Cannibalism: It will get you, um, closer to god. Or, at least, that’s what an isolated tribe somewhere in the middle of Papua New Guinea used to believe.

The tribe, called the Fore people, believed that the only way to get to kwelanandamundi (or the land of the dead) is by being eaten.

Eating Deceased Relatives

You can imagine the Fore people as a living relic of our past. But unlike our primitive ancestors, they engaged in mortuary feasts. You see, up until the 1960s, the fore people widely practiced cannibalism. Rest assured, they only ate the recently deceased.

“The Fore ate deceased relatives for several reasons,” City University of New York (CUNY) anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum tells Upvoted.

When a relative passed away, it was primarily women who would cook and feed on the dead body to show their love and respect for that person. After placing the cooked meat on banana leaves, they’d consume the entire body—brains, head, genitals, and all.

Gastronomic Appreciation

Eating the body protected the community from the angry ghost of the deceased person. Once eaten, the spirit was free to wander to the land of the dead.

Sometimes, the bodies were eaten simply out of “gastronomic appreciation,” according to a study in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Overtime, the Fore developed a taste for the dead, giving scraps and leftovers to children who begged and pleaded for a bite of human flesh.

Doomed to Extinction

Then, in the 1950s, the Fore people suffered from a serious and peculiar affliction. Like a biblical plague, the Fore people were being killed off, one by one, by an unknown epidemic. The weird part? It was mostly women who met their untimely demise.

“The people began to think they were doomed to extinction for so many of their women were dying…” writes Lindenbaum in her study.

Things got so bad, the ratio of males to females dwindled down to three to one. From 1957 to 1968, over 1,100 people died—and that’s out of a population of only 8,000. If things kept progressing, the Fore people would go the way of the dinosaurs.

Trembling in Fear

Before dying, those afflicted would suffer from bouts of uncontrollable crying and maniacal laughter. They’d shake and tremble, lose muscle coordination, and, eventually, were unable to walk or swallow. Within a year of symptoms first appearing, they’d die.

In an autopsy study, medical doctor Ken Boone describes treating one of the last living patients in 2003:

“That evening I went down with Jerome and Toby to see the patient. By then he was not talking. He had lost his gag reflex, had a bit of chest infection and had developed some bedsores.”

The Disease That Pokes Holes in Your Brain

The Fore people were suffering from a fatal and incurable neurodegenerative disease. The culprit? Kuru disease, an illness contracted by consuming infected human tissue. Kuru is a prion disease, similar to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Mad Cow’s disease.

But unlike Parkinson’s, it’s acquired by ingesting human tissue laden with infectious prions rather than inherited through genes, according to the University of Utah, Genetics Science Learning Center. The kicker? Infected prions mostly inhabit the brain. Needless to say: You shouldn’t eat human brains.

Killer Proteins

Some prions are what you would call “killer proteins.”

Unlike normal proteins, infected prions are folded in an abnormal shape. Whenever these prions come in contact with normal, similar proteins, the normal protein assumes the shape of the infected prion. This is how they replicate (since prions are not a “living” virus, they don’t contain DNA or RNA).

Since infectious prions are shaped so unusually, they bind together in tight clumps that are toxic to cells, leaving holes where neurons used to be in your brain.

According to the University of Utah, Genetics Science Learning Center, the “brain tissue in infected individuals is filled with holes, giving it a sponge-like appearance.”

According to Andy Ellington, biochemist at the University of Texas at Austin, “You can sort of think of prions as the first domino that initiates a cascade of conformational events that leads to a big, tangled mess in your brain. Not good.”

Much like Kuru, Mad Cow’s Disease is spread by cannibalistic cows consuming infectious prions. But the reason there are so few cow to human transmissions is because of “huge species barriers in prion replication,” explains Ellington.

The Fate of Kuru

When word of Kuru spread through the Fore community, government patrol officers cracked down on the practice of cannibalism, according to the study by John Matthews. Eventually, the practice ceased and the community flourished. By 1977, only 30 people had died from Kuru.

What has the near extinction of the Fore people taught us? Don’t eat brains, obviously. In fact, don’t eat people. It’s bad for your health—and you just might go insane.

Though, other people might disagree with this advice (and by other people, I mean cannibals):