Mmm... tastes like pork

Human cannibalism was once common, prion gene suggests

Early humans may have regularly dined on each other.

That is the unappetizing conclusion of British researchers who have discovered that a gene that protects against prion diseases -- infectious diseases that can be spread through eating contaminated flesh -- is found in people all over the world.

The gene is most common among the Fore of Papua New Guinea who, until the late 1950s, feasted on the flesh of the dead at funerals. The Fore also suffered from kuru, an infectious disease that leads to tremors and dementia, and kills its victims within two years.

Researchers now know kuru is transmitted by a prion, a deviant protein that causes other proteins to clump together in the brain. They also know that it belongs to a group of diseases that includes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (sometimes known as mad-cow disease) and its human version, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. All three leave the brains of victims riddled with holes.

Unless you happen to carry a protective gene.

The British team, whose results were published in today's issue of the journal Science, found that gene was most prevalent in female Fore over 50 who had survived years of mortuary feasting without getting kuru.

British people who carry the gene also seem to be protected from new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

[…]The British researchers, led by John Collinge of University College in London, wanted to know how common the protective prion gene is, so they checked more than 2,000 DNA samples selected to represent worldwide genetic diversity.

They found a version of the gene in all populations, with its prevalence decreasing in East Asia except for the Fore.

This led them to conclude the gene may have evolved because it offered protection to human cannibals, and that cannibalism must have been widespread early in human history.( Read more... )

this is awful

Looters Ransack Baghdad's Antiquities Museum

Looters have sacked Baghdad's antiquities museum, plundering treasures dating back thousands of years to the dawn of civilization in Mesopotamia, museum staff said on Saturday.

They blamed U.S. troops for not protecting the treasures.

Surveying the littered glass wreckage of display cases and pottery shards at the Iraqi National Museum on Saturday, deputy director Nabhal Amin wept and told Reuters: "They have looted or destroyed 170,000 items of antiquity dating back thousands of years...They were worth billions of dollars."

She blamed U.S. troops, who have controlled Baghdad since the collapse of President Saddam Hussein's rule on Wednesday, for failing to heed appeals from museum staff to protect it from looters who moved in to the building on Friday.

"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum. If they had just one tank and two soldiers nothing like this would have happened," she said. "I hold the American troops responsible for what happened to this museum."

The looters broke into rooms that were built like bank vaults with huge steel doors. The museum grounds were full of smashed doors, windows and littered with office paperwork and books.

"We know people are hungry but what are they going to do with these antiquities," said Muhsen Kadhim, a museum guard for the last 30 years but who said he was overwhelmed by the number of looters.

"As soon as I saw the American troops near the museum, I asked them to protect it but the second day looters came and robbed or destroyed all the antiquities," he said.

Amin told four of the museum guards to carry guns and protect what remained.

Some of the museum's artifacts had been moved into storage to avoid a repeat of damage to other antiquities during the 1991 Gulf War.

It houses items from ancient Babylon and Nineveh, Sumerian statues, Assyrian reliefs and 5,000-year-old tablets bearing some of the earliest known writing. There are also gold and silver helmets and cups from the Ur cemetery.

The museum was only opened to the public six months ago after shutting down at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. It survived air strikes on Baghdad in 1991 and again was almost unscathed by attacks on the capital by U.S.-led forces.

Iraq, a cradle of civilization long before the empires of Egypt, Greece or Rome, was home to dynasties that created agriculture and writing and built the cities of Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylon -- site of Nebuchadnezzar's Hanging Gardens.