Latest / The Smart Cookies podcast / Cannibalism with Professor Bill Schutt

Transcript

Cannibalism with Professor Bill Schutt · The Smart Cookies podcast

• zaza: Bill Shutt is a professor of biology at LIU Post and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He's the author of Dark Banquet, Blood and the Curious Lives of the Blood-Feeding Creatures, and Pump, a natural history of the heart, which is his latest book, I believe. Professor Shutt also co-authored two novels, Hell's Gate and the Himalayan Codex. In 2017, Professor Shutt published an astonishing book cannibalism, a perfectly natural history that I have right here, which is what we're going to be discussing today, in which honestly, I couldn't put down once I started reading it. It's so compelling. I believe I devoured it, no pun intended, in two days, which never happens to me unless I'm reading one of Stalin's biographies. Anyway, right. Professor Schutt, welcome to EuroTrash. bill_schutt: Nice to be here. zaza: Out of all the dark taboos out there, I always thought that cannibalism was the most straightforward one, with things like, let's say, murder or even incest or something. Yes, we have a visceral reaction to them, but cannibalism just comes equipped with this universal stop sign that seems older than time itself, as something that holds true across time and space and is completely non-negotiable in any context. there's not really all that much interesting we could say about it. And then I read your book and boy oh boy was I wrong because this stuff is complex to say the least and there's many layers to it. The first one that already shocked me to be honest was the fact that within the animal kingdom we find cannibalism practically among all species pretty much across the board, right? bill_schutt: Well, I don't know about all species, but all animal groups. And zaza: Yeah, okay. bill_schutt: it's more common in some than in others. For example, animals without backbones, the invertebrates, it's very, very common. And then once you get into, you know, on sort of the other side of the spectrum, once you get into the mammals, it's less common. And then primates not so common. So, but it is really widespread. You're right about that. And that was a big surprise to me as well. zaza: So from what I understand cannibalism in the animal kingdom fulfills an evolutionary function. Could you explain that aspect a bit more? bill_schutt: Yeah, I think so let me back up a bit. When I first started working on this book, I noticed that most of the mentions of cannibalism in the animal kingdom had to do with two things. It was either weirdo animals like praying mantises or black widow spiders who were cannibalizing example, golden hamsters, which are a very popular pet, cannibalizing their young. And because of the reason that they're doing this, because they're sort of stuffed in small cages and they're stressed out by these captive conditions. And so that was really the party line for a long time among researchers, was that if you're going to get cannibalism, this is where you would see it. background work on this, I realized that there were scientists who had since the 1970s published papers showing that cannibalism was widespread for other reasons that had nothing to do with a lack of food or stressful conditions or the fact that they were praying mantises or black widows. But I found cannibalism related to things like parental care or as a lifeboat strategy where you have, for example, three chicks hatch. We're talking birds, of course. And two of them are larger than the third, because they hatch earlier. And they're also internally, they get this sort of internal boost of hormones that the third chick doesn't. And if there's plenty of food, then there's no problems. then the two larger chicks will oftentimes cannibalize the smaller one. So this went on and on and there were all sorts of other reasons. For example, one of my favorites was when I went out to Arizona and studied these spade-foot toads. And here was an example where the unpredictable environmental conditions selected for this cannibalistic morph, sort of body type, that hatched in these ponds that were transient ponds. The conditions out there are really, really warm and dry or hot and dry. And these ponds that the eggs are laid in by the toads can evaporate overnight. And so in essence, if the toad, if the eggs haven't hatched into tadpoles and then evolved and then sort of developed into toadlets that can sort of get out of the pool and hop away before the pond dries out then everybody dies. So what has evolved is this, are these cannibal morphs where half of this batch of eggs, they all hatch into tadpoles, they all look the same, but within a couple of days, half of the tadpoles are tremendously larger with these big jaws and a short meat eating sort of digestive system. And there were all these other sort of adaptations that they develop really quickly. cannibalize the smaller tadpoles hatched out of the same batch of eggs, which enables them to develop quicker and get out of the pond before it could possibly evaporate. So those are the types of things that I ran into when I was working on this book that you know that just blew me away and there are more there are there are several other reasons why cannibalism zaza: Right. bill_schutt: is nature. zaza: I have to say one of the most horrifying instances of animal cannibalism that you describe in the book was that of the tiger sharks. Apparently once they're in the womb, their embryos develop at different times or something. But that's bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: not the scary part. The scary part is the bigger baby sharks who already have teeth somehow then proceed to eat the smaller ones all while still inside the womb. So bill_schutt: Yeah, zaza: they bill_schutt: it's zaza: will bill_schutt: not zaza: eat bill_schutt: really zaza: each bill_schutt: formal. zaza: other until... Yeah. bill_schutt: So think of it this way. So instead of, they hatch from eggs, but instead of eggs being laid like we usually think of them