===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 digging deeper into the bloody guts of cannibalism. For those of you who didn't listen to Cannibalism Part 1, you should. There's a bunch of cool stuff in there, and it's really, I promise, until the end, not too gory or disgusting. It's such an off-putting topic that I kind of felt like it was only fair to start with the vegetables, so to speak. So we talked about cannibalism in nature, sexual cannibalism also in nature, don't worry, and the ways in which some tribes in the past and the present have practiced cannibalism on their own people during funerary rites.

And I feel like I learned a lot. That episode walked so that this episode can run.

Exactly. And I think we kind of ended on a pretty grotesque note, the well-intentioned funeral cannibalism is really the most disgusting part. It involves leaving the bodies of your loved ones out in the heat and humidity of the Amazon for days as family members arrive from all over the place and only then cooking and eating the body, which makes me think of when my buddy on Hose Crew got sprayed in the face with garbage water from the bottom of the dumpster in the middle of the summer. I haven't forgotten that smell and I'm sure the corpses in these rituals smell much, much worse. Anyway, point is, if you were disappointed by the lack of truly grimy, disgusting cannibalism last week, if you thought the Square Boys were too focused on facts and learning and tadpoles and what it means to be human, buckle up. Last week was just an appetizer. Today, Scared All The Time presents the main course.

Now it is time for. Scared All The Time.

Hey guys, welcome back to the show in the hot, hot heat of July. We just wanted to kick things off with a little bit of housekeeping as always. First of all, thank you to those who are premium subscribers. We appreciate each and every one of you and you really, it's been awesome so far. If you haven't signed up for premium yet, hit up scared.supercast.com, sign up and if you choose the I'm Terrified tier, you could be one of our show producers like one of these fine folks whose names we are going to read off right now.

All right, per usual for animinity's sake, since not enough people reached out to be like give us a whole last name, here we go. Kevin W, Sean K, Matthew S, Kristen T, Samantha C, Cassandra O, Carly C, Gabrielle G, Christopher M, Catherine L, Ambrosio L, Charlotte C, Claire B, Jonathan B, Michael S, Lauren M, Kristen S, Melissa L, Justin R, Ariel. Unclear what your last name is, so just Ariel. Buttercup, Honeycutt, Royce D, Jeff Q, Marshall K, Justin H and Diana E are all producers in good standing as of June of this year.

Hell yeah, thanks guys. That's a little opening credits scroll for the show. We don't usually, we only do that once a month, but I kind of like that. We get a little opening credits energy.

And I also wonder, should, I mean, that's everybody. That's like, that's all producers in good standing. I guess we can also at some point just be like, hey, here are just the new ones, but.

Here's what we'll promise people. Once we have a thousand producers, we'll just do the new ones.

We'll put it at the end.

Yeah, we'll put it at the end. Brow, brow, brow, brow, brow, pins and shirt update.

Yes, pins and shirt update as far as premium goes. As many people know, Button of the Month Club exists. And there were shirts and stuff at Monster Fest people could pre-order. Fourth of July slowed us down. Fucking supply chain issues, just like everybody else. That said, everything's off to the races now. If you pre-ordered a shirt at Monster Fest, I am currently hand-making them. You can watch the videos on our socials. And they are going out pretty much every day as they finish over the next week and change. So that's the pin update. And all the pins have gone out, but the shirts are another week.

Awesome. So yeah, you guys should have presents in your mailbox from the Santa Clauses of Scared All The Time any day now. And we also, we've been doing something that I think you guys have been liking based on how many five-star reviews have been getting posted, which is we've been starting to read five-star reviews in housekeeping. So if you leave a five-star review, we might read it. We don't have time to read all of them, but we will read some of them. So fuck four-star reviews. If you just like the show almost enough to be a five-star review, either, you know, man up and leave the five-star review or don't. That's fine. We don't care. We've got some good ones though that we wanted to share here. My favorite is from Har Har Go Pirates from July 1st. Five-star great show. Chris and Ed are wonderful. Show is always funny and fresh. They got that frog in them.

Oh wow.

So I love that. I love that. I do have a frog in me right now, Richard Gere style.

Don't you dare.

Just kidding.

We're going to jail.

Just kidding.

That poor son of a bitch. I'm sure there was no truth to any of that. And that guy walks around with that.

Oh no, it's a complete meme before there were memes. Ed, what's a favorite five-star review that you like to read?

I'll read a fairly new one because they mention our good friends, Let's Get Haunted. It says, five stars. Thanks for introducing me to things I didn't know I was afraid of, is I guess the subject. Then these guys are an absolute blast to listen to. The episodes are well-researched and the banter makes it an easy listen. The only episode I couldn't make it through was waking up during surgery. It was fantastic, but genuinely became a new fear. 10 out of 10 episode, though. Also, shout out to another podcast you'd love if you liked this one. I first heard them on Let's Get Haunted and I'm glad that Nat and Allie shared this podcast with their audience. We're glad, too. We had a really fun time hanging out with them.

Yeah, that was great and hopefully we'll be back on there soon to have some fun with those two.

Yeah, I just spoke to them and it sounds like we're gonna try and plan another thing. By the way, that was from Bridget, BC, as in British Columbia. Amazing. I don't know if it is that, but that's just giving you the initials.

And I'm gonna read this last one here from Cross-Eyed Cyclops. Five stars, loving the show. I love the show. It's funny, well-produced. Kudos to Ed. I'm adding the kudos. And it gets my heart rate up with all the scary subjects. If I'm ever buried alive, all I ask for is to have this show downloaded and buried with me.

Oh, fun.

So how fun would that be? Listening to buried alive as you wake up six feet underground, suffocating, and spending the last couple of minutes with us. That would be nice.

That's a nightmare on top of a nightmare.

Yeah.

Thanks, Cross-Eyed Cyclops.

Thanks, Cross-Eyed Cyclops. All right, well, that's housekeeping. We've got a very gooey, very gory, very grotesque episode on cannibals for you all. So without further ado, let's dive in and talk about some flesh eaters. Welcome back to Scared All The Time, Cannibalism Part 2. We got the water boiling last week. We used a comically large knife to cut carrots and onions into the mix. And all that's left is for you to sit back and relax into our stew. There's almost a choose-your-own-adventure level of cannibalism yet to be explored. And I'm not even sure where to start. I think maybe the best place to start is right where we left off with an exploration of exocannibalism, which is eating members outside of one's own group. As we mentioned in part one, this kind of cannibalism often happens during times of war when members of other groups would be taken captive, tortured, slaughtered and eaten. And this is also the kind of cannibalism, it's worth mentioning, that has long been used to demonize groups of people all over the world going back centuries.

With case in point on this, by the way, as you know, we hate AI, but sometimes we use it as a tool.

Yeah.

And I do a lot of the work and the design and the art on our show, but occasionally I'll use AI to help with a few things.

Yep.

And let me just say, the art they gave me back for just typing anything to do with cannibalism was super fucked up and dehumanizing. It was like, oh, you mean this? And I'm like, we can't post that.

Those images will never leave the scared all the time vault. Also, I'm kind of shocked that with all the safeguards and everything around AI, I'm kind of surprised that you got anything back.

Yeah, sometimes we'll be like, give me this. And then it'll be like, sorry, we can't do that because.

Oh yeah, the morgue for Buried Alive was like.

We couldn't write morgue. We couldn't write whatever.

But if you write cannibal, you get a 1920s racist caricature of.

And they'll give you as many of those as you want. It's crazy. And I was like, no, make it less this. And it was like, more? And I was like, no, less. And so anyway, we got to something where I'm happy with. It still took a lot of tooling around on my part in Photoshop after, as these things always do. You know, you can't just ask this shit to give you something. I personally won't just accept it, but I definitely won't accept it when it's like, this is brutal.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I found an interesting article from a site called The Weekly that tackles this really long and complex history of exocannibalism as, you know, antisocial signifier and kind of condenses it down into, I think, an easily graspable look at the topic that's really interesting. So, according to the article I'm quoting here, in 1979, anthropologist William Arends published The Man-Eating Myth, in which he argued that stories of cannibalism were racist lies. Historically, he pointed out, communities that are considered threatening or inferior have often been described as cannibalistic. The Romans accused the Celts of eating people. The English accused the Irish. It doesn't say if anyone ever accused the Italians. If we avoided the accusation, it was probably sheer luck because we eat everything. So I feel like at some point, somebody in that area would have gotten the accusation.

