that he lied about it.

Okay.

That he lied about being eaten by cannibals or something. That like, I don't know, we did no research and here we are, we're gonna get in trouble for even saying it. But yeah, I guess it was something about like, Joe Biden, probably just confused as per usual, was like, oh, my grandpa was a, well, he fucking landed on an island that he was eaten by cannibals.

Oh, okay, hold on, hold on. So I did, I just looked this up because, you know, we can't just breeze past the idea that the president of the United States is a cannibal.

No, he's not, now you've really collapsed the story. He might've had a family member eaten by cannibals, but it sounded like it was complete bullshit and it might've all just been baloney.

Malarkey?

Yeah, it was a bunch of malarkey, yeah.

Listen here, Jack, it's a bunch of malarkey. On April 17th, 2024, the AP reported that President Joe Biden misstated key details about his uncle's death in World War II as he honored the man's wartime service.

What did I say, grandpa?

Grandfather, so that would have been like the War of 1812. This guy, check this name out, Ambrose J.

Finnegan Jr. That's a good name.

Which is the most like old-timey pilot name or whatever.

Yeah, he's flying with a Guinness in his hand.

Yeah, so he's the brother of Joe Biden's mother, got shot down in New Guinea, and the president said Finnegan's body was never recovered and quote, there used to be a lot of cannibals in the area. And Biden, who also relayed a version of the story early in the day was often the particulars, the US government's record of missing service members does not attribute Ambrose J. Finnegan Jr.'s death to hostile action or indicate cannibals were any factor. So.

RIP, God bless Biden's uncle.

RIP, God bless Biden's uncle. I'm sure he was a great guy and.

And we'll never know how he met his demise.

We'll never know what happened to him, yeah.

Yeah.

But, okay, enough about Tadpole Cannibalism. That is-

Yeah, it's boring, and they are dumb.

That's not why you hit play on this episode. You want the gross stuff. And that's okay, we do too. But, you know, this show, if nothing else, you're gonna learn something. So, now you've learned absolutely useless information about Tadpole Cannibalism, but your reward is that next, we're gonna talk about sexual cannibalism.

That's a reward. You gotta save up a lot of box tops, send those in. Get yourself some sexual cannibalism.

It sounds like a movie I would have tried to sneak into a sleepover in eighth grade or something.

Yeah, which is weird, because it sounds like it would be complete schlock, but it also sounds like Brian De Palma could have directed it. You know what I mean?

Oh my God. Dude, I would, the things that I would not do or that I would do to get Brian De Palma to make a movie called Sexual Cannibalism, it would be a classic. It would be incredible. And I think, so this is one of the topics that we've loosely touched on before because sexual cannibalism is a behavior that black widows are famous for, hence the name.

I would say that the guy in Berlin, maybe in Eat and Alive episode, might have been practicing sexual cannibalism as well.

Oh, that too, that too, that guy too. That was a slightly different.

Okay, it was cannibalizing sexual organs.

Yeah, that was more of like a fetishistic cannibalism, whereas this is more of like a purely reproductive cannibalism because in this case, the female Black Widow consumes the male. Although interestingly enough, it does seem that the practice of Black Widow females consuming their male sexual partners is actually probably much rarer than initially thought. I found an article in Discover Magazine that addresses all kinds of sexual cannibalism and its causes. So unlike other forms of natural cannibalism, sexual cannibalism doesn't seem to have evolved out of this, you know, out of like a desperate situation kind of thing, the way that this other cannibalism has. I think this is probably the best place to start. It's something I didn't know. It wasn't until 1976 that the idea that the sole purpose of biological life is to pass its DNA from one generation to the next. That idea was popularized by Richard Dawkins' book, The Selfish Gene. And so the idea wasn't new. People had had considered it before that that's the purpose of life is to reproduce. But the book really popularized it and got people thinking about how the bodies that we inhabit might really just be vessels for the genetic information that they contain. And once those genes have been passed on, the physical body has very little use. Of course, humans have evolved into a species that places a fairly high cultural and emotional premium on being alive. So we don't take such a black and white view on it.

Yeah, I know. I mean, this guy is kind of, it's just like, we're not playing hot potato with DNA.

Yeah, I mean-

I mean, we are, but I mean, you and I aren't, we don't even know how babies work.

Well, right, we're like, now hang on babies. Do they come from eggs or how do they, where do they come from?

They can.

They can, not in people.

Well, they can.

I guess in people, but not like-

Yeah, come on, 80% of the government's lizard people. You think lizards aren't coming out with eggs?

That's true.

This episode's gonna be all like weird, trickled in conspiracy talk.

But it seems like lots of other species outside of humans really don't seem to give a fuck what happens after they bust. There's plenty of species who die after mating, including salmon and these little mouse-like guys called Antichinus, Antichinus, Antichinus. They're like the little mice. They live in Australia and they die after they mate.

Of course they do, yeah.

This article that I found in Discover Magazine notes that in many cases, scientists believe sexual cannibalism arose from a basic necessity, which is expectant mothers need lots of food to sustain their children and the males offered a nearby source of protein.