and the eggs are external, the eggs are maintained inside the mother and there are two overducks, a right and a left. And there are eggs that develop at different rates within that overduct. The ones that are the oldest eggs, and there's one on the right side and one on the left side, they hatch internally the smaller eggs. And when those, if some of those eggs are still around and they hatch, then those two sharks, right side and left side, devour the smaller sharks. And in essence, basically what happens is when they are delivered, when they leave their mother, they are already trained to be hunters. So this is the selective advantage that they have out in this wild and difficult world that they're gonna encounter. That's another really strange example of sort of, I think the term for that would be filial cannibalism. zaza: All right. And the second case that made my hair stand up a little bit was that of Sicilians. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but these sort bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: of snakey worms eating the skin of their mothers as babies. And then that skin grows back and bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: she's motionless while her babies are eating her. bill_schutt: Yeah, this was another pretty incredible zaza: I mean, bill_schutt: example. zaza: damn. bill_schutt: Yeah, these are actually amphibians. So they're sort of closely related to things like salamanders and frogs, but they're legless. And they look like an eel or a snake or a large worm. And they're found in the tropics in South America and also in Africa. And there are two very different types. Some of them lay eggs and some of them have live births. inside the mother rather than an egg being hatched. The ones that you're talking about, the egg layers, they were films that people looked at that showed the babies after they hatch, sort of squirming around their mothers. And years later, when people took a closer look at those videos, what they realized was that the mothers, which had grown sort of abnormally fat outer layer of skin suddenly developed a lot of fat content, which no one knew really why that happened. What these babies were doing is sort of latching on to their epidermis, to the outer layer of skin, and pulling it off and eating it. And so that was one example of sort of maternal cannibalism, parental care type of cannibalism. Years later, what they found was that the groups as the babies develop internally, the fat doesn't accumulate on the outside of its body, but along the overduct, along the sort of the uterine tract, and the babies are eating that fat-rich lining of the mother's reproductive system so that when they hatch, they're able to... I've already had a meal. So in both instances, players and in live-bearing, say, Scyllians, they have this incredibly strange maternal cannibalism. zaza: It's such an oxymoron, the phrase paternal care cannibalism. bill_schutt: Well, they lose a lot of weight to the mothers. You know, they don't go through this on skates, but you know, they do survive. zaza: By the way, are there some commonalities that we can draw from cannibalism in the animal world? Why does that happen? bill_schutt: I mean, like I mentioned before, there's cannibalism for a number of different reasons, and some of them are quite different. So for example, if you get into animals like bears and tigers and lions, if there is a female who comes into the group and she has a, for example, a cub, then it often pays for the lead male in that group to kill and cannibalize that cub estrus and is more receptive to mating quicker. So you get rid of that paternal investment and now you can mate with that female. So there are all sorts of different reasons why this happens and a lot of times across the animal groups you'll see similarities in the invertebrates for example or even in fish. Let's talk about fish for a minute. zaza: Yeah. bill_schutt: If you're laying five million eggs, if you're cod fish, then those eggs are, it's not like there's Tony and there's over there, think of it more like these are raisins. This is indiscriminate cannibalism. Here is a safe, here's a safe, easy to access food source that many species of fish take advantage of because they're not really putting a dent in the massive numbers of eggs that are out there, very few of which are ever gonna become adults anyway. But this is something that crosses many species of fish where you get, cannibalism. If you're laying thousands of eggs then it doesn't really matter if a couple of them get eaten zaza: Right. bill_schutt: or you know a hundred of them even. zaza: All right, if we put Neanderthals aside, you begin the story of human cannibalism with Christopher Columbus, bill_schutt: Let's zaza: and bill_schutt: go. zaza: there's a very good, if dark, reason for that. Could you break down that story for us a little bit? bill_schutt: Well, I think if you back up, cannibalism in humans evolved a long time before Christopher Columbus. zaza: Of bill_schutt: But zaza: course. bill_schutt: yeah, but in the book, I talk about the fact that now what it already developed is this taboo, which we haven't talked about yet, how cannibalism became this knee-jerk reaction that we all have. When I say that word, you are completely, you know, you're thinking about like Jeffrey Dahmer and what a horror show this was. Christopher Columbus. But by the time these sort of flag planters made their way across the Atlantic, it was already a very well-established taboo. And it became, just to use the example of Columbus. So he gets to the New World and he meets these people, indigenous people in the Caribbean. And the initial word that goes back to the Queen is that, They're nice people. They are, you know, and of course I'm paraphrasing. These are these are nice people. They're they're they're they're fit to become good Christians and and that's what we'll do now. Now Columbus was looking for gold and he didn't find any gold in the Caribbean. So when that took when that sort of came about and he made four voyages Then then then things