But the only difference is that like Italians, it would be like, you know what? Whatever they did, it came out delicious.

It would be, the meat would fall off the bone.

There's other nations that they're accusing people of. It's a lot of boiled meats up there. It's a lot of, they're not known for their cuisines, where Italy, they'll be like, yo, give me a couple shakes of oregano, garlic, and we'll get this going. It'll be good, it'll be delicious. I promise you these eye meatballs or whatever will be delicious. Italian wedding soup with eyeballs would be primo.

Yeah, I bet they taste kind of Parmesan-like.

Well, they'll add Parmesan for sure.

They'll add Parmesan for sure. The article continues, quote, stories of cannibalism among African tribes ease the consciences of European slave traders. They argued that they were doing the Africans a favor by rescuing them from such depraved activities. So that's strike one. In 1503, after the Spanish Crown decreed, oh, this fact, see, this is exactly the kind of thing that makes talking about cannibalism such a dicey topic. In 1503, after the Spanish Crown decreed that only cannibalistic tribes in America could be enslaved, man-eating natives were suddenly discovered all over the New World.

Yeah, I bet.

Yeah, exactly. It's like cannibalism, the subject is kind of fraught because there's this long history of this bullshit. Aaron's thesis, that cannibalism was a fiction. So again, the guy who wrote this 1979 book who said that this was all fictional or that cannibalism was a fiction, his thesis was that it was invented to justify Western colonialism. And that idea in 1979 proved to be hugely influential and ushered in a period of what anthropologists called cannibal denial.

It's a, I like that it's a period of time where it's like, oh, what, what are you, a Capricorn, you're a Taurus, I was born under the cannibal denial period.

Yeah, I've never heard of such things and.

Yeah, yeah, I remember that it was this, it was amazing actually, it was like the summer of love, the cannibal denial period.

The cannibal denial period.

You walked around just being like, you know what, there's nothing to be afraid of in this world, nobody's gonna eat me. So let's fucking party till the sun comes up.

And they did, and they did. For a couple of decades, anthropologists acted as if cannibalism wasn't real and they had nothing to be afraid of. Recent scientific discoveries though, have proved beyond a doubt that cannibalism was once commonplace. The last society to admit to ritual cannibalism, the Four Tribe or the Four-A Tribe, I'm not sure if there's an accent there, F-O-R-E, the Four Tribe of New Guinea, stopped in the mid-50s after an outbreak of Kuru, which is a brain disease closely, it's basically mad cow disease that's brought on by consuming these proteins called prions that exist in human brain tissue. I think we may have joked about Kuru disease last year.

It was the Hillary Clinton conspiracy that she has it or something?

Yeah, when she fainted, she was getting out of a car or going into a school or something and she fainted and that clip was used as evidence that she had Kuru disease that came from her habit of eating human children.

Sure.

Yeah.

At least it makes you weak, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We talked about this last episode, too, but it seems like, yeah, maybe you aren't consuming the strength and courage of the people you eat.

Yeah.

If you're falling down a lot.

It would be really bad if the cannibalism diseases made you stronger. That would be bad for everyone.

If that was proven, we gotta stop this podcast and open a people restaurant right away. It'll be loaded, man. It'll be loaded.

So yeah, needless to say, while your mileage may vary on Hillary's effectiveness as a candidate, I'm comfortable stating that Hillary Clinton does not, nor has she ever had Kuru disease.

I'm not comfortable saying that. We'll be ruined if it comes out tomorrow that she was, in fact.

She does have Kuru disease?

We would have such egg on her face.

Back in reality, quote, British scientists studying the four tribe discovered that many of them had developed a genetic resistance to Kuru disease. They then took samples from populations around the world and found the same result. So cannibalism, the scientists concluded, was once so commonplace that humans evolved genetic resistance to the diseases associated with it. So that's one way that they started to decide that actually cannibalism did happen, it's not a fiction, and that even if it was used in the past to be a racist attack against other groups, it was very real.

It definitely happened, yeah. We have scientific evidence that points to the fact that they wouldn't have these antibodies or whatever if they didn't do it.

Exactly. So one of the other ways that scientists started to determine that cannibalism was something that was practiced quite often in the past is that they found human myoglobin, which is a protein found only in human muscle tissue, discovered in the thousand-year-old feces of the Anansazis, who are the ancestors of today's Pueblo Indians. So the only way that proteins in human muscle tissue are ending up in your poop is you consumed that muscle tissue. Now, why you consumed it, whether it was ritual or funerary or survival-based, whatever, we don't necessarily know, but the proteins are there. It's kind of a smoking gun. So at the same time in the Southwest, archaeologists also found human bones. This is, this one's even more, I would say, this confirms it even further. Archaeologists found human bones that had been boiled in a pot until they were polished smooth and skulls that had been roasted face up over a fire.

That could be art, making art.

True, true. Well, actually we talked about the, fuck, I forget what the term was. There was a term for the bone polish or whatever that happens when they clang against the side of a pot.

Might be called bone polish.

It was something like that.

Oh, kettle polish.

Kettle polish, that's what it was, yeah. And then the article goes on to say that piles of butchered human remains have also been discovered in France, Spain and Britain. Some of the British remains date from between 30 BC and AD 130, which is right around the time of the Roman invasion, suggesting that the Romans had a point and the Celts did eat people after all.

Yeah, I think they also found a Celt cookbook. Yeah. That said, two eyes of a Roman.

What was the How to Serve Man, the Twilight Zone episode?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Spoiler alert for anyone.

How to Cook a Guy in 10 Days.

I want to be careful to say that we're not bringing any of this up to say that it is justified to demonize groups of people, just to say that there was a period where scientists felt that cannibalism was a fiction and then we've now concluded, the scientific community has concluded that cannibalism was a fairly common practice. And honestly, I think kind of what this tells us is at some point, everyone pointed to everyone else as cannibals because it seems like at one time or another, it was probably true.

Yeah.

It's one of those things. It's like a stereotype that holds true for everyone. When people make stereotypes about overbearing mothers, I feel like every culture has an overbearing mother. It's not when they're like, oh, **** moms or **** moms or **** moms.

I'm going to go ahead and bleep out every nationality.

But it's true. There's some stereotypes that I'm like, I don't even understand why this is a stereotype. It's just everyone. And I think that's kind of what cannibalism was at one time or another.

It was also very easy to use it as a demonizing card. It's just super easy because again, it's just so knee-jerk reaction from people to be like, ugh. It's a level of uncivilized people aren't comfortable with. And so I could totally see them being like, well, we'll dehumanize them from that fact.

Even calling it uncivilized though is sort of a very Western European perspective, modern.

I stepped in it.

But I'm just saying, I think that's... But I don't think that that's just the result of how cannibalism has been portrayed for so long. Obviously, some of it, the torture and everything is horrible, but it was part of civilization, just like I think, you know, a few hundred years from now, people are going to look back on the number of people that we've placed in prison and be like, well, that was barbaric. That was completely uncivilized. And it's like, well, now some people, not me, but some people consider that just part of how you have to run society. And I think that's a similar thing with cannibalism for some people. I'm sure we've probably stepped in it probably 30 times in this episode already. But archaeologist Timothy Taylor says, quote, at about the time humans began farming, which made dining on human flesh both unnecessary and in poor taste, it is likely that the cannibalism taboo arose for status reasons. Being able to farm your own food and raise your own livestock and bury your dead on your own land came to be seen as an expression of wealth and power. And he doesn't say this, but hence civilization. But even among, quote, civilized societies, people have reverted to eating each other when no other food is available. And this is what's known as survival cannibalism, which again, I think is probably what lots of cannibalism was throughout the ages.

And if it wasn't, it's a good excuse. If someone's like, what are you doing? It's like I had to.

It's a great fallback.

But you live like a block from a relfe, so you do not need to do this.

So according to this article, this is still from the weekly Napoleon's troops resorted to cannibalism during their retreat from Moscow in 1812. So did the starving citizens of Leningrad during Hitler's siege of the city. In 1820, sailors stranded in three lifeboats after the sinking of their whale ship, the Essex, survived by eating the bodies of their dead mates. When the dead were all eaten, survivors drew straws, killed the loser, and consumed him. In the last lifeboat found, one half-crazed sailor remained, with a small collection of licked clean human bones, sustaining himself by sucking out the marrow.