That's what I'm talking about, dude. Babies be siphoning.

Gotta get the proteins up. For example, a study in spiders found that females that ate the males had larger brood sizes than those that didn't. And over time, females that ate their mates had more children and the behavior spread through evolutionary selection. Not only do female black widows sometimes eat their mates, but male brown widows are on the menu as well. The article tells us that during mating, a brown widow spider will place its abdomen near the fangs of the soon to be mother of its children and the female will consume her mate using his body as sustenance for the babies.

That sounds like there's consent there.

There is consent, enthusiastic consent, I would say.

Check out these abs.

Even more enthusiastic consent, male redback spiders perform what scientists describe as a somersault directly into the mouth of the female after mating, which is the funniest thing.

What a cartoon thing to do. It's like they have a little hat. Yeah. They can tip their hat being like, I bid this world adieu. And they like fucking, they twirl into the jaws of a lady spider.

And then a bunch of other spiders hold up cards with the number 10 on them.

Oh my God, dude. I would watch that. I would fucking watch that Olympics.

Pixar, are you listening?

Pixar, call us.

And apparently it works because the male redback spiders that sacrifice themselves have twice as many children as male redbacks who don't. So, you know, good shit, it works. Spiders haven't cornered the market on this behavior. Biologists have documented female anacondas strangling their mates after mating.

Sure.

Likely to use as food later. Generally, female anacondas are bigger than the males, so it makes it easier for them to overpower their mates. And sexual cannibalism has also been seen, this one also makes me crack up, rarely but has been seen in octopuses. In one instance, a female blue octopus killed a small male after he'd mated with her multiple times before dragging his body to her den for dinner. And when this happens, the females kill by strangulation. So they do, much like you would imagine an octopus would kill its partner, it wraps a tentacle around the male to cut the flow of water off to their gills and suffocates them.

Engaging in anything intimate, you're really exposing yourself to be murdered, I guess. So, you know, and I guess that goes through every level of the food chain, but holy smokes, does it seem prevalent out there in the animal kingdom?

Yeah, truly. And not to get, you know, I don't want to get all dudes rock here, but I do think even more in, hold on, hold on. Where this gets even more interesting.

More uncomfortable.

Are the ways that the males of different species have taken to try to protect themselves from hungry females of their own species?

Sounds like abstinence will help.

Yeah.

To start with abstinence.

Researchers have found that male nursery web spiders are the masters of survival. Some of them, some of them bring, so this is, so this is what's crazy, because right, like.

Some of them have guns.

Yeah. I mean, almost. So part of the reason this is all interesting, right, is the idea that, well, these males, you know, that they're just the vessel for DNA, so they will just sacrifice themselves. They don't care. It doesn't matter. But male nursery web spiders seem to be sort of an exception to the rule in that they will bring insects to their mates, and when they do, they end up cannibalized at far lower rates than males that show up empty handed.

Or literally fucking gymnastic twirling into their mouths. Those guys have super, super small success rates.

Other male nursery web spiders will, and men, we do not recommend this, they will tie the legs of their prospective mates with silk prior to mating, something researchers have termed a bridal veil. The strategy not only protects the males against predation, it also lets them mate for longer, increasing the chances of having offspring.

Oh wow, lots of hate there.

So these guys bring gifts, tie the girls down.

God, it's almost like I brought you a gift, if you want it, it's on this table. Oh no, they tied my shoelaces together and I fell over, all eight shoelaces.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow, so silly, but I guess, so they're the only ones, the nursery rhyme boys, is that how they're called?

Yeah, so I did poke around a little bit on this and I didn't find too many other examples, but yeah, male nursery web spiders seem to be somewhat more, I don't know, socially advanced than other, not even just other species of animal, but like other species of spiders because they seem to be aware that there's survival beyond mating.

Yeah, but they kind of seem like deadbeat dads a little bit. You know what I mean? They're not offering anything in terms of nutrients for the babies. They're just like, hey, I brought you a fly wing or whatever, and that'll get them in the door. And then they trick them with silk shackles. And so, yeah, I don't know if I like these fucking spiders. They're bad news.

I'm very curious. I hope someone studies what evolutionary branch makes them-

Tricksters?

Yeah, they're the Loki spiders.

Yeah, let's see if Dr. Baby has any information on this the next couple of years.

So for now, what makes male nursery web spiders act this way may remain a mystery. But Ed, do you know what's not a mystery?

Sure you'll tell me.

How much humans love taking a little bite out of each other.

That is a fucking mystery. What are you talking about? This is news to me.

We love it so much. I mean, let me take a step back. Maybe you and I and our socially upstanding listeners don't, but traditionally humans have been one of the most cannibalistic species on earth. So now, finally, halfway through this episode, we get to human cannibalism, which I know is what you freaks want to hear about. And honestly, what I want to tell you about, but we had to do a little windup. Paleontologists have discovered teeth marks on Neanderthal bones that have had the marrow sucked out.