changed and going from looking for gold and there was as I said very little of it if any another resource and the most valuable resource that he found were humans. And so Queen Isabella had and once again paraphrasing is that, you know, if the people that you encounter are good people, then you need to treat them well. But if they're cannibals, you can do whatever you want, all bets are off. And so lo and behold, on a board and forth journeys to the new world, that he met, they were all cannibals. So you could do whatever you wanted to them. You could destroy their civilization. You could murder them. You could enslave them. You could steal everything that they owned and that's what he did. And the Spaniards that followed him as well and other European groups did the same thing in Mexico and Central America and South America and then in Africa. It was the same thing. If you could call someone a cannibal, then in reality these journeys became that you weren't dealing with humans. And this happened time and time again. So you dehumanize indigenous groups and the best way to do that is to call them cannibals. That's not to say that some cannibalism probably didn't occur in these groups because one of the themes of my book is that culture is king. And that's the major difference between humans and human cannibalism and animal cannibalism. Cannibalism is a wonderful way to honor your dead if you're the war-a in South America or the four in New Guinea. Or the very concept of consuming another human is hard, the worst thing that you can do. So it's just a matter of the fact that in Western culture, and it started with the ancient Greeks and then moved to the Romans and then throughout Europe, that cannibalism was literally the worst thing that you could do to another human being. And the only way that it would occur was if the gods were mad at you or you were doing it in the extreme form of vengeance. So there was a big difference there in cultures. So there are cultures where, at least there were, where cannibalism is something that is done to honor the dead, for example. zaza: If we go back to Conquistadors and to Christopher Columbus, so like you said, they kind of weaponized this taboo against the local populations, right? Suddenly every local that was found resisting was proclaimed a cannibal practically. bill_schutt: Absolutely. zaza: And a particularly striking story in this horrible saga is that of Trinidad that you describe in the book. The Spanish of course thought that there was lots of gold there, so the locals were designated as non cannibals at first, a proper workforce to mine. Once it turned out that there was no gold there, reports began filtering suddenly that the locals were cannibals after all, so it was kind of okay to start killing them again. Horrifying. bill_schutt: Yeah, they basically depopulated that entire island, which is horrifying. zaza: We talked about it already right now. Where does the taboo of cannibalism, which here in the West, like you said, we regard as one of the worst there is, if not the worst? Where does it come from? bill_schutt: It starts with at least in Western culture. It started with the ancient Greeks zaza: Yeah. bill_schutt: and and and so they were the ancient Greeks were They were the ones who sort of determined that that cannibalism was something that a good Greek would never do That that the others did this, you know, which is very similar to zaza: The Barbarians. bill_schutt: Yeah, the the barbarians and this is the same line that that Columbus and the and the flag planters used as well and from the the Greeks it got passed on to the Romans and and it's spread throughout Europe. And so you had, you know, so later on it would be Shakespeare and it would be the brother's grim. And you had a snowball effect where cannibalism was thought of as really the worst thing that you could do. And then it entered into the early anthropologists and they were expecting to find cannibals wherever they went. And so, yeah. And it goes on and on. You had Daniel Defoe with when he wrote Robinson Crusoe, just this idea that is ingrained in the Western brain that cannibalism is the most serious taboo. And so that's where it happened. And that was my hypothesis. It's that this is how this all took place. And I don't know how to sort of follow that up to lend evidence to it. I said, okay, so where was a place that didn't really have the connections or the major connections to the West. And when I looked at, I came across China and for the longest time, of course, there was some connection going back and forth between China and Europe. But it was not a major, for a long time it was not a major exchange of information. China, this vast country, they never got the memo that cannibalism was the worst thing you can do. And so there was culinary cannibalism in the 13th and 14th century and filial piety where if you had a sick relative, that one of the things that you could do as a young member of the family was to cut off a piece of your flesh and feed it to them, tied into the idea of medicinal cannibalism to help them survive. So, and there were a lot of cultures that, you know, that they never got the message that cannibalism was the worst thing that you could do. And they incorporated it into their practices. So once again, culture is king. It's we who, it's the individual cultures who determine what is right and what is wrong. Not just cannibalism, of course. zaza: I mean, it's a bit odd because Christianity seems to have some tentative relationship with cannibalism. I'm an atheist, but I went to Bible school as a kid from Eastern Europe. And I always struggled with the bit where the sacramental bread and wine turns into Jesus's body and blood, and we have to eat them during mass, especially bill_schutt: Thank zaza: because bill_schutt: you. zaza: the nuns told us that this actually happens. bill_schutt: Yeah, what's the truth zaza: I bill_schutt: is not zaza: didn't bill_schutt: so much. zaza: and kind of still don't understand why we have to eat Jesus if, on the other hand, thing that exists. bill_schutt: Yeah. You know, I went into that and that's where I, you know, when you write a book about cannibalism, you sort of expect that you're gonna get some flack back about it. And when it was the section that I wrote about, about the host and the wine during communion, that got the most flack from, you know, from people associated with the Vatican, for example. But yeah, and, you know, in the old days, you know, I have a lot of, a lot of my relatives are Catholics And I don't believe that any of them consider that when they are taking communion on Sunday, that they are actually eating the body of Jesus Christ and drinking his blood. But this is symbolic and they realize that. But back in the old days, there was no symbolism. There were popes who went out there and said, no, this is not symbolic. This is actually the transformation of Christ's body into this communion wafer. zaza: Yeah, that sounds familiar. bill_schutt: And anybody who stands against that is, you know, that's blasphemy. So and things were, things were a lot more difficult back then as well. If you were a Jew, for example, who was convicted of abusing the host, then you would, you know, quickly burn. So yeah, it was, that was a really interesting aspect and maybe the most controversial thing that I talked about among many in this book. zaza: Can I ask what sort of pushback did you receive from the Vatican? bill_schutt: It wasn't directly from the Vatican. It was from people who had been scholars that were associated tangentially with the Vatican who told me that to consider this cannibalism was ridiculous. zaza: Now, despite our long-standing kind of cultural distaste for it, people actually practiced a peculiar form of cannibalism in Europe for a very long time, up until very recently even. Could you tell us a bit more about that? bill_schutt: Yeah, this was one of the two big surprises that I got when I decided to write this book and started to look into it. The first was how widespread it was across the animal kingdom. So we talked about that. But the other was that given this Western taboo and how strong it was, the fact that starting in the Middle Ages and going right up into the early 20th century, body parts of every type were used medicinally. So we're talking about blood. We're talking about fat. We're talking about flesh. and to cure things like epilepsy or bad skin or, and it just went on and on. And this really, this was a huge surprise. And as I said, this went right up into the 1900s in the Merck Index, which is sort of the pharmacological encyclopedia, Mumia was listed as having powdered mummy was listed as having medicinal value. And zaza: Powdered mummy. bill_schutt: yeah, this all came about translation. There was an Arabic term that is similar to the word mummy and the Europeans who came across that term for a while the Arabs had taken over Egypt. And one of these translations was mistranslated because in Arabic they were talking about this sort of to close wounds, for example. Kind of zaza: So, topically. bill_schutt: like a bandage almost that would dry zaza: Right. bill_schutt: and close the wound. And the Europeans mistranslated it and thought that they were talking about mummies. And so that mummies have medicinal value. So mummies were shipped to Europe or stolen and ground up and sold as having medicinal value. And as I said, this went on for, you know, 100 years or so right up into the beginning of the 20th century. It's like the 19 teens in the Merck index. Here you had this substance, Mumia. zaza: So what, you could just walk into a pharmacy and say, I want some ground at mommy, I have a headache. And they would bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: just give it to you in the 19th century. bill_schutt: That was probably fake or it was probably not real mummy. They would take some dead guy and dry him out and grind him up. But. zaza: but they would actually use bodies for that. bill_schutt: Yes. Yep. Yep. zaza: And what do they think this is gonna cure? What kind of diseases? Just a cure all bill_schutt: Yeah, zaza: or... bill_schutt: I can't remember the specifics, but I think it was more or less like you said, a general cure all for whatever ailed you. Instead of it was more or less along the lines of instead of take two aspirin and call me in the morning, it was pop this mummy probably made into an elixir and then drank. zaza: I'm sorry, that's pretty crazy. All right, at this, bill_schutt: Well, medicinal zaza: yeah. bill_schutt: capitalism still survives today in people who think that consuming their placentas does some good. And I had some experiences with that as well. zaza: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you described that in the book that you actually partook in that form of cannibalism a little bit. Could you bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: talk about that as well? That's fascinating. Is that still going on this trend, by the way? bill_schutt: Yeah, and it's not widespread. And it's basically a form of alternative medicine. So you might find it in practitioners of alternative medicine, mostly in the United States. It's not found for many other places. Started out as a sort of late hippie thing, late 70s, not as a, more as a sort of communal, we're talking about the placenta, let's clear that up here, zaza: Thank you. bill_schutt: which zaza: Bye. bill_schutt: is, mostly fetal tissue. partially maternal tissue. And it's really sort of the interface between the developing fetus and the mother. So the blood goes through and is filtered by, the mother's blood goes through and is filtered by the placenta before it enters the baby. So you can think of it as that. But it is delivered after the birth. This is what we're talking about here. that consuming the placenta after giving birth restores the hormones that are lost when the placenta is delivered. And so things like curing the baby blues, the depression that sometimes follows giving birth, these were the, this was the reasoning behind consuming your placenta. not very widespread. And so I had finished writing the pretty much finished