This is the one you want to hear about. I don't bat an eye at somebody who's like, I had to eat somebody. Like I get that. You probably don't feel great about it, you know? Because now you've got survivor's remorse and cannibal remorse, but you gotta do what you gotta do. So I totally like survivor cannibalism that gets passed.

These days we just call it a cleanse. Suck out the marrow, that's it. There are also two very, very American instances of survival cannibalism. The one most people are probably familiar with is the story of the Donner Party. Wagon Train gets stuck in the Sierra Nevada mountains during a terrible storm, and everyone turns to eating each other to survive. But there's a lot, I wasn't going to do Donner Party because it is well known, but then I realized I think all that's well known about it is just that it happened, you know?

It's just the name, dude. Because you just said that for real, and I'm over here going, wait, a wagon party? I thought this was the 70s. I have always confused Donner with not Gacy, but the other one, who's the one that ate people?

Dahmer.

Yes, dude. I was confusing the two, so I literally just did a double take when you told me that. So yeah, I think we're definitely within the realm of we can recap it because I didn't know what the fuck you're talking about. I just was confused.

I learned a lot. Ed's about to learn even more because he thought this happened in the 1970s.

Oh my God, I thought it was film director Richard Donner.

Donner, yeah. So I'll also say if anyone listening to this is like a history buff, you're going to roll your eyes at how little of this we're covering. It's going to be the next probably 20 to 30 minutes of the episode, I think. But there were so many diaries and letters and witness reports and studies and there's such a giant pile of material.

So we're going to hit you with the cliff notes.

We're going to hit you with the cliff notes because out of the 89 souls that set out in the initial wagon party, only 45 made it to California alive. Although I think every single one of them wrote a newspaper article about it, which is part of what makes this such a rich topic. But RIP. God bless to the ones we lost.

Absolutely. Good day. RIP. God bless.

First thing I didn't know is that this wasn't just a wagon train that had terrible luck and followed the trail that everybody went on and like, oops, there was snow. There was actually a guy responsible for this tragedy. He has a great villain name, Lansford Hastings. He sounds like a bad guy on like Greenacres or something. He wasn't evil so much as just a really bad communicator. Basically, long story short, he told people that he discovered this shortcut to California through the Sierra Nevada mountains, but he never actually like walked the whole thing or cleaned the brush. So it was some combination of he got overexcited and or just straight up lied that he had a shortcut. And then, so the Donner Party decided to take this path, but Hastings, I guess, was sort of realizing he was ahead of them. And I guess he was either realizing that he fucked up or didn't really what the path wasn't ready because he was then using a combination of notes that he was leaving along the trail and messengers that he was sending back to help guide the Donners through this shortcut.

Sure.

So he was building the railroad as the Donners were on it.

Yeah, he was laying the track as the train went down. Yeah.

Yes. Yes. Although I guess to be clear, because this is the 1800s, there was no train tracks. This is still just wagons. No trains. So poor visual there. So the Donners were on this path, and it turns out it wasn't really much of a shortcut because no one had cleared the way. So the Donner Party, which was named after the two wealthy brothers who put the group together, and at this point were probably like, god damn it, like, we're used to sitting in our posh, you know, we just wanted to go out to California, come on out to California, have a couple drinks.

Fucking destroy the native population, manifest destiny. Yeah. Was one of America's like truly bad ideas for the people who were currently living here.

Yes.

At the time.

Yes. Well, the Donner Party got delayed because they were now on this trail that still had brush and boulders all over it. So they had to clear their own brush and move their own boulders just to get the wagons through. And it slowed them down to the point that winter arrived before they'd made it through the area, which is now called Donner Pass.

Oh no, I'm not taking that pass.

Yeah, then at the time it was probably known as fuck Lansford Hastings Boulevard.

And prior to that, it was just known as do not enter based on the sign the first literate person in the area had put up.

Yeah, exactly. So winter rolls in, it starts snowing, and now I'm going to be taking a bit here from an article on All That's Interesting. According to All That's Interesting, if the Donner Party had left on their journey even a week earlier, they still might have made it through the pass, but instead they got stuck in a blizzard. And the article here quotes from a survivor's writings, All I could see was snow everywhere. I shouted at the top of my voice. Suddenly, here and there, all about me, heads popped up through the snow. The scene was not unlike what one might imagine at the resurrection, when people rise up out of the earth. The terror amounted to panic, the mules were lost, the cattle strayed, and our further progress rendered impossible. So, the wagon train at this point had just under 100 miles to go to make it to California. But the snow was almost 25 feet deep in places, so they weren't going anywhere. That's a new sub-fear for this episode, 25 feet of snow.

Also wagons are like canvas and shit. Like canvas and wood.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're freezing in there.

I think the deepest, I don't know about you Ed, the deepest snow I've ever seen, there is a blizzard in Pennsylvania in elementary school where we got I think like five or six feet and everybody was like, oh my God, we're never getting out of this. And that's it. That's as, I've never seen 25 feet of snow.

You're probably thinking of the blizzard in 92, which was like, I have some great video footage of that as a child. It was an amazing, it was an amazing blizzard.

Yeah.

It's either blizzard of 92 or blizzard of 94. But blizzard of 92 was the one I remember.

Right around there.

And that was like, even it snowed a tremendous amount and then also the snow became ice on top. So you would like go sledding, but like you couldn't stop, you couldn't like stop yourself because the snow was like, had like a layer of ice you had to punch through. It was so crazy. We were out of school for like days.

Yeah. I remember we're thinking of the same blizzard. I don't remember which year it was, but yeah, it was like almost a week of school that we were out, I think. And it was crazy. But so anyway, I couldn't even picture snow 25 feet tall. So, I Googled to see things that are 25 feet tall. And according to my new favorite website, measuringstuff.com, the following are 25 feet long or tall. Number one, a garden hose. So a standard garden hose, which I don't think I've ever seen one uncoiled the whole way, but that's 25 feet tall. A 25 foot long extension cord, which doesn't really help me because again, I just have to know what 25 feet looks like and that's what I'm trying to get to here. This next one is a little more helpful. Four refrigerators. So I can kind of picture four refrigerators stacked on top of each other. That's 25 feet tall. Number four, five folding tables. Number five, five park benches. Number six, four adult males, which-

Wait, what? I guess we're all five and a half feet.

Yeah, they'd all have to be five and a half feet tall. I guess that's kind of an average. They're a little shorty, but that's okay.

Four short kings.

Four short kings stacked atop each other. Number seven, a two-car garage is, I guess, 25 feet across.

Hello, millennials. We'll never know what that looks like.

Yeah. Number eight, Ed, this one's for you. Half of a semi-truck trailer-

Okay, sure.

Is 25 feet tall. Number nine, five queen-sized mattresses. I'm recording this in my bedroom and looking at a queen-sized mattress, so that's very easy. Although, I feel like the mattress is almost the height of a refrigerator. I don't know where we're getting an extra mattress between four refrigerators and five mattresses.

Yeah, this website's fucking trash.

Number 10, 20 bowling pins, and number 11, two and a half alligators.

Again, seems like you can get all sorts of size alligators.

Yeah, but we're going with average sizes, so I'm gonna try in the future, I'm gonna be using measuringstuff.com. It seems like they have lists for every height and width of thing.

I love it.

So, great, great research.

But also, 25 feet of snow. I mean, I don't know if it's like a cumulative over the whole winter, that winter, because 25 feet of snow.

Well, they were there for at least a couple of months. They were stuck in the past from...

They had to wait for it to melt.

Yeah, they were stuck in the past from like November or December into March. So they were there for a while, and I don't know if all the snow came, I mean, I'm sure it just also kept snowing.

That's such a long time. You got to eat people before they give birth to all the kids that came out of fucking...

Well, there was a woodcut that I saw in my research of people building shelters and stuff. So I don't know how quickly... I don't think they just circled the wagons and were like, well, we'll just sleep in the wagon. I think they started building a camp.

Well, yeah, I mean, I have to imagine it because again, it's only so much cover that a canvas sheet can give you. Like you're either going to die from freezing or but it was also like people were so hard of your time. There were homesteaders. They like knew how to collapse a wagon and turn it into a cabin.

Yes.

Or build a cabin from the woods.

Yeah.

We got off track.