Well, if we learned anything about Neanderthals, you've got to suck the marrow out so that you can replace it with red pigment for the funerary, you know, traditions.

That's true, but also, I assume it probably tastes good. That must, that's probably part of it.

Bone marrow slaps, have you ever, like do you ever eat bone marrow at like a restaurant?

No, dude, I don't eat red meat.

It rules, it rules. You don't eat red meat anymore, but you might have at one point.

Well, I haven't had red meat since I was 20, 19.

I never had it until I was having dinner with and I'll bleep that name, so it doesn't seem like I'm name dropping.

Everyone's going to think you said Joe Biden.

No, but she was like, oh, you should have his fucking slaps. And it really was like, wow, bone marrow is very good if you're at like a fancy place.

Oh, oh, wait, okay. So hold on, wait, wait, wait, just correction. Correction for the listeners. I believe you just said that you hadn't had red meat until you tried it with, but what you meant was bone marrow.

I said bone marrow.

I think you said red meat.

And then you said you don't eat red meat. I don't know what bone marrow is. Is that red meat?

I mean, it's, well, I mean, I don't, so I don't eat cows or pigs, so I would not suck the marrow from their bones. I don't know.

You don't suck it. Like the bone, it's like cut in half and then like you kind of scoop it out, but with like the bread or whatever. But I guess I should probably reiterate. I don't know what bone marrow I was eating each time, but I'm fairly certain it wasn't human being. So.

Probably not. Probably not. At least I don't know what the **** is into, but who knows. So paleontologists have discovered teeth marks on the anorthal bones. They found 15,000 year old human bones with knife marks in them that suggest both consumption and ritual. And there's also evidence of human bones that have been found with kettle polish, which is a term for the patina that develops when bones hit repeatedly against a metal pot while being cooked.

Oh, wacky.

Which is the most loony tunes, Bugs Bunny cannibalism thing. I feel like, you know, just the idea of bones like dong, bong, bong against the inside of a pot.

Yeah, they're being stirred in that big cauldron with like full apples and carrots and stuff.

So it appears that not only do we or did we engage in cannibalism fairly often, we are one of the only species on the planet that cannibalizes for reasons other than desperation. So let's set the table a little bit and define some.

Ooh, no pun intended.

No pun intended and define some tasty terms. The cannibalism that we see most often in true crime and horror fiction, the kind of cannibalism that you were thinking about when you clicked play on this episode, is a kind of pathological cannibalism. It presents as a symptom of psychosis or an indifference to human suffering or even worse, a desire to inflict pain and suffering, all of which is very gross and scary, but to me, it's almost less scary than more accepted forms of cannibalism throughout history because at least if it's a scary freak eating your skin, it's like, oh fuck, this is bad and I'm glad it's not allowed because upstanding members of society might step in and try to stop your flesh from being consumed by this person.

Yeah, let's hope, let's hope.

But our past has borne witness to lots of cannibalism that could just be your fate as the result of living in a society where the well-meaning members are the ones organizing the feast of your flesh, where no one is coming to help you. And that's a bad time, my friends, because this practice is known as institutionalized cannibalism, where the consumption of human flesh is an accepted practice. Institutionalized cannibalism breaks down a couple different ways. First, by the relationship between the consumer and the consumed, and then by motivations for consumption. So I think the easiest way to break it down is to start by saying that anthropologists and archeologists refer to the consumption of members of one's own group as endocannibalism. And this is the opposite of exocannibalism, which refers to the consumption of outsiders. And either or both of these relationships can be present in the different reasons for consumption of another human being.

Sure.

So generally endocannibalism, the consumption of the member of your own group is associated with mortuary cannibalism, which takes place as part of funerary rights and can be practiced as a form of affection or as an act of renewal and reproduction. It is believed that some South American indigenous cultures such as the Amahuaca Indians of Peru picked particles of bone out of the ashes of a cremation fire, ground them with corn and drank them as a kind of gruel.

Oh man, back to the Christmas episode days. It brought me right back there. Gruel's back people.

Gruel's back on the menu.

Yeah, but where's those, who are those boys, the fucking.

Fuck, not the mischief boys. But there's like 13 or 15 of them or whatever. Some of them piss in your hair and some of them steal your balls.

They're probably hanging out somewhere. I have to edit all that out.

No, leave it in, leave it in. It's okay, we don't remember everything we talked about on this show.

Yeah, but they were those Icelandic dudes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that's actually not the gruel person. The gruel person was like that witch who had a fucked up foot.

Oh yeah, and sometimes she'd appear as a goose or something.

As a fucking goose or a sexy lady with a grizzly foot. Shit, man, dating is hard. That's all I'm saying.

Well, this recipe that the moaca would try is honestly probably the least stomach churning recipe on this list. Until government workers and missionaries forced them to stop in the 1960s, the Whare people in Western Brazil, and we're gonna hear a lot about the Whare for the rest of this episode because they're one of the most cohesively studied cannibalistic tribes in the world, even though they were forced to stop cannibalizing in the 60s.