writing the book and I recently retired, took an early retirement from teaching, but I was probably about 10 days away from starting a semester. And I had come across this story about placenta phagey and made a couple about it. And one of them hooked me up with a woman who lived in outside of Dallas, Texas, who did this for a living. She went to the hospital, she collected the placenta, and then she would bring it home and she would do things like dry it out and make powder out of it. Or if you wanted to have it fresh, she would make up a slurpee out of it. And you can bring it. And so there were all sorts of ways that she would who were on the phone for not like a half an hour and she's telling me about her clients and how interesting this was. And at the end of the conversation she goes, well, you know, it's too bad you can't come down here because you could eat my placenta. And I went, well, and she said, yeah, I just gave birth, you know, a month or so ago and I've got one in the in the in the freezer. My husband is a chef. He can prepare it for you any way you Asabuko style, however you want it, you could have it. And I'm just like amazed. I'm sitting there going, thinking to myself, did this woman just invite me down to Dallas, Texas, which I've never been there before, to eat her placenta. And then I started to think, if it's 10 years from now, I've written a book about cannibalism and talked about this. And I had the chance to go down there and do this. And I didn't do it. Then I'd be kicking myself in the behind. I know it. So I told my wife about it and she was like, go. minutes later, I had bought tickets, flew down there through a hellacious storm that had knocked out the power to this area. And I'm in the hotel that night and I go out to eat and there's a really, really weird vibe. And it had to do with the fact that there was, there was first instances of some serious illness that had come in from Africa and people really like a little wired and on edge. I get a phone call from her and she says you know well our babies that are canceled on us we were going to drop off our little angels but I got to tell you that my 10 homeschool kids will be there when you come over tomorrow. So the next day, I head over to her house and I make a stop at the liquor store. And I'm thinking to myself, okay, well, I gotta bring a bottle of wine for this. zaza: Thank you. bill_schutt: So I'm thinking, all right, well, I wanna find the most Texas looking salesperson that I can find down there, which is not difficult as a lady with cowboy boots the whole nine yards. And I said, well, you know, I've got a really interesting pairing for you today. And I told her what I was, and she literally ran away from me. So I grabbed the bottle of Italian red and I made my way over to her house and got greeted by this wave of 10 kids who were all over me. They'd never seen an iPhone before. This is back a couple of years ago. Can I hold your iPhone? And can you eat my mother's placenta? zaza: Buh-bye. bill_schutt: So it turned out to be this incredible experience. And she pretty much admitted that what she was dealing with was the placebo effect. She was very intelligent and recognized that there were no real scientific papers out there that showed that consuming your placenta did very much of anything, especially if you cooked it. And you're thinking in terms of if you're going to replenish your hormones by eating a placenta, hormones are a type of protein. And if you take this and cook it, you're now a denatured this protein. zaza: Ok. bill_schutt: It's not the same thing when you cook it as it is in the egg and and she recognized that but but but as she did say and We've got to agree with it is that you know the placebo effect is very strong So if you think you're getting a benefit out of it many times you do So after the interview was over her husband comes out and he's got like a complete chef's uniform on He's got the hat the whole thing any any steams up these vegetables and vegetables and sweats them. And he says, these vegetables are organic. And I'm like, I just remember saying, thank God, because there's no chance that I'm eating your wife's placenta unless the vegetables are organic. So he cooks this up. And finally, in the freezer, they defrost these little bits of her placenta. It really wasn't that much. It was maybe a couple of tablespoons. Dumps. zaza: What does that look like by the way? bill_schutt: Looks like, it looks like organ meat. zaza: like liver or bill_schutt: or like that. zaza: okay. bill_schutt: So he cooks it up and I ate it and it was delicious. You added the wine to it and it's just like anything else. It's how you cook it and what part of the body, whether it's a cow or a human or a pig or a chicken, it depends on what part you're eating and what it tastes like. And this tasted to me like, you know, it was a bit unique. And back when I was in college, we were all broken on Sundays. We used to watch football and we used to get chicken gizzards and fry them up with garlic and olive oil. And the taste reminded me of a chicken gizzard, but it zaza: Mm-hmm. bill_schutt: had the consistency. It was very tender. It tasted more. It had the consistency of veal. So that's what it tasted like. And so, yeah, if I'd have written, you know, I've written three novels. And if you let me just write this, make this entire trip up, it could not have been any weirder than it was. And she was wonderful. And her kids were wonderful. And her husband was really cool. And they were very poor. And I just remember for a number of Christmases after that, just sending them boxes of gifts and things like that for her kids. And I went in there all snarky thinking, you know, 10 kids is going to be like the old women who lived in the shoe and I just felt like such an idiot because she was such a nice person and so kind and treated me so well and it was a very memorable experience. I would never do it again. zaza: Did you feel different after eating bill_schutt: No, zaza: the placenta? bill_schutt: no, zaza: Were bill_schutt: not zaza: you like, bill_schutt: really. zaza: now I'm officially accountable? bill_schutt: No, never thought, never thought at all. I just thought, you know, I was doing it for the, for the sake of the book. I don't, zaza: Right. bill_schutt: I don't, you know, this, this is not something that I think makes any sense, especially since I could have, if she'd have been zaza: Yep. bill_schutt: ill, I might have gotten, you know, I might have gotten sick. And so that was a chance that I took. And so I do tell people that I don't believe that there are, that there are any benefits whatsoever, but there were definitely some, some, some, some possible problems that might develop from doing that. So it's not something that I recommend. zaza: Alright, so this placebo effect didn't work on you. bill_schutt: No, I hadn't had morning sickness or that sort of thing in the moves. zaza: Okay, just to make it clear, this point, is any form of chewing or ingesting any part of the human body in any form, is that considered cannibalism? Because for example, I'm a nervous wreck, I bite my fingernails all the time, bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: so I might technically speaking as some sort of a self-say-though cannibal or something. bill_schutt: There are gray areas in cannibalism. If you're kissing somebody and you're swapping spit with them, is that cannibalism? And so there are also, if you bite your fingernails, that sort of thing. So there are certainly gray areas where you could make, I mean, you could say that it's cannibalism, but that's really not what we're talking about here. When I define cannibalism as consuming all or part of the same species or a substantial part of that individual. zaza: Okay. bill_schutt: That's cannibalism to me. And so for example, I work at the Museum of Natural History. One of my colleagues, when we talked about cannibalism in dinosaurs, Mark Norell, a curator there, and I got into a discussion, and he had said that when he was in Africa, he saw a cannibal, he's, excuse me, he saw a camel eating another camel And he said he didn't consider that cannibalism. He considered it scavenging. And I said, well, I consider it cannibalism because the camel is eating another camel. If it had been eating a dead pig, then I wouldn't consider it cannibalism. So like I said, there are gray areas here, and there's some discussion about what is and what isn't. zaza: Okay, I recently went to McDonald's here in Berlin and I saw a pigeon eating some chicken nuggets that somebody left over. It just seemed kind of wrong, but I don't know. That's different species though. bill_schutt: Yeah, that's not cannibal. zaza: Anyway, bill_schutt: If zaza: okay, bill_schutt: it was if zaza: I bill_schutt: it zaza: have bill_schutt: was zaza: another tricky. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. bill_schutt: if the pigeon had been eating pigeon nuggets, then it would have been zaza: I have another trick one for you. I'm a massive hip-hop fan. And when the rapper Tupac got shot and killed there was a rumor floating around that Was apparently confirmed later that members of his crew the outlaws rolled some of his ashes in a joint and smoked them There's also the story about Keith Keith Richards snorting some of his father's ashes from the table with bill_schutt: Yep. zaza: these cases be considered Cannibals and we're not really bill_schutt: Well, I mean, I looked into it. I'd never heard the two pack story, so I can't really comment zaza: Yeah. bill_schutt: on it. They rolled his ashes and what smoked it. zaza: Yeah. bill_schutt: Not really consuming it. And by the same token, what happened, what I had read happened with Keith is that his beloved father had been cremated and in transferring his ashes from one place to another, onto the table. And he just sort of wiped them up with his finger and just sniffed them in. And I thought it was kind of, the way he described it, I thought was extremely touching. And I don't think he was being an idiot. I just think that was a bit of respect that he was paying to his dad. But I don't consider either one of those to be cannibals. If he'd huffed down the ashes or they'd consumed them, then I guess you might consider a cannibalism. As I said, there's a lot of gray area. zaza: gray areas. Yeah. You describe a lot of cases of survival cannibalism where people have nothing else to eat but the bodies of their comrades or other humans. By the way, how much nutrition do you get from eating a human? Why are these people who resort to survival cannibalism or who have to always so gaunt and skinny when they find them? I would be thinking that you would get some proper nutrition out of bill_schutt: Yeah, zaza: that. bill_schutt: that look that you see is the same look when you see starved children. And basically what has happened is that you have, you're starved to the point where your body is literally cannibalizing itself. Your protein is being broken down so that as a nutritional source by your own body. And that's why you have this sort of like sunken appearance that people I think that the human body in these conditions would be as nutritious as any other mammal that you might consume. So you're eating muscle first, probably, and then you're going for, and then you're eating organs like the liver and heart. And there's nutrition there. It's not going to, you know, we're not talking about, you know, healthy for a diet of consuming human flesh, but it is, you know, it's mammal flesh. So there's certainly nutrition there. zaza: All right, as we touched on it before, there were many cases of Western European colonizers designating local populations as cannibals, so they had a convenient reason to subjugate them. Right? Most of the time, these were either rumors or, you know, things they heard, inventions. There was hardly any proof bill_schutt: Well, I mean, zaza: for bill_schutt: there zaza: all that. bill_schutt: could have been ritual cannibalism as well zaza: Yeah, okay. bill_schutt: in some instances. zaza: Right, yeah. So on this note, we do know for sure that some tribes, like you mentioned in Guinea, for