That's all right. Some people hate that, but you know what? I love it. So guess what? You're stuck with it. Instead of getting trapped under two and a half alligators worth of snow, The Donner Party set up camp at Truckee Lake and hoped to survive the long winter. Spoiler alert, many of them would not. They'd used up at this point almost all of their rations. Remember, they were already like a week behind. So I don't know how much extra rations you usually pack on a trip like that, but they're already a week behind. So they're into the remaining extra rations already. And they decided to kill their pack animals first. Sure. It's sort of a tricky thing, though, because you need them to pull the carts. Yeah, I guess maybe they killed like if they had any mules or something, maybe they did that first. But yeah, you wouldn't want to kill all your cattle or anything because yeah, what's pulling you? Although I guess they figure if they're going to survive the winter, they'll figure that out later. That's like an order of operations today.

We'll cut that. That's a loss. We'll write that off. We're gonna start a new settlement right fucking here.

Yeah, exactly. At that point, yeah, if they've already built the houses and stuff, then it's just like, well, fuck California. We now live at Truckee Lake and we're just gonna go find new animals. So anyway, however many animals they killed in that first wave of pack animal slaughter, it did not last them very long. They stretched as much as they could. They sucked the bone marrow and they tried to make an edible paste from the animal hides, which sounds real gross, but I guess when you're desperate, any port and storm. You know, so then after they ran out of pack animals, they killed field mice, which I tried to imagine, you know, when I researched this kind of stuff, when I researched anything, I'm trying to imagine what it would look like. And the thought of 80 something pioneers running around in the snow trying to like whack a mole mice is sight to behold, darkly funny. Then they killed and devoured their dogs, which sucks, brutal. And then when they ran out of animals to eat, the frantic pioneers chewed on pine cones and tree bark, which reminded me of their Japanese counterparts committing live self-mummification probably around the same time. We talked about this in Buried Alive, part one or two, one of them, you know, brothers in tummy grumbles. These guys, they could have done sex, I don't remember what it was called. I'm not even going to make the attempt, but it was a, it was a process.

They could have done sex.

They could have done, I was going to say seppuku, but that's not what it all was. It was like shinbutsu or something. But anyway, they chewed on pine cones and tree bark, but unfortunately for the Donners, they did not become gods like the Japanese. They just started dying and it didn't escape anyone's attention that these bodies provided an alternative food source. Diaries and letters written during and after the ordeal tell us most of what we know about what went down at this point. And while not everyone was completely in agreement about what happened, it's clear that the Traveler's Hunger got the best of them.

Yeah, this is where I want to see the diary or journal of the guy. I just want to see one journal that's like, so I said again, we should start eating each other and again, I had pushback.

Yeah.

And it was just the idea of being like, dear journal, unpopular for a third day in a row, as I mentioned.

There's one guy we're going to get to who was really unpopular from the very beginning and it must have sucked to have been him, but we're not to him yet. The first two reports of people eating the dead, one comes from a woman named Sarah Murphy Foster who lost her brother Lemuel, which that's a name we got to bring back. It's like Samuel but L-E instead of S-A, Lemuel.

Lemuel. Yeah, sure.

She barely had a chance to mourn him before she realized that some of the other pioneers were eating his heart. So Lemuel, R-A-P, God bless.

I do like that it's heart in the sense that like, when did you get that heart? You can just name any animal. Come on, no one's gonna recognize a human heart from a distance. Oh, this? They got this from a field mouse. It's bigger than a field mouse. Yeah, it was a big field mouse. Does it matter? Anyway, did you anything you wanted to say to Lemuel before we eat him?

Another man, Patrick Breen, recorded in his diary that Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that she thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don't think she has done so yet. It is distressing.

Oh my god, I love it. I do like there's some people who are just very open about it being like, yo, you're gonna eat that too? Are you kicking Milt to the curb? Because I'll take him.

Well, yeah. RIP. God bless Milt. And I don't know who Milt or Mrs. Murphy were, but I suspect she did commence on him eventually.

Yeah, she's either a cannibal or a cougar based on that sentence.

These people mentioned in these two dire entries, the people being eaten were already dead when they were consumed. And for the most part, for the most part, the Donner Party members tried to stick to that rule. But nature and hunger are cruel beasts and eventually broke their will. On December 16th, a group of the strongest members of the Donner Party decided they would try to strike out and get help. Their party, unnamed at the time, but later dubbed Forlorn Hope, if that gives you any idea of how well this went, included two Native Americans named Salvador and Luis.

These guys sound like dudes who played Native Americans in movies. I'm Ericoy by way of Naples in the role of running waters, Francesco Scaramucci.

Yeah, well, Salvador, Luis, Scaramucci or whatever, they hadn't been with the group the whole journey. These poor souls had only joined up with the Donner Party just shortly before they'd gotten trapped in the mountains. So I'm not sure exactly how they crossed paths, but if they had not gone on this shortcut with the Donner Party, they would have been fine. Anyway, Salvador and Luis were part of Forlorn Hope and they marched for days, found nothing but snow, and unfortunately the group, the party, the search party were starving and they started to get hungrier and desperate. And wouldn't you know it, the Native Americans were the ones that everybody started eyeing up.

Oh boy.

At least one of the other men in the party warned Luis and Salvador that the others might kill and eat them. So in the middle of the fourth night of the expedition, Salvador and Luis fled. But they didn't flee very quietly or quickly because the pioneers followed their trail in the snow. They found them, collapsed in the snow, exhausted, and Donner Party member William Foster shot them both in the head. They were then butchered, cooked, and consumed by the rest of the party.

Billy. Billy was like, it's a man of action.

Billy's a man of action.

You're aware of Billy's like, we're eating tonight. I'll be back.

Yeah, obviously not a great turn of events, not something I'd be particularly proud of, but it did give the Forlorn Hope Party enough energy to keep going. And after a month, they managed to stumble onto a ranch in California and alerted the world to the horrors unfolding in the mountains. Being lost in the snowy woods in this period in history, or really any period before there were communication devices, you truly are just stumbling across a ranch. Like I guess you know if you're headed north, south, east, or west, and you're like, well, fuck it, I'll keep going west. But the west was also fairly unsettled at that point. So you're going west, but there's no, the chance that you're going to go west and intersect with a settlement seems pretty slim.

And I mean, it's winter, so it's different, but there's so many like westerns movies that a plot point will be like they get to a watering hole that has a sign that says the well's gone bad or it's poisoned now or blah, blah, blah. So you couldn't even like run into that and feel safe and like, oh, we have water now because so often it was like, it's a lot of dead fucking skeletons next to this and it would be like someone left a sign that like half your party can't fucking read. It says like the water's gone bad or whatever. So yeah, it's just such a scary time to be lost cruising around, but I'll just stay where the fuck you're from to stay in New York or whatever. Why do you feel like you got to go west? I guess Manifest Destiny, they want to go get their shit, whatever, we're millennials, we'll never own anything.

Well, Forlorn Hope returned to Truckee Lake with one of what would amount eventually to four separate relief teams that rescued the survivors of the Donner Party over the course of two months. Each relief team came back with more people and-

Please, Chris, were they referred to as food with more food?

Each relief team came back with more juicy steaks and stories of the hellacious shit that they'd seen up at Truckee Lake. One man described seeing a quote, revolting and appalling spectacle at Truckee Lake that included human skeletons in quote, every variety of mutilation. Another claimed to have seen children sitting upon a log with their faces stained with blood, devouring the half-roasted liver and heart of their father. The account went on to describe hair, bones, skulls, and the fragments of half-consumed limbs around the fire. And then there's the story of Jean Baptiste Trudeau. One rescue party member insisted when they arrived at Truckee Lake, they found this guy holding a human leg. I don't know exactly what he was doing with it, if he was like waving it around or gnawing on it or practicing a golf swing on eyeballs, but Trudeau did later admit to eating other Donner Party members.

I hope he's related to current, well, the two previous Trudeau Prime Ministers so they can also have their Biden moment of being like, you know, my ancestors were also eating. Yeah. My ancestors were doing the eating. Interesting.

In a conversation with HA Wise, who published one of the many accounts of the tragedy, Trudeau allegedly confessed to eating both Jacob Donner and his four-year-old son.

He ate the boss?

He ate the boss.

Holy shit.

Quote Trudeau, and this is the quote, I eat baby raw, stewed some of Jake, and roasted his head. Not good meat, tastes like sheep with the rot. But sir, very hungry, eat anything.