That's gotta be a bummer for them.

Yeah.

Be like, who the fuck are you people? We've been doing this, it's a vibe, and you come in here and say we gotta put on pants and stop doing this?

Yeah, it's really interesting. So they practiced cannibalism on both members of their tribe in funeral rites, and they also practiced exocannibalism on enemies that they fought. And we'll get to the enemies when we touch more on exocannibalism in a few minutes. But for right now, I wanna just stay on endocannibalism because for the wari, it was an act of compassion in which roasted remains of fellow wari were consumed in this sort of funerary or mortuary setting. And this is how it would go down. So right after death, the closest relatives to the dead person would hug and embrace the deceased. The body would be left for about three days, although there was no set span and depended largely upon how soon family members and other settlements could get to the funeral. So the wari didn't all live in the exact same place. They were spread out a little bit.

So they might hold off until everybody gets to town.

Yeah, but this is in Brazil. So by the time everybody would get to town, the Amazon, famous for its heat and humidity, not kind to a deceased body. So by the time people would get there, the body had typically begun to decompose already and sometimes had already become bloated and discolored.

Yeah, but you know what? You've been on the road all day. You're hungry. I think at that point, it's like, I'll eat whatever.

Yeah, you show up, it's looking a little ripe. You're getting a little whiff of...

I mean, if it gets too ripe, you just make like a banana bread out of it.

Put it in the freezer, save it for later. So when all the relatives within a reasonable distance had arrived, the relatives prepared the body to eat. So remember, they're not preparing a fresh corpse. They are preparing a gray, green, bloated...

Oh, it's gross. And you know they're talking about it the whole time. It was like, oh my God. Like if you didn't have to stop 16 times to ask that fucking caterpillar for directions or whatever, we would have gotten here and not eaten this disgusting meat.

So mortuary preparation involved ritual whaling. So really right there, basically they're Italians as far as I can tell. Building a fire, removing the visceral organs, and finally roasting the body. And then after the body was roasted, the decedent's closest kin would not consume the body, but would urge the attendant relatives to eat. So essentially-

Another Italian trope, yeah.

Yeah.

They were like, listen, I'm not gonna eat my brother, but manja, manja.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also hating their in-laws. I don't even know if that's an Italian trope.

That's an everyone trope.

Basically, yeah. I mean, from what I read, it sounds like they essentially would be like, make the in-laws eat the body, which I think is very funny.

Yeah.

Consumption of the flesh would help assuage the family's grief as it meant that the soul of the deceased would be kept in the living bodies of relatives instead of being abandoned to wander the forest alone.

Oh, that's pretty good.

Yeah. The practice was considered an act of compassion, an act of love and an act of grief. The relatives were encouraged to eat what they could, but sometimes because of the decomposition of the body, it amounted to a little more than just small tokens of the meat. And it's noted that even this minor consumption would often cause the mourners great gastric distress.

Oh yeah, you're gonna have soul farts.

Yeah. The heart and liver were also eaten, but much of the body and hair would end up being burned.

Oh yeah.

No one wants to eat hair.

Yeah, you know how late you have to be to dinner? It's all that's left is hair.

Yeah, too bad. You missed out. And I want to say that cannibalism has been used as sort of like a racist prod towards tribal peoples in the past. And there is an inherent disgust, I think, to people who don't practice cannibalism this way. It is funny. I mean, it's like-

Oh no, we're able to joke about it, but no, you're not. I mean, I think a lot of people know now that, yeah, that is definitely used the way you say it. Anything, like I said earlier, it's like, oh, why you gotta change us? Make us put on pants and stop eating people. Like, it's deeply personal and fucking generations old, centuries old traditions that-

Yeah, yeah.

People come in, they're like, hey, that's not Western or that's not whatever. Change, you idiots.

Yes.

And that has, there's a lot of inherent racism in that. I'm not sure why we're talking about that section, but we are making fun of it.

Well, because of course, after I read all this, I was like, all right, I have to go deeper and find out why go through with all this. Because it even notes that even the tribal people, sometimes all they could get down was a little bit of meat and then have terrible gastric problems. So it had to hold meaning, but how did they get to this tradition and what meaning did it hold? So there's a woman named Beth Conklin, who is an associate professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt, who studied the Wari from 1985 to 2000 and published a book on the tribe in 2001. It's called Consuming Grief, Wink, Compassionate Cannibalism in Amazonian Society.

Did you add the wink or does she have an emoji in there?

No, I added the wink.

Oh, okay, okay.

I haven't read the book yet, but I did find an article that discusses the book that I think is really interesting. So I'm quoting from the article here, during her discussions with older people in the tribe, because remember, they stopped this in the 60s.

So the only people who were old enough to remember the practice.

Yeah, were older. Coughlin learned that some of these older folks in the tribe were uncomfortable with the practice of burial, because they considered it to be a less respectful and less comforting way to treat the passing of someone you care about.