example, New Guinea, did practice a form of ritual funerary cannabism, right? We know that because also because a horrible disease began spreading amongst these tribes. Kuro, I think it was called, a disease that literally produces holes in the brain tissue. bill_schutt: It's very zaza: Could bill_schutt: reminiscent zaza: you, bill_schutt: of Alzheimer's. I think it's on the same spectrum zaza: Okay. bill_schutt: as Alzheimer's disease and the fact that it causes severe progressive damage to the brain. zaza: So if we discard our kind of social or cultural reservations, could we consider kuru, this disease, as the ultimate proof that cannibalism is necessarily a bad practice or are things not so simple? bill_schutt: I mean, I think that, I think that crew is, it is certainly a danger when you're, I mean, I mean, I just, there was this Facebook thing the other day that was like, what would you never eat? And I just put brains down there because whether you're talking about humans or you're talking about deer, for example, you're getting, you know, there is the possibility of getting this type of spongiform encephalopathy. It is a, it is a disease that is, it depends on who you talk to, caused by these self replicating proteins, which have never been seen called prions, or it's caused by something that's been termed a slow virus. And I have really been on the fence about which of these I believe because there are some serious experts on both sides, but in any event, that those diseases come about, whether you are getting mad cow disease, zaza: Yeah. bill_schutt: whether you're dealing with Kuru, come about because of eating neural tissue, spinal cord and brain, and of an infected individual. And so this was a great fear back when Slotter House, when the rules that were being used to deal with animals in Slotter houses and how they were fed, changed back in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a great fear that people were going to come down with mad cow disease because they were literally chopping up cows that had died and feeding them to other cows. And there were many instances of mad cow disease and some of them got into people and young people for example died tragically. So that's one aspect of that. this as a negative from cannibalism. And by the same token, the anthropologists who went into New Guinea in the 1950s found to their horror that approximately 1% of this indigenous group, the four, were dying from this terrible wasting disease. And two Nobel Prizes were won by the researchers who did that work to figure out that it was, the fact that women and children, after people had passed away, would consume parts of the deceased. The researchers wondered, why aren't men getting this disease? So there was this whole, you know, they thought it might have been genetic, but then children of both sexes were getting this. And what they found out was that it was because the women and the men weren't, and that it was from something very similar to mad cow disease. You had this, either a prion or a virus that was found in an infected victim's nervous system, and if you consumed it, that you would pass it on. And it didn't matter if you cooked it or not. You weren't destroying it. So yeah, it's something that would scare me. If there became widespread would certainly be something you would have to consider is the health hazards of this horrible, incurable disease. zaza: So does that come only from consuming brain tissue or other body parts as well? bill_schutt: From what I understand, the highest concentration of this is found in the brain and spinal cord and nerves. zaza: All right. There's also the example, I mean the example, the hypothesis that that was a contributing factor for the demise of the Neanderthals, right? bill_schutt: Yeah, that was a model that someone put together and I thought it was a really interesting model, but there's there's absolutely no proof You know, he just said there's proof that there was cannibalism that took place There's proof that Kuru kills will kill you so that might have been a contributing factor to the demise of the Neanderthals There's there's no solid evidence. It was a it was sort of a mathematical model that a researcher put together I thought it was interesting but but I mean I do spell it out as as as a model, nothing more. It's not like they found evidence of Kuru in the fossil record. zaza: Hmm. I recently hosted a famous anthropologist Professor Stringer on the podcast and we talked about this as well and he said that's a he said that's a very reasonable hypothesis And that he thinks it's very possible anyway bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: All right. Oh wow time is passing Right these days. It seems that in pop culture cannibalism is all the rage, right? We have the tv show Hannibal with maths michelson. I love that. I love that guy sexy French film Raw, then there was the film Fresh, and now we have Bones and All with Timothy Chalamet. It seems like the whole incest business that Game of Thrones kind of brought in is out and cannibalism is in. Why do you think that is? bill_schutt: Luckily for me, as a matter of fact. zaza: Yeah. Good timing. bill_schutt: Yeah, um So I I think that you know to me it reminds me of the of the idea of vampirism is something kind of Kind of well with vampirism. It's something like sexy about it and and and with cannibalism It's certainly not sexy, but but it is there is food plus equals fascination. Now, so if you can run that through a filter of sort of fictionalization, then it becomes acceptable. Then you can watch it if you know that it's fiction. And it is, you know, I guess people are stimulated by that. You know, we're into violence and gore on, especially if it's, you know, since the 19 late 1960s when Bonnie and Clyde and the Wild Bunch came out and you know, then people will get blown apart on the screen. You know, then there was this acceptance of, there was more acceptance of gore than anybody that I've seen before in the media. And so I think we've become numb to it. And as I said, I think we're all disgusted