Was he getting fucking charged by the letter? Is this a telegram? Why did you write it like that?

Well, I think this is a quote, I think this is how he talked. He talked like Tarzan, I think.

Oh my god, he ate like Tarzan.

I drew like sheep with the rot.

Yeah, because that's something he's used to eating, so he knows that real well. He's a poor guy, he's a fucking poor person.

This is, yeah, I don't know if his IQ dropped a few points, maybe he had kuru disease at this point.

Guys got kuru. Anyway, he would later have a very successful family, maybe, so there you go, worked out. Glad he survived.

Well, and so would this next guy.

Jeremiah Clinton, Dave Bush, god, every president and prime minister or descendents of the Donner Party?

Jehovah Obama? The last guy rescued-

He might have recued, too, he recued some people.

So the last guy rescued from Truckee Lake was, they rescued him in April 1847. This guy, Lewis Keseberg, I think wins the award for most fucked up guy. He was a real bummer. The Donner Party hated him from the get, like from the jump when they started, no one liked him. He was apparently short-tempered and cruel to his young wife, and rumors spread that he'd once comforted a young boy only to kill him, hang him up in his cabin, and later eat him, which I assume but could not confirm happened during the tragedy and not before, but I don't know.

I mean, it could have been the first thing, and then when they did get desperate, it was like Louis had a good idea like a week ago.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You see what Louis is doing?

He made some patties that were just, mm, mm, mm. Now our children are all missing.

They were primo. When he was done screaming at and humiliating his young bride, he made us these unbelievable kid burgers.

Yeah. So Louis Kesseberg had injured his foot with an axe by the time they got trapped. The injury made it hard for him to walk. It was so bad that when the first rescue party came to Truckee Lake, he sent his wife and daughter off with them, but stayed behind because he didn't think he could make the journey. So I'll say this is maybe the one good thing this guy ever did. Seems like he sent his wife and daughter, said like, you guys live, I'll stay back. Unfortunately his, I think his wife was pregnant with his daughter at this point and the daughter did die. The wife survived, but the young daughter didn't make it. Anyway, he stayed behind. When the second rescue crew came, his state had gotten worse. They found him lying in pain in his own excrement. So they tended to his foot wound and left behind some food for him and said, we'll be back. A few weeks later, a third rescue party arrived and this is starting to sound like a joke, I feel like at this point. Like the first rescue party that God said, I sent a boat and whatever. But when they returned the third time, Louis Kesseberg confessed to one of the rescuers, this guy, James Eddie, who was himself a Donner Party member who'd returned to help with the rescue efforts. So he had been rescued with the first or second crew and then came back.

That's cool.

Louis apparently confessed to him that he had cannibalized Eddie's young son.

Why?

And Eddie's-

Wait till they brought you back, bro.

Yeah.

Don't start the journey with like, think about me as I ate your kid.

Yeah.

Wait, you should be like, hey, thanks so much for the trip to California. Now that we're here, I should probably tell you I ate your kid. That's the order you do it.

James Eddie found this out and swore to murder Kesseberg if they ever met in California. Now Kesseberg also did not leave with the third rescue party. He claims it was because his foot was still wounded. I think it's probably because James Eddie was gonna straight up murder him.

Yeah, try to sleep, Belle. Fucking try to sleep. Yeah.

So, Louis Kesseberg stayed back for a third time with Tamsen Donner, who obviously related to one of the Donners, I don't know, wife, sister, whatever. I guess wife, because he stayed back with Tamsen Donner and her ailing husband, George, whose arm had become black with infection that had traveled up from a seemingly minor cut.

Oh boy.

And wouldn't you know it, when the fourth rescue party returned, Louis Kessenberg was the only one there, wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by human bones and sitting next to a pot of what appeared to be fresh human liver and lungs. He was accused of murdering the other two survivors, but insisted George Donner succumbed to his infection and Tamsen Donner got lost in the snow and she was dead when he found her. Sure, buddy.

His legs all fucked up though, so maybe he was just like, everything alright out there? I don't know.

That's true.

Did he chase someone and fight them? I don't know. This guy's had some pretty brutal leg injury for what sounds like a year and a half.

Well, it also didn't help Lewis's case that he reportedly stated that George's flesh was the best he'd ever tasted. And it also came to be known that he had hidden all of Tamsen's money. The rescuers believe that Kesseberg stole the money, but Kesseberg claimed that Tamsen had given it to him and said to take the money to her children, which he swore he was going to do.

Wow, a lot going on here.

I don't know if it ever got to them.

If he ever again, yeah, I probably didn't. He probably bought a new leg with it.

It is very funny to come back and there's one guy left. Everyone else is dead. He's stolen all their money and he's sitting there like, dude, don't look at me.

All this time, he didn't come up with one convincing story. He's still at that moment and had to like give an excuse. He's like, oh, they gave it to me.

Fuck you guys.

You weren't there.

But then his life after all this is kind of wild too.

Oh, he became mayor. He became governor of California.

Dude, almost. So, I think he kind of became the face of the cannibalistic aspects of the Donner Party. He was vilified. He was written about. He was accused publicly of being a thief and a murderer. And it got to the point that he eventually sued one of his rescuers, Edward Ned Coffeemeyer. Who? He sued Ned for defamatory statements. He then won in court, but was only awarded one dollar, which at the time maybe was like a million dollars. I guess so.

He started San Francisco with that dollar.

I don't know exactly. I feel like even in the 1840s, a dollar like wasn't a ton of money.

Yeah. What is that in bits?

Yeah. He was never charged for any crimes at any point. And James Eddy did attempt to follow up on his promise to find and kill him, but was persuaded to drop it by fellow survivor James Reed.

James, you pussy.

Yeah. And then get this. So, Louis Kesseberg took his dollar and went and invested. Well, I mean, I'm making this part out. I don't know for sure. But he went and made money in the gold rush. I don't know if he used his dollar to invest in pickaxes or whatever, but he made enough money to purchase. He made a large purchase. Ed, would you like to guess what Louis Kesseberg famed cannibal decided he would buy after he made his money during the gold rush?

Can I ask a question of like, is it property? It's not a car, obviously. It could be a cattle farm.

It is a kind of property.

Hearst Castle.

No, he purchased a restaurant, of all things.

Oh, shit.

And he made human being burgers. No, I think perhaps he recognized that his infamous past might not be the most enticing sell to customers. So he converted the restaurant into a brewery and is now credited with introducing the lager style of beer to the West Coast.

Oh, my God.

So Louis Kesseberg famed cannibal has a place in American brewing history, a fairly sizable place in American brewing history because lagers were basically, they were considered like a style of the Pennsylvania Dutch. They were the gangling. Yeah, they took longer to make. They had to be cooled in in caves and stuff. So it was considered very like northeastern style of beer. And I guess he liked them or something. And or maybe I don't know exactly where he was born, but yeah, he introduced the lager style to the West Coast. So second, the only other good thing he did in his life besides setting his wife first was open to pretty cool brewery. But then there's a whole bunch of other stuff happened and he ended up dying penniless. So good to this day, they don't know where his grave is. They think he was buried in just like a public pit.

Basically, he was eating.

I mean, he should have been like that would have only been fair. Even if he didn't kill the people that he ate, I feel like it's only poetic that they should have served him up to somebody after he died. In a not great lesson for kids, I'll wrap up our journey through the Donner Party history with this. It's not great lesson for kids. There were only two families who didn't lose a single member of their family. One of them was the Breen's who survived because they refused to share their supplies with others. Which, I mean, three months into being stranded in the woods and everyone else is eating people, I'm surprised no one just killed and ate them.

Yeah, those are, that's a god, you know, there's no person in this story who isn't a villain.

Yeah.

The person who's like, I ate your kid, man. It was, I had to.

Yeah.

And the person who was like, I'm not sharing with anybody is like equally as bad in my opinion. It's all selfishness.

Someone in that family was a scary motherfucker.

Oh my god. Yeah. The Breen's are the hell you said they're?

The Breen's.

The Breen Bruisers, they call them.

Yeah, they're all six feet tall. They're like built like trees.

Yeah, weird. They like, yeah, they're the, they're a tough family for sure.

They have a four year old with the head of an ox. They're just like, it's the scariest. Because honestly, like, I'm stunned. There were plenty of other survivors. Even if they were all weak, they could have ganged up and like forced them to.