Because you're burying them soul and all, because they were saying, you were saying earlier that you consume some of it so their soul lives on after they get dumped into a fucking bin or something. I don't mean to get that far. So yeah, it is less respectful if you think now you're burying people with their soul and they can't get their soul to move on.

Yeah, Conklin says here, In the past, the idea of leaving the body of a loved one in the dirt and letting it rot was as repulsive to the wari as the idea of eating human flesh is to us.

It's wasteful.

Yeah. So as she began exploring these attitudes within the tribe, Conklin found that the models developed by anthropologists and psychologists to explain cannibalism in most other cases didn't fit here. So the wari did not eat human flesh because they needed the protein. They were not trying to absorb the dead person's life force or courage or other qualities, and it wasn't an act of aggression or dominance. Instead, Conklin concluded that the practice was deeply rooted in the worldview of the wari and their understanding of how memories affect the grieving process. What she found was that the wari rituals are designed to help bereaved relatives cope with their sorrow over someone's death by eliminating things associated with the dead, which provoke sadness by reminding survivors of their loss and may also attract the dead person's ghost. The wari, obviously, the wari burn all the dead person's possessions, including the house in which the dead person lived.

Wow, this is a will-less society. What'd you leave me? Leave you? No, no, no. Ashes. Yeah, we left you ashes, bro.

Yeah, so they burn the house, they stop speaking the person's name, and they change the appearance of the village and other places where the dead person spent time.

Wow, that's elaborate.

Yeah, consuming the body is part of this process as well. Conklin says, Far more than we do, the wari see the body as a place where personality and individuality reside, and so of all the things that remind you of dead people, the corpse is the strongest reminder. So they believed it was important to transform the corpse in order to help transform survivors' memories of their dead relative. Which all of this, I think, is almost more foreign to Westerners than the cannibalism itself. Like, we all bend over backwards to remember the dead. Yeah. Right? Like, shrines and memorial services. And, you know, a lot of our religious practices center the idea that we'll all be together again someday, somewhere else. And the Wari are like, no, fuck no. Like, you're out of here. We don't, like, it's sad to think that you're gone. So we're just gonna change the way the town looks. We're like, repainting the shutters.

Yeah, we're on Wari version 9.6 or whatever at this point. Like, we're not, like, if you left for two years and came back to that village, you wouldn't know where anything was.

No, yeah, they've moved everything around.

Yeah, it's those staircases in fucking Hogwarts. They're, like, constantly changing and moving.

Yeah. According to the Wari's traditional beliefs, the spirits of dead relatives go to an underground world from which they return in the form of peccaries, which are, like, wild pigs, basically. And the peccaries are a major source of meat for the Wari.

Oh, you can't escape being eaten in this culture.

No, well, that's, so their belief is that the ancestor peccaries seek out hunters from their own families and offer themselves to be shot to ensure that their meat will go to feed the people they love.

Oh, they're doing the 30 backflips right into a cauldron.

Yeah, it's, well, like sustenance, and it makes sense for tribal people who maybe have had a harder time or have had famines or have trouble sustaining the tribe on the food that they're able to capture. Like, sustenance itself is a big part of the way that the Wari think about life and death. Thanks I think, interestingly, it wasn't just the Wari, or even indigenous South Americans who chose to honor their dead through acts of cannibalism. Despite how much Europeans love to use cannibalism as an indicator of barbarism and otherness, Ed, you'll never guess who is getting up to a little funerary fun somewhere between 11,000 and 17,000 years ago.

Oh boy, funerary fun, it's not the Vikings. No, they like to light shit on fire.

Europeans.

The Italians.

European ancestors.

Yeah, okay, well, the Vikings were European.

That's true, that's true, yeah. These were the Magdalenians.

I'm sorry, the what, the what?

Magdalenian, Delanians, Delanians?

What country is that? Is that a country, is that a place?

No, this is, I think this is 11,000 to 17,000 years ago. Yeah, this is pre.

It would be like Neanderthal situation.

More or less, they're still, Magdalenians were human, they weren't Neanderthal, but they were old. They were pre countries. They lived during the late upper Paleolithic era.

Never heard of you, pal, never heard of you.

Lost the time. They practiced the ritualistic manipulation of human remains, also not out of any necessity, such as starvation, but simply because it was a part of their culture. And we know this because an exhaustive review of 59 Magdalenian sites with human remains across France, Germany, Spain, Russia, the UK, Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic and Portugal.

I've heard of all those places.

Right, but they weren't those places yet when this was going on.

I get you, yeah, sure.

