where I come from people never die. Before you rush to buy a house next to mine, I do not mean people live forever, I mean that the English will never say a person whose vital signs are zero is "dead." In good company of people who are close to the deceased is said to have "disappeared" or "gone to a better place" or are "longer with us." In informal contexts people will say euphemistic they "got rid of this mortal coil" or "popped their clogs" or are "pushing daisies". This is all to do with the traditional British "stiff upper lip" and says a lot about our desperate need to avoid any kind of sentimentality or emotion.
Some say it is not very healthy, we should cry hard and release our grief. Some say we should moan and scream and beat our chests as they do. Some say we should support the body in a corner and get rat-arsed as the Irish do. But for the English, after a silent funeral, he is out of the house the next of kin for a quick cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich and then get out of there as soon as possible. But apparently, for some of us, funerals used to be very different.
Up to and including the first part of the 20 e century, the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea (and some other people around the world) used to eat their corpses (for as far as our best anthropologists are aware) because they believed he was the best way to create a permanent link between the living and the dead. I guess the digestive system sorted the good bits of bad bits and all the things they disliked about me Auntie Doris still smoldering behind a bush and all the good bits become nutrition.
Unfortunately for them though, mocking the dead of the same tribe, social group or society known endocannibalism can cause a form of BSE known as the kuru (bovine form is what we call the "mad cow").
In the early 1900s, there was a major epidemic in Papua New Guinea after some members of the Fore tribe chowed down on a car guy who had developed the disease spontaneously and the epidemic lasted until some few years ago
disease was unique to the Fore and their nearest neighbors and was caused by the ingestion infected organs of chap - and worst of all it was orally transmitted. Because men ate the meat of choice pieces and women were left with brain and other organs where the majority of perpetrators resided prion, the disease has mainly affected women and in some areas 25 percent women have died as a result thereof.
What is interesting is that, according to a survey by an Australian medical researcher named Michael Alpers, some people of the Fore tribe has never contracted the disease, even though they shared a "Chappy meal "with people who subsequently developed the disease and died horrible deaths. When he dug deeper, he found that these lucky people were safe because they had a particular genetic profile that completely protected them. "Marvellous!" He said. "From these people, I can develop a vaccine that will stop this disease from spreading to the rest of the world!"
But Alpers was shocked. When he compared the genetic profile of Fore uninfected people to those of everyone on the planet, he found that the immunity was far from unusual. Many people from other parts of Asia, Europe and Africa, have developed the same immunity and had the same genetic profile. His conclusion was that, at a time in our history, there may be around half a million years, it is they who ate and our dear disappeared Fore tribe who were not. We had developed immunity, the Fore tribe had not. For this reason, the kuru disease remained confined to the Fore people and never spread outside the zone, even if it was transmitted orally.
Thus, half a million years or so ago according to this theory, funerals in the area we now call England may have been very different, especially restoration . Give cucumber sandwiches seem even more boring!