No, the Breen's are like, yeah, the Breen's wouldn't let you near this comically large pile of rations they kept.

The other family who didn't lose a single member with the Reeds, who also had at least one lunatic in their bloodline, I didn't find any information about whether or not the Reeds shared their supplies with other people, but James Reed stabbed and killed a fellow Donner Party member, I think before this happened.

Oh, that's prison rules. It's like, look, as soon as you get there, you find the biggest non-Breen you can, and you fucking stab them so everyone knows that you're not supposed to be fucked with.

The timeline of this, I think he must have, because so basically he stabbed and killed somebody, the group banished him, but it ended up being one of the best decisions they could have made because he made it through the past before the winter came, which is why I think this must have happened before they got stuck or maybe right as they were getting stuck, tensions were ramping up as they were trying to move boulders and he stabbed somebody, but they banished him. He made it all the way through the past and got to Sutter's Fort in California where word, I guess, got to him that everybody else was trapped. So then he raised money for one of the rescue expeditions, which he helped lead. And then he found his wife and four children alive. He was reunited.

Oh, that's why he raised money. Okay, so he's not like a single guy who they banished and then out of the goodness of his heart was like, I should go save them. He's like, oh shit, that means my wife and kids are probably all fucked. They're in a rough situation.

But he got to them, rescued them, they settled in San Jose and now have several streets named after them. So pretty cool for a guy who stabs somebody.

I mean, start as a criminal. JFK's family were running fucking moonshine, right?

That's true, yeah.

He's the most beloved person ever. So, I mean, also, you should be expecting a couple switchblades and bowie knives because, I mean, there's, yes, there's Manifest Destiny and then there's like, I watched this great Western movie where it's like, they're taking all these women to get husbands or no, these guys want wives in California, so they have like a chuck wagon. It's like a whole Donner Party situation of just like, we're bringing these brides across the country. It's an interesting movie. I forgot the name of it. But that said, you're gonna run into some like weird elements, because other than Manifest Destiny, there's also guys who just need to get the fuck out of Boston. You know what I mean? Like probably wanted for crimes and shit, need to start a new life. So yeah, you might have a couple like Breen's and Reed's who were like, we're the toughest guy in the five points or where the fuck that shit is. And even that's later, but you know, you might have some uncouth characters just trying to, who's in the group with you.

I'm sure, I'm sure. I mean, even the more civilized people in that group were probably, you know, I feel like more people in the past had to kill at least one person.

Yeah, it was a different time.

I feel like the body count was higher.

It was a different time. They had no teardrop tattoos. They had to just take them on their word.

Because they didn't shed a single fucking tear when they killed that man. So that kind of wraps up The Donner Party for us. The second less elaborate story of American survival cannibalism I wanted to touch on also comes to us from tough times. It's technically pre-American, but I think it's interesting and relevant because it's another story of cannibalism that rumors of the cannibalism seem to be politically motivated, but did turn out to be accurate.

Was Tough Times the name of the newspaper you founded? Or are you just saying they were Tough Times?

No, they were Tough Times.

Oh, okay. This comes to us from Tough Times online edition.

This comes to us from the Jamestown colony in the early 1600s. It was a pretty brutal existence. And five historical accounts written by or about the Jamestown colonists referenced cannibalism as a method of survival during particularly bleak winters. But until recently, these reports were unproven. In fact, according to a National Geographic article that I found, William Kelso, director of archaeology at Historic Jamestown, thought that the reports of cannibalism during these times were politically motivated and intended to discredit the Virginia Company, which was the stockholders who provisioned and financed the settlement. So I'm not quite sure exactly what sort of political backstabbing, who discrediting this would have helped, but he felt like it was exaggerated, made up bullshit. Which, you know, not as nasty as reports of cannibalism designed to make slavery more palatable, but perhaps bullshit nonetheless. Anyway, in 2012, portions of a butchered skull and shin bone of a 14-year-old girl from England dubbed Jane by researchers were unearthed by Jamestown archaeologists. They found the remains about two and a half feet down in a 17th century trash deposit in the cellar of a building built in 1608 inside the James Fort site. This period lines up with a harrowing period in Jamestown history called the Starving Time, which lasted from 1609 to 1610 and killed nearly 80% of the colonists.

Wow, and that's a way worse time period than the one earlier, the like, cannibal doesn't exist summer or the hell we talked about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Doug Owsley, the head of physical anthropology at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, examined these remains. This is so gross.

Yeah, it's probably gross enough to warrant a little disclaimer here. So a kind of sort of gross story incoming in 3, 2, 1.

And found multiple chop and cut marks on the girl's skull that were made by one or more assailants after she died. Quote, they were clearly interested in cheek meat, muscles of the face, tongue and brain, he said. Four closely spaced chop marks in her forehead indicated a failed attempt to split her skull open. The close proximity of the unsuccessful blows indicates that she was already dead or they would have been more haphazard. I think translated to mean she would have been fighting back and they would have been all over the place. The back of her skull was then cracked open by a series of chops by a lightweight axe or cleaver. Cleaver blades and knives excavated from the Jamestown site were compared to the blows and Owsley said he thinks a cleaver was used. There were also numerous cuts, saw marks and gouges along her lower jaw made by the tip of a knife to get the meat and to remove throat tissue and the tongue, he said. The cutting was not done by an experienced butcher except possibly the chops to the shin bone. Quote, there is a hesitancy, trial and tentativeness in the marks that is not seen in animal butchery.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

But could be a professional butcher who's like, I got it. Then when they were tasked with the actual thing of like, I'm cutting up a fucking kid.

That's what I was going to say.

They might be a little bit more timid than they would be with like venison.

That's what I was going to say. It seems to me that like we're discounting that butchers would have had any sense of emotion or sadness. That they're just like, here's a leg, I do not differentiate this leg from a cow leg.

Yeah, you know butchers, their inability to feel anything.

Yeah, just cold and heartless. So anyway, RIP, God bless Jane.

Oh, Jane.

I'll tell you what though, I'm going to take a long walk around the block to give you a bright side here. The bright side is that, and I think, I don't know if we've talked about this before, but it's a thought that I've had before. When they do reconstructions of long dead people, which is ultimately what they did to Jane. If you go to the National Geographic link in the show notes, you'll see that they did like a digital reconstruction of her face and what she would have looked like. And I've always found those fascinating because they are, you know, whether it's her or like some cavemen that they've done these reconstructions of, a lot of times the reconstruction is of a completely anonymous person who is one of the billions and billions and billions of people who were alive on this planet who lived a life of, you know, probably real hardship and suffering that we can't even imagine. And this girl died horribly. She was dead before they ate her at least. So she probably succumbed to, you know, a natural death. Then they ate her. And now, you know, because they ate her, she was reconstructed. So we all get to see her and she has a place in history. And so my long walk around the block there is like, if you offered me the opportunity to be remembered by the human race hundreds of years in the future and the trade-off was someone was going to eat me after I died, I don't know. I'm taking that deal. I like it.

Yeah, that's pretty good. I'm actually on the website right now and she's...

She looks like a very nice person, you know?

I don't know. She's got like, are you fucking kidding me, eyes? They gave her sass. They gave her sass in this reconstruction. But yeah, she looks like a person who didn't deserve that.

No, but it's cool that we know her. Jane, I don't think that was probably her name.

If only they had carved into her skull her real name.

I know, left a little name tag for us. But yeah, so, you know, RIP, God bless, Jane. Anyway, all this got me hungry, obviously, and it also got me wondering about just how nutritional the human body is as a food source. We sort of touched on this in part one with animals and the tadpoles. Yeah, but minus the obvious risks of consuming diseased flesh.

Yo, that didn't stop fucking Whatlouie or whatever. He was like, yo, your arm is straight up black, dude. I'm gonna eat you, dude. It was like, you're objectively sick.

Objectively sick, yeah.

Yeah, and I have no problem with that. They're gonna come back and you're not gonna be here.

So I wondered what kind of sustenance are people actually gaining in this kind of survival situation? And I wasn't entirely sure how to figure that out. Turns out the mad lads at PBS of all places figured it out for me. PBS, let's go.

Public Body Succulents.

I don't know. But they published a piece in 2017 called If You Had to Eat a Human Body, Which Part Should You Pick First? So I don't know. Look, when you talk about evidence that, you know, the government is comprised of cannibals, probably not a great look for your public media to be presenting articles called If You Had to Eat a Human Body, Which Part Should You Pick First? But that's what they went ahead and did. The article is actually a much more digestible, dare I say, version of a study. I know.