They found that 13 of the 25 sites they studied had sufficient archeological information that carried evidence of funerary cannibalism, such as bones with chew marks, cups made from skulls and bones broken in a manner associated with the extraction of bone marrow for nutrients. The study says that quote, Given the similarities of the anthropic modifications observed on the cut marked and cannibalized human remains across sites, the high frequency and geographic distribution of this practice and the association in some of the sites of cannibalism with the ritualistic manipulation of human remains, it is proposed that cannibalism during the Magdalenian period was practiced as a form of funerary behavior rather than for necessity or gastronomic cannibalism. So we don't know if this practice was akin to the Waris, as in like, if it had some of the same meaning or if there was a different understanding of what the practice meant, but to throw things back to the Catholic conversation from earlier, it doesn't seem outlandish that any of our ancestors might have felt there was some sort of spiritual connection to be gained by consuming pieces of the flesh of the dead. In fact, there's an entire history of another kind of cannibalism, symbolic cannibalism, that we won't really get into because it isn't very gross or scary, but if you squint, you can kind of see the origin of Christian communion in some of these cannibalistic funeral practices. And I don't say this to offend anybody. I just like, what is taking the body and blood of Christ, if not an attempt to commune with a higher power through cannibalism? Like it just, it literally is that. And I'm not sure how many people know this. I mean, Ed, you and I were raised good little Catholic boys, so we do. But one of the major differences between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholics believe in transubstantiation, which is the idea that during Mass, the bread and the wine are changed fully in substance into the literal flesh and blood of Christ, even though the elements of wine and bread appear to remain the same. So I don't want to do one of those tired, like, hey, if you think about it, wasn't Jesus the first zombie bits?

Yeah, no, we're not doing that.

But, but seriously, it's kind of wild that there's what? I think like one to two, maybe somewhere, billion Catholics on the planet, and every week they're all practicing Cannibalism. A very thinly veiled form of Cannibalism, yeah.

Yeah, well, we've been those people.

Yeah, and so, you know, I'm not saying the Catholics or Christians are practicing Cannibals.

It's metaphorical Cannibalism.

But for Catholics, it's not, that's what I mean.

No, I understand what you're saying, but I think to the average person, even if they, I don't know, it's tough, because even a person with faith, I think they maybe go and they just see them as crackers and juice a little bit, and not necessarily.

I mean, I guess I bring it up just because it is very funny to me that like, how many of these tribes have been forced to stop their practices by Catholic missionaries, and then go to church and do the same thing. It's like, you know.

That's pretty interesting. Although I feel like a lot of missionaries are like non-denominational Christian or Baptist and stuff.

True, true.

Like I feel like, or even Mormons, like I feel like Catholics really roll in that heavy in the missionary world, but maybe they are.

I mean, maybe not now, but for a while, I mean, they were everywhere.

The Pope ran some shit.

Yeah, I mean, if I were one of those tribesmen, I'd be sitting there like, what the fuck? What, I don't understand, why did we stop? You guys are doing the same thing. Anyway, where endocannibalism celebrates the life of those within the group.

Beginning-o cannibalism celebrates.

It's opposite, as I mentioned earlier, exocannibalism is frequently an act of aggression, often in the context of warfare, where the flesh of killed or captured enemies may be eaten to celebrate one's victory over them. This is commonly called, no surprise here, warfare cannibalism.

Yeah. And if only they had put a higher premium on possessions. You could have just like taken their shit instead of like, oh, I don't think that stuff we're gonna burn anyway, eat this guy.

In pop culture at least, this kind of cannibalism is often portrayed as either a method of intimidation or a belief that eating a person's flesh or organs will endow the cannibal with some of the positive characteristics of the deceased, like their courage or their spirit, whatever. But a lot of authors that have looked into this, researchers, whatever, they've investigated exocannibalism all across the world and particularly in New Zealand, New Guinea and the Congo basin, they've discovered that a lot of those beliefs weren't present, that it wasn't necessarily about consuming the spirit or the courage.

Well, how did that spread? Was it just works of fiction by writers? Was it just Biden?

It was Biden's uncle was telling everybody.

Biden's uncle was like Ken Burns style, read letters came back to him. And it was like, oh, nephew, I saw another insert racist trope here.

Well, I shouldn't say I'm sure. I would imagine that that's not a completely unheard of practice that that would be the reasoning behind it. But I think it became somewhere along the line and I don't know where, but somewhere along the line, it did become the trope. But the practice of warfare cannibalism has been studied all across the world. From the North American Iroquois, to the Batak and Dayak people in Asia, to the Atacadi in Europe. And nowhere has it been more thoroughly documented than in the Wari. So once again, we return to the Amazon and the Wari. Because like I mentioned, the Wari practiced both forms of cannibalism and they viewed the purpose of each of them very differently. Part of what makes this possible is the way that the Wari view what it means to be human, which is more about your relationship to the tribe than a concrete fact of your being. So I'm gonna do my best to explain this because it is fucking fascinating, but there's not a ton of writing on it and it seems kind of complex and at times maybe a little contradictory. I also might just be an idiot in screwing some of this up, but-

Let us know in the comments.

Let us know in the comments. If you know about the Wari, and I'm sure at least one of you do, please let us know how I'm fucking this up, genuinely, because this is really interesting and I pored over what little writing on it I could find to try to make the most sense of it that I could, but again, I'm not sure how much of this is just that the concepts are so foreign to the way that I have been raised to think of life and being a person and how much of it is just that I'm not an anthropologist and there's concepts I don't understand, but anyway, this guy, Aparecida Viaca, a professor of social anthropology at the National Museum at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, notes that to the wari, humanity is not restricted to humans, anything that acts human, MaxHuman, i.e. performs rituals, has a family life or drinks beer, may be considered human.