if we hear about criminal cannibalism. But if you are watching a movie where you know it's, you know, this is fictional, then it becomes, then you're fascinated by it because it's this combination of food, which has always had a tie-in to cannibalism, because it's like, you know, if you think about other cultures, they're sometimes sort of ostracized because of what they eat. For example, when I was a kid, that, you know, I heard this slang term for French, it was frogs, that's because they supposedly ate frogs legs. I didn't know if that was true or not. So you're defined by what you eat. And so there has always been this sort of fascination with food and you know so you tie that into this taboo that we have and I think you've got you've got all this interest right now. zaza: I see you wearing the t-shirt depicting Nosferatu. You think that vampires and vampirism was once a safer way to talk about cannibalism? bill_schutt: Oh gosh, I think vampirism is a form of cannibalism, but zaza: Okay. bill_schutt: I don't really tie the two together very much. zaza: We're almost at the end. No, we are at the end, which means I have to ask you something a bit trashy because the name of this podcast is Euro trash. You bill_schutt: plus. zaza: alluded to it already. But it seems that these these days on screen, the cannibals are getting sexier and sexier over bill_schutt: No. zaza: time. Right. We had Anthony Hopkins, bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: kind of smart, sophisticated, but he was a bit older, like more like Dracula or something. Like then we got Matt Mickelson, who was already kind of like sexy. He was an excellent chef, also extremely snazzy. Now we have Timothy Shalamay, the ultimate heartthrob cannibal. Is there any sort of connection between cannibalism and sex? bill_schutt: Well look, so now you have food plus the taboo, and then you have this really handsome guy. So that, I mean, bones and all flopped badly. zaza: Oh really? Because here everybody's talking about it. They're like, you have to go see that movie. I didn't check the box office though. bill_schutt: There was this huge lead up to it in the states, and I've been interviewed a number of times about it. And then when the movie finally hit it, bombed it, it didn't do well at all. But once again, you just go back to the attraction to cannibalism and then add the fact that, let's see, should we have the cannibalism be this kind of like ugly old guy? And I'm not talking about Anthony Hopkins, who I don't consider to be an ugly old guy. But let's put this sexy guy in here. Oh yeah, that's a much better idea. I just think that's what you're dealing with here. zaza: What's next though? We had incest, cannibalism. Where can we go next in pop culture and movies? bill_schutt: I don't know. zaza: Is there anything left? What's the last boundary? bill_schutt: I want to write about it if it's out there. I'm trying to figure out what the next thing that I'm writing about is. The after cannibalism that I wrote a book about the natural history of the heart. And I just finished one on the evolution of teeth and the natural history of teeth. But so yeah, I'm trying to think of and get back into some weirdness. But there's nothing that strikes me right now as being quite as interesting and multifaceted as cannibalism was, which is why after Bite, my book on teeth comes out, I think the next thing that'll come out is a children's version of the cannibalism book, which is now in discussion with my publisher, Algonquin. So there's nothing that comes to mind that is equivalent to that. And something that can be approached, I tried to stay away from the real sensational aspects of cannibalism because there have been a lot of what I consider to be junk out there. zaza: Or just like Jeffrey Darber all the time and all of this stuff bill_schutt: Yeah, zaza: and Ed Gaines. bill_schutt: and I really wanted to stay away from that when I wrote this book because for one, I wanted to look at cannibalism through the eyes of a zoologist, a scientist, but I didn't want to lay on that. I'm also an educator. I didn't want to lay on the heavy terminology and show off how much science I knew. I wanted to explain things. And I just thought that that was an approach that had never been taken before with this topic. cannibalism. On the other side, on the opposite side of the spectrum from the sensational stuff was where the academic works that you would only read if you were a scientist who was working on this species who cannibalized for whatever the reason happened to be. So there was this opening that I just walked right through and when I wrote this book and I sort of did the same thing for for blood feed and vampirism but yeah I'm looking for the next topic to do that And I haven't quite come up with it yet. zaza: Well, I hope you do, because this book was absolutely fantastic. bill_schutt: Thanks. zaza: I bill_schutt: Thank zaza: really bill_schutt: you. zaza: recommend it to everybody. Where can people follow your work? bill_schutt: Um, let's see, uh, bill shut.com. So I have a website and then you can just look me up on Facebook. It's bill shut author. Also on Goodreads bill shut author. Uh, all of Ram's on the book is available wherever you want in every format. All of my books are, you know, available in any format that that you prefer, which, and I'm just thrilled about that. So, um, so, so I hope you guys are. interested enough to sort of follow up with it and get back to me, you can certainly contact me through my website and happy to chat with readers. zaza: Alright, do you have any social media accounts? bill_schutt: Well, like a Twitter account. Yeah. zaza: Yeah, yeah, you have to. Okay. Okay. And they can, people can find it on your website as well, probably, bill_schutt: Yeah. zaza: right? bill_schutt: Yeah. So, I mean, website is B I L L S C H U T T. It's pretty easy to remember. zaza: Awesome. Professor Schott, thank you so much for taking the time. This was fantastic. bill_schutt: You're very welcome. Nice to be here, Zaza. zaza: Thank you. Bye. Bye. bill_schutt: Bye.