No, I love it. It's what we're here for.

You're welcome. Version of a study published in Nature, a much less punchy title, Assessing the Calorific Significance of Episodes of Human Cannibalism and the Paleolithic.

Sure.

So that's the article that the PBS article summarizes. I'll put links to both of them in the show notes.

Yo, somebody at PBS needs to get a fucking Pulitzer. Look at this title. That's not gonna work. That's not gonna sell any ads. How about instead, like, what's your article about? Well, it's about, like, how nutritious a human body is. All right, boom. If you had to eat a human body, where do you start? All right, get me 20 million copies of this right now.

Yeah, I think maybe one of our Button of the Month Club buttons should be, if you had to eat a human body, which part should you pick first?

Oh, the button's not big enough, because I would want, like, one of those, like, butcher diagrams that shows the T-bone and shows the, like, fillet and shows whatever.

Well, so there's actually, in the article, they have those diagrams. We'll get to that in a second.

Again, give this guy a raise, a Pulitzer. He's created his fucking job. Whoever this guy is, created their job. Or lady, I don't know.

The guy who led the original study was James Cole, an archaeologist at the University of Brighton in England who was studying the history of nutritional cannibalism, aka the kind of cannibalism many of our ancestors regularly engaged in to survive. And that got him thinking, quote, well, how nutritional are we? If we're labeling these behaviors as nutritional cannibalism, then you need to have an idea of where we fit within the faunal spectrum. Cull notes that clarifying this distinction is especially important for understanding the cultural diversity of early human relatives like Neanderthals who have been branded as thugs, his word, not mine, in part due to their unrefined behaviors like nutritional cannibalism. The article reads, Cull tracked down data collected by a single research group during the 1940s and 50s where the scientists had analyzed the chemical composition of four deceased human males. The subjects, who ranged in age from 35 to 60 years old, had donated their bodies to science. I don't know that they knew they were donating their bodies to food science, but they had donated.

Yeah, massive latitude that word carries when you donate.

Yeah, yeah. Now, Cull relied on these four bodies from this single team in order to avoid introducing extra variables into his calculations. If you read the actual paper in Nature, there's a whole complicated section about someone who had done a study like this previously, but some of the data they felt was inaccurate because they had kind of cherry-picked bodies from different datasets and all this shit. So in this case, he just relied on these four guys. Within this data, Cull found values for water content, protein content, and fat content for a variety of organs and body parts. From there, the article says the math is easy. One gram of protein is worth four calories, and one gram of fat is worth nine calories. So based on that math, a person's fat pads carry the most nutritional value on average, approximately 50,000 calories per fat pad. Now, fat pad, from what I can tell here, is not a medical term. I think they just mean anywhere on a person's body that carries a pad of fat. So, you know, your butt, your thighs, your stomach, whatever. If you're outrageously fat, your fingers.

I think America... He was doing this in England, though. Modern-day America, we can get you fucking pads for days, dude.

We can get you some calories.

We're the most nutritious people to eat, then, I guess.

Yeah, you could also try the skeleton, which has 25,000 calories, the thigh muscles, which have 13,000 calories, or the skin, human skin.

Please refer to it as human cracklin.

Human cracklin has about 10,000 calories. So that infographic that I mentioned I have here in front of me, you can look at it in the show notes, but it notes here that the teeth, the average caloric value of teeth is 36. So you're not getting much. That's honestly more than I would expect. I don't know what calories even exist in teeth. I guess maybe like a little protein, but there's no fat in your teeth.

Yeah, that's a little, that's just like, ugh. I'm eating teeth soup again? This sucks.

Yeah, and then there's the skin here, the cracklins, the total skeleton caloric value, which I guess maybe comes from like bone marrow.

Bone marrow, yeah.

They've also got upper arm, average caloric value 7,451.16, forearm is much less than that, about 1,664 calories. The calf, average caloric value 4,486.

Wow, you can eat like a whole calf for the calories of a fucking six-piece chicken nugget from McDonald's. You can eat a whole forearm for like a double quarter pound of a cheese.

Yeah, the average human is made up of 11 Big Macs.

I kind of feel like if you want to get square, start eating human.

Truly. So then Cull compared the caloric values of humans with those of prehistoric animals that were found in the same archaeological layers as the remains of the early hominins who were cannibalizing people. So we're talking like bison, mammoth, woolly rhino, deer. And surprise, surprise, based on Cull's calculations, it seems unlikely that all of our early relatives were conducting cannibalism purely for nutritional reasons. As Cull states, a horse is almost 200,000 calories. A bison is almost a million. Compared to the average, you know, 50,000 calories.

From sucking molars. This guy is eating arms and sucking molars by choice.

It's a great trait for an ancient villain in a movie, sucking on teeth and spitting them out.

Like their cherry pits.

Yeah, these folks probably weren't starving. It does seem like there was some element of ritual or something else taking place here. Cull doesn't speculate on what that something else might be, but he does say that during the eight months that he conducted this study, he did have trouble eating bacon.

Sure.

So it got to him a little bit. So where does that leave us with cannibalism as we get near the end of this episode? It leaves us honestly with a whole lot to talk about. I mean, we're talking a part three, a part four, a part five.

We won't go. But also if you guys say, let us know right away if you hate this. It will fuck up our schedule if you do.

Well, my thought is there will be multiple parts of this, but I think what we might start doing for some of these, like airplane disasters, airplane crashes, shout out, Helly. I think we're going to have multiple parts for some of these things. I think we'll just spread them out over seasons instead of doing them all in a row. Anyway, it doesn't really matter. But the point is, there's a lot to talk about, including some of the other recognized but less studied categories of cannibalism, like medicinal cannibalism, which involves the ingestion...

Stop it. There's no fucking way...

.of human tissue. Yes. So, for instance, in Germany, from the 1600s to the 1800s, executioners would often sell leftover body parts as medicine as a side job to supplement their income.

What the fuck? Pay them better.

Described in Kathy Stewart's book, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts, human fat was sold as a remedy for broken bones, sprains, and arthritis. Usually, the fat was rubbed as a balm, not eaten. However, apothecaries regularly stocked fat, flesh, and bone, and there are also examples of human skulls being ground into a fine powder and mixed with liquid to treat epilepsy.

Oh, my God. I kind of want to read this book, actually.

Yeah, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts. Whenever we get to part three someday, maybe I'll read that book and build around that. Then there's technological cannibalism, which includes drugs derived from the pituitary glands of cadavers for human growth hormone. There is placentophagy, in which the mother consumes her newborn baby's placenta, and innocent cannibalism, which is when a person is unaware that they are eating human flesh, which I say to you, good luck getting the jury to believe you.

Unless it's Soylent Green, then yeah.

Yeah, and then there's also auto-cannibalism, which is the act of eating oneself, and pathological cannibalism, which could probably be its own multi-part series, which is, you know, that's cannibalistic serial killers.

But also in the same tier as like psychopathic cannibals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Because that's something I think the audience would really enjoy.

They probably would, and we'll get there someday. But I wanted to end with this. It doesn't quite fit into either of the parts of cannibalism part 1 or 2. I mean, it is cannibalism, but I couldn't figure out where else to put it. It's an insane news story from New Zealand in 2012. And it's so crazy that I'm just going to read it so that no one accuses us of exaggerating or making anything up.

All right, well, give us the writer.

Here we go. The article is called Cannibal Cult Members Arrested in Papua New Guinea, published in the New Zealand Herald, July 4, 2012. So almost exactly 12 years ago. We're recording this on July 3. Here we go. Quote, members of an alleged cannibal cult who police say are responsible for the deaths of seven people have been arrested in Papua New Guinea. The 29, including a 13-year-old boy and a teacher in his 50s, were arrested during a dawn raid at Biyaam Village, Madang Province on Papua New Guinea's northeast coast on Wednesday night. Two men, one believed to be the group's leader, known only as Joe, are still on the run. If you're going to pick a fake name, Joe is a great one to pick. It'll make you very hard to find. These two, Joe and his compatriot, well, sorry, I'm quoting, so I won't add my own commentary here, armed with homemade guns fashioned from rubber and believing they had supernatural powers to identify sorcerers, the group has killed four men and three women since April, police say. The last was last Thursday, senior constable Daniel Kappen, who led the raid, told the AAP, which is the Australian Associated Press, the group alleges that there were some deaths related to sorcery in the area. They were initiated, quote, this is the constable again, they were initiated into a cultural house and believed they could identify sorcerers. It has been an ongoing problem. So I think what they're saying here, now I'm not reading, I'm interjecting to say, I believe what's going on here is that there's a cannibal cult who believes that they have the magical power to identify sorcerers, and then they are then killing and eating those sorcerers.