Hell yeah, welcome aboard, baby. Welcome aboard the human race.

Yeah.

Grab yourself a fucking Budweiser, dude.

Get a Bush Light or whatever. What were you drinking that you said at the truck place?

I was drinking Bush Lights all weekend, yeah.

Bush Lights all weekend? So hell yeah, to any of the creatures out there that drinks Bush Light or Miller High Life, I welcome all my beer-drinking brothers and sisters. So not only is humanity not restricted just to humans, the idea of a body is even less concrete than it is for us. So in the Wari's native language, the word kweré, K-W-E-R-E, is the closest word they have to the word body in the English language. And Viaka describes kweré as more of a quote, way of being than a physical attribute. So for example, a person's temperament is caused by their kweré. An animal's diet is attributed to its kweré and the wind's strength originates from its kweré. Husband and wife are even considered to share the same kweré as are all of those who live together. So it's not being human that makes you human. It's not having a body that makes you human. So what does define a person as human in the eyes of the kweré? Well, being kweré. Because the tribal word for we or people or human beings is the word kweré. And it's defined in opposition to game animals. So in other words, they basically see the world as less of a divide between humans and animals and more of a divide between predators and prey. Although even that's not quite right, but just go with me here.

I'm willing to go with you.

Okay, thank you. This is where we come back around to the idea of exocannibalism. Because the kweré perspective meant that the tribes warriors don't distinguish between an enemy and an animal. And so they felt no need to be merciful or gracious to an enemy any more than they would be merciful or gracious to an animal. Once the fight was over, the kweré would bring home the bodies of their fallen enemies whenever possible. And those bodies would be served to the women and younger men who had stayed home in order to strengthen the group. So that was how they practiced exocannibalism. One of the tribes that the wari often fought and ate was the Tupi tribe also of Brazil. And not as much is known about the Tupi because the population sort of died out and got absorbed into other local populations. But there is some evidence, though mostly evidence written by Europeans and disputed that the Tupi practiced warfare cannibalism as well. And there's a great story from a Vox article that details one of the earliest prominent European accounts of cannibalism in the Tupi tribe. It's from a writer named Montaigne's late 1500s essay of cannibals. So according to Montaigne, cannibalism was so ingrained into Tupi life and society that sometimes the Tupi would live with their captives for months before they ate them. And it's not clear whether they were imprisoned in cages or with restraints or just guarded, but allowed to go about their lives.

Or being fed every day so that they're nice and plump before they're eaten.

Yeah, the really crazy part is that the captives and captors apparently sang to each other. The captors taunted captives by entertaining them with threats of their coming death. And the captives replied in a fashion that was like a song or a chant. So it was basically like history's most threatening game of Marco Polo, except I think one of the halves of that was not moving. Montaigne writes, and this is a quote from his essay, I have a song composed by a prisoner which contains this challenge, that they should all come boldly and gather to dine off him, for they will be eating at the same time their own fathers and grandfathers who have served to feed and nourish his body. These muscles, he says, this flesh and these veins are your own poor fools that you are. So essentially what he's saying is, I ate your people and now you eat us, but you're still consuming your own family.

Oh, weird, that's got a lot of layers, like a turducken.

What an appropriate term for the cannibalism about to take place. Musicologist Gary Tomlinson wrote about the 2P in his book, The Singing of the New World, that described this sort of exchange of songs as an economy of flesh that passed through warring tribes for generations. It was a transaction across generations in these warring societies, Tomlinson says. They were saying, in the future, you will be captured by my people and we will eat you. The transaction goes on and on. So that's fun. A little campfire kumbaya before you go in the fire. So anyway, Ed, I don't know about you. I think that's a lot to chew on for this week. This topic might be a two or even a three parter if you people, you people.

I mean two for sure, because we didn't even get, one of my least favorite experiences was watching Cannibal Holocaust with you in Boston many years ago. Just because of that turtle stuff. But, that said, we didn't even get into any of the very trope-y giant cauldrons, you know, Italian whore shit, yeah.

We haven't touched on modern cannibalism. We haven't touched on survival cannibalism. We haven't touched on auto cannibalism or medical cannibalism or any of the really horrific and violent stories that surround psychopathic cannibalism.

So we tricked you guys into learning a bunch of stuff today so we can go off to the races on the next one.

Yeah, so the next one, the next one is really off-putting and no one really wants to listen to it. We could be like, well, I mean, look guys, what do you want? We gave you one for the smarties.

We gave you tadpoles for a while.

Yeah, we gave you tadpoles.

It's not a bait and switch. It's a bait and bait and then potentially more bait.

Yeah.

Some would say we're cannibalizing this season.

We're cannibalizing ourselves.

Cannibalizing ourselves.

