Genetics may protect against disease linked to eating human brains
Remote tribes in Papua New Guinea were ravaged in the 20th century by kuru, which was spread when people ate their dead relatives as part of funeral rituals – but some individuals may have had genetic resistance to the condition
By James Woodford
19 March 2024
The cerebellum of a person affected by kuru
Liberski PP (2013)
A genetic study in an extraordinarily remote community in Papua New Guinea has uncovered new insights into a brain disease spread by people eating their dead relatives, which killed thousands of people in the 20th century.
Strewn with mountains, gorges and fast-flowing rivers, the Eastern Highlands province of Papua New Guinea is so isolated from the rest of the world that it wasn’t until early in the 20th century that outsiders realised it was home to around a million people.
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Some of the tribes, known as the Fore, practised a form of cannibalism called “mortuary feasts”, where the bodies of deceased relatives were consumed as part of funeral rituals.
This sometimes meant they consumed abnormally folded proteins, called prions, that can cause a fatal neurodegenerative condition called kuru – which is related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Locals, however, believed that kuru was caused by sorcery. There were at least 2700 recorded kuru deaths in the Eastern Highlands.
Simon Mead from University College London and his colleagues examined the genomes of 943 people from the region, representing 68 villages and 21 linguistic groups. Although this part of Papua New Guinea covers only just over 11,000 square kilometres and is smaller than Jamaica, the different groups are as genetically distinct as people from Finland and Spain, which are around 3000 kilometres apart, say the researchers.