Yeah, they're the the dexter of cults, like cannibal cults. They're like, we're the good guys here.

Now get this, so again, this is 2012. I don't know where it stands now, but according to the article, sorcery is legally defined in Papua New Guinea. The legal definition is between legal good magic such as healing and fertility and illegal black magic held responsible for unexplained deaths. However, the government's Law Reform Commission is considering stamping out the law because of sorcery related murders throughout the country.

Yeah, they're using it as a loophole.

Yeah, most cases of sorcery, literally, most cases of sorcery are also bogged down in the nation's beleaguered court system because most lack any real evidence. So I think, yes, I think people are probably using sorcery as a sort of magical stand your ground.

Yeah, no, this is vigilantism where they can be like, listen, they were dark sorcerers. I had to.

Yeah.

I had to. And then, you know, for good measure, I had to eat them too.

Yeah.

Joe does what Joe's got to do.

Yeah, Big Joe. Maybe Joe was a Breen family member. Maybe that's why.

Old Bazooka Joe.

Over there.

So back to the article here, I'm quoting again, Initial forensic reports and statements made by the accused led police to believe parts of the victims were eaten. However, Mr. Capin declined to go into detail. He also denied media reports the group was a cargo cult, which is a term for a religious practice found in some pre-industrial tribal societies formed around the belief that wealth can be attained through magic. Quote, they were not demanding money off people, Mr. Capin said, adding that getting wealthy did not appear to be the motive for the murders. But we believe there was an exchange of money for the power to recognize sorcerers.

I mean, that's just other ghostbusters too. They're like, you having a problem with sorcerers? Call us. 555. No more sorcerer.

And then the article wraps up here with, I think this must be related culturally in a way that maybe is clearer if we have anyone listening in New Zealand or Papua New Guinea.

Or Australia.

But it says, yeah, it says, villagers near Biyaam, a small village near Tangu substation in Bojia district, were unable to vote in the national elections out of fear for their safety. Police will be following up on this matter, as many were deprived of their constitutional rights to cast their vote because of this group, said Madaing Superintendent Anthony Wagambe Jr. In 2010, cult leader Stephen Tari, a self-styled black Jesus, was found guilty of raping young flower girls who belonged to his sect. Tari made international news when captured and arrested in March 2007 after eluding police for more than a year by moving from village to village or hiding in remote mountain camps in the Transgogol area of Madaing province. At the time, he had thousands of village followers, including a corps of armed warriors to protect him.

Interesting. I worked on something where I was asked to work on something a couple years ago that was an Indian, like from India project. And I remember my buddy was working on it before they were thinking about bringing me on. And he was like, listen, if you're asking my advice on this, it's like you got one or two too many things. Like you got this cult leader, you got this crime syndicate, you've got this magic element, blah, blah, blah, blah. I would say maybe drop the cult leader thing because it just seems like one too many hats or whatever. And they were like, you've really just exposed that you're not Indian. Like that's the one we can't drop because like every day there's another cult forming that like this is so ever present in our culture that it's like you just don't see that. But like it's people would ask us where it is if it's not in here.

Right.

And so maybe it is a little bit like that there where it's like this is more like you were saying culturally, you might not know. Like there may be like just a lot of whatever the fuck this is going on all the time.

Yeah, I will. I promise you listeners, I will do some follow up research on Joe and see if to see if they caught him.

Well, I mean, there was Joe. Then there was this other guy who was accused of saying like there was just like a bunch.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But also we should also point out that like we laughed a lot during that article, but we could also recognize that real people died.

Yeah.

Real people did seem to die for potentially no reason, but it was funny the way you read it.

Well, it just it's you know, I don't know how many places in the world sorcery is legally recognized. It's just the word sorcerer and sorcery is so funny to be reading in present day as like a motive for cannibalism. It's like a mad lib. It's just it's like there's so many and they had rubber guns and like it's just it's a lot of like put in whatever noun you want in this article.

But also it's like they're the black hat, white hats of that part of the world where it's like they're like good hackers, bad hackers.

Yeah, if we do have any listeners from this part of the world, we definitely have at least one listener in Australia.

She's reached out.

Oh, that's right. I would genuinely be curious. Like how common is this? Have they changed the laws around sorcery in Papua New Guinea?

Do you know anyone personally in Oceania who's ever gotten off for something because of sorcery?

Yeah, I'm curious. So anyway, that brings us to the end of Cannibalism Part 2. I know I said we're going to have future episodes on this. I do feel like we have to place cannibalism on the fear tier because we didn't do it last week. We got to do it this week. And then I guess we just won't revisit maybe, well, I guess psychotic cannibalism probably has a different place on the fear tier.

For sure.

Yeah, but to me, dude, I would put, well, here's the thing. The only cannibalism I'm truly frightened of is somebody eating me while I'm alive.

Exactly.

Because once I'm dead, I don't really care. Or I guess someone killing me in order to eat me would also be pretty scary.

I'm not square enough yet to not be immediately looked at in the event that we're running out of food. Like, people are definitely looking at me and being like, when's he going?

Yeah, neither of us are Breen family Jacks.

Oh no, A, we're not Breen family, so no one's going to leave us alone. And B, I'm just heavy enough where they're going to be like, that you can feed more than some other guy. I think you can stand next to me and buy yourself another month.

Well, we've now just given everyone the ability to calculate our caloric value in the event of an emergency.

Yeah, we've given it to them. Also, I do like the Carnival Barker, the like guess your weight Carnival Barker. If it's like you go to a county fair and instead of telling you your weight, they'll tell you how long you can feed a party of four. Where it's like three weeks, I guess three weeks on this man. So I think I could probably feed a family of four for like two weeks.

Yeah, but because cannibalism seems like it has been so common for so long, I'll put this pretty squarely in the middle of the fear tier, I think.

I put it in the middle of fear tier because if I'm in a situation like alive, then we've all discussed, you know, this is a shit situation. If I die, just eat me. That's cool. I'm checking that off on my driver's license here. But I also think that like, I don't know, I could be like captured by the Illuminati and eaten. That's the one I'm more worried about.

So you are worried about Hillary Clinton eating you.

No, I don't mean like Illuminati, like I super believe in Illuminati. I just, I do think right now, I would not be surprised. Not that I think. I would not be surprised that right now a rich person is eating a poor person. It's as simple as that. And so I'm not in the economic place where I feel comfortable to not be slid onto a plate at some point.

Yeah, we are for sure the hunted.

We are the hunted of society.

We are the hunted.

That's why you got to get square. You got to make yourself unappealing to eat if you're not going to be rolling around in that Scrooge McDuck vault of coins.

Agreed, agreed.

So because of that, I put it squarely in the middle.

Yes, we must make ourselves the most dangerous game.

Yeah, hell yeah, dude.

Anthony Hopkins, The Hunt, the name of that movie? Oh, The Edge, The Edge, The Anthony Hopkins.

But The Edge isn't the most dangerous game. The Edge is just they get stranded in the woods after a plane crash.

Yeah, but we have to make ourselves like we could survive that is what I'm getting at.

True, true. I was thinking surviving the game with Ice-T.

Oh my god, which was a most dangerous game, kind of like The Pest or any of these most dangerous game reboots.

Yeah, the cast of that movie is just the best character actors. I think it's like, I want to say the bad guys are Wilford Brimley, William Sadler, there's probably at least one Busey in there. And they're all hunting Ice-T.

Amazing. Yeah, we should definitely do a most dangerous game episode. There are so many versions of the most dangerous games that exist that we could probably pull from a lot of that and have a really good time.

Yeah. All right. Well, guys, thanks for listening. This has been Cannibalism Part 2. Like, subscribe, leave some five-star reviews. Sign up for the premium if you want more of us in your ears. And until next week, this has been Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

Stay salty.

Too salty to eat.

True.

All right, see you guys next time. 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 Fifle.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

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

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