But anyway, since we're gonna kick the fear of tear down the road for this topic because we're gonna do a part two or maybe a part three, I thought maybe we could wrap up by discussing our favorite facts from this episode. So was there anything in this episode, Ed, that you learned that you thought, hey, I didn't expect that?

All of it. Really? I'm trying to think.

I feel like a high school teacher. So what did you think? I don't know, all of it. It was all so good.

I don't think you read the fucking book. I know, I pray you're right, I didn't. I'm trying to think. There was the male spiders who are just super thirsty to please and fucking back flipping into the ladies' fucking jaws. That is a very funny Michigan J-Frog visual.

Yeah, yeah, I like that.

So that was a fun thing to learn. I think, I mean, I'll have to go back and listen to all the times I went, oh. Because those would all be moments I really enjoyed, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, I, you know.

It's like 10.30 at night. I've had a bunch of fucking Bud Lights.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, no. For me, it's the Wharie. Like, I don't think I've ever.

Well, I feel like I learned a lot about Wharie this episode, but I feel like you got a deeper well of Wharie knowledge that you didn't even share tonight. So for you, it's like you really probably have anecdotes that I don't even know.

Well, yeah, it just blew my mind to read about a group of people who have such a different idea of like, what it means to be alive and what it means to be human. And that the boundary is so thin between, like it doesn't seem like it's particularly focused on the individual so much as it is like, the individual's place in the universe almost, you know? Like you can be a pig that's an ancestor and they'll kill you and eat you anyway, but that's a good thing. Or you can be an enemy who's a person and they hate you, but they'll still, you know, like it's very, I almost can't wrap my head around, I can't put myself in the shoes of a wari and be like, huh, how would I interpret the world? It's just such a fascinating.

And there's probably less of all these things by the day. So, although I'm always shocked, you know, I'm always fucking shocked. Like I feel like every couple of years it'll be, oh, a new uncontacted tribe discovered in the fucking, under the canopy of the Amazon. And it's like, we're fucking still finding people. And also like leave them alone. They don't need an iPad.

They certainly don't need the internet. Although that story about-

Yeah, them all get addicted to porn.

I saw a followup that that was all-

Bullshit.

Or mostly bullshit.

Yeah, makes sense. I've been to Alaska and they barely have fucking broadband internet. How the hell did you get these, well, they got Starlink maybe?

Well, no, the bullshit part was that they got addicted to porn. They did give them the internet with Starlink, but then everybody was like, whoa, no, no, no, they didn't really get addicted to porn.

It doesn't take much.

No, sir. So I, you know, all too easy to believe that really giving the internet to any person on the internet in the world might leave them with some upsetting addictions, but.

I mean, what is that, right? You're giving the internet, it's day one, they're like, here's a box, you can ask it anything. I guess the first thing you ask it is like, what are you? And then Google's like, oh, I'm a thing that'll, you know, give you all the world's knowledge and anything you ever wanna see or learn, I'm here for you, I got you, welcome to Dogpile. And then of course your second thing is for several people, they're like, show me some boobs.

Yeah, I mean, the retraction was almost this like, you know, like, well, we're not trying to other these people or make them lesser than, but to me, like, you know, the idea of an uncontacted tribe immediately becoming addicted to pornography, obviously very funny, but it's funny not because I think it says anything negative about the tribe, I mean, to me, it's funny because it says something about our shared humanity that like, yeah, of course, if you give people unlimited access to hardcore pornography, some percentage of them are going to probably overindulge. You know, that seems like a very, maybe not a good thing, but it seems like a very human thing.

The cup filleth over.

Yeah.

They don't even know, like, they don't speak English.

No, well, maybe.

So like, what the fuck are they typing in to get to the porn? Brother, is it just that like, the internet is so filled with sponsored porn that they can't avoid it? It was like, oh, I was trying to type any of this alphabet I don't recognize, and the first thing that came up was like boner pills and porn stuff.

I can almost guarantee you.

Someone showed it to them.

Well, you don't even need to type words in any language into a search engine to find porn. Like, you could probably hit random.

Yeah, it's just, this keeps auto-filling as porn.

Yeah, or you just hit random letters and then you hit return and, you know, you're gonna get three pages in before something pornographic comes back.

Yeah, even, I mean, rule 34, but also like even the fucking origin of Google, when it was new, remember like when it used to have I'm feeling lucky as like a button?

Yeah.

And like even that's a suggestive sentence. So, yeah.

We'll do an episode on the horrors of the internet someday.

It sounds like a good live episode because I don't know how much of this we can use. If you're hearing any of this, then how lucky are you on the regular non-credits?

How lazy was Ed?

Oh my God. Yeah. If you're hearing any of this, please donate to my family. I might be dead at it. I think it's time to fucking finish the episode. But yeah, so Uncontacted Tribes, they're coming soon. Keep contacting our show and we'll try and get back to you.

Hell yeah.

All right.

Well, for this week, that's it. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

This is Scared All The Time and we will see you soon.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Vifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is A*****.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Supercast and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, to producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go sign up for our Supercast at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

Don't worry, full Scaredy Cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission.

Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Good night.

We are in this together. Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===