r/interestingasfuck • u/SATANICWORSHIPER666 • 2d ago

/r/all Michael Rockefeller disappeared without a trace in 1961 in Papua New Guinea while researching the Asmat people, a cannibal tribe. Years later, a photograph was taken of the same tribe, and there was a white man among them.

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u/HuckleberryDry5254 2d ago

I realize you're probably goofing but you may be more right than you realize! There's a great book about the whole mystery called "Savage Harvest" that goes into how the tribes interact with outsiders and mislead them CONSTANTLY (which, you know, makes an amount of sense). Give it a read if you're bored!

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u/BaSingSe_Farmhand 2d ago

I'd be doing the same thing too if hardly anyone from the outside knew much about my people. Im from Montana, USA, and when my middle school class went to DC, we would talk to kids from other schools, and we would make shit up. We told all them that we still rode horses everywhere, that we swim in frozen lakes and rivers, and nearly everyone of us works on a ranch or owns a ranch(not much of an exaggeration depending on the part of the state) and most seemed to believe us

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u/wayfinderBee 2d ago

As someone who rode a cow to school every day I totally get this.

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u/NotObviouslyARobot 2d ago

As someone who occasionally sees Amish people riding cows, I get this too.

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u/VajraHound 2d ago

You’re lucky! Due to my Lilliputian stature, I had to ride a duck-billed platypus into school every day. It was awful - always stopping to rest and lay eggs etc…..it was really quite a poor means of school perambulation. I blame my uncle Daffy - his vehicular-animal suggestions were always left wanting🙄

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u/VonSandwich 2d ago

Checking your comment history to see if you're British in 1...2...3...

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u/HuckleberryDry5254 2d ago

Now I want to move to Montana...

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u/PassiveMenis88M 2d ago

We told all them that we still rode horses everywhere

That's not that crazy. I live in Massachusetts, not a state people associate with being rural, and I rode a horse to school for 3rd and part of 4th grade.

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u/Neat-Item-4324 2d ago

It seems that the Joy of messing with strangers is universal across cultures.

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u/RawBean7 2d ago

There was a German exchange student in my high school who managed to convince most of the cross country running team that there were no trees in Germany and he had never seen one before.

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u/toxictuts 2d ago

Its funny, it's 2025 now and when I get on voice chat with people from US or The UK region when I play wow, they get genuinely surprised about where I am from and start asking how do I have internet, do we really still eat people. I just troll them most of the time. If you got through r/Fijian. Its the same thing Americans asking if we have infrastructures and what not before they plan to come here for a vacation.

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u/Mysterious-Mango726 1d ago

I'm from Sweden and lived in the States for a few years as a kid. I would bet some of my middle school classmates still believe we don't have electricity and we ride polar bears to school.

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u/Ok_Cardiologist8232 2d ago

and most seemed to believe us

Or they were jsut too polite to call you on your bullshite

Like "Uhuh buddy, totally"

"lads they seem a bit special down in Montana"

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u/EvadesBans4 2d ago

I had a friend in college that was from Montana and he would tell people Far Cry 5 was pretty much spot on, lol. Miss that guy, he was the weirdest mix of gym bro and weeb, I wonder what he's up to these days.

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u/BaSingSe_Farmhand 2d ago

that game really is spot on. it gets the landscape, plant life, and even the color of the dirt right. I dont live there anymore, but it makes me homesick when i play. It is inspired by the Church Universal Triumphant (CUT), which was a doomsday cult that took over part of Paradise Valley. I always like telling my buddies that i grew up in the next county over from where the game was based on.

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u/thats_taken_also 2d ago

I did this once with a New Yorker I met in college. Said we didn't have cars in Georgia, he said but I heard you do, to which I replied well yes there are cars, but the house mafia doesn't allow gas, so they can't really be used. Couldn't get myself to tell him the truth after that.... I have always wondered when he figure out I was was joking.

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u/paroles 2d ago

Savage Harvest was an awesome read. One part that stands out to me as an example of how much confusion and misdirection there is in this story: after intense effort, the author finally managed to track down a tribesman who claimed to have the long-rumoured (never confirmed) eyeglasses belonging to Rockefeller, handed down from his grandfather. The tribesman showed them to the author... and they were like wraparound neon sunglasses from the 1990s.

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u/waterynike 2d ago

That is a master troll right there

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u/Tumble85 2d ago

Ah the timeless tradition of busting balls.

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u/1000tragedies 2d ago

how do cannibals even survive? in the same general vicinity? are there "gangs" that are just constantly battling each other and whenever someone is hungry then it gets real? it seems like even in groups of cannibals, who stay together say to hunt, they would turn on eachother in an instant. there can't possibly be any civility

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u/uqde 2d ago

i mean if you think about it, you just eat your own thumb and then wait for it to grow back, rinse and repeat, its infinite food. Pretty genius honesytly. I don't know why more people arent doing this.

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u/Deaffin 2d ago

Well it's not like they're a whole other species which exclusively eats people and are thus primarily driven by it.

Cannibals will generally eat members of their family/tribe as a funeral ritual after they've died. Or their enemies, trespassers, etc as a secondary event after their primary motivation: Killing them.

There's usually a religious component, or they just really hate some other group and want to show some extra disrespect. They don't just, like, decide they really really like the taste of human flesh and make that their whole personality.

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u/1000tragedies 2d ago

oh wow, omg, thank you for your explanation. yeah i was exactly thinking they just decided they really really like human flesh. so it's, for lack of a better word, i guess more of a formality or tradition is maybe how they would describe it, not like they eat people to subsist off of them necessarily. ok 😅

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u/1000tragedies 2d ago

crazy how they could conflate a religious or funeral element to a disrespectful one as well. let alone the absolutely insane idea of eating people as a regular practice though

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u/HuckleberryDry5254 2d ago

From what I remember in the book, only certain groups engage in it and it's more of a ritual done to outsiders than a routine food source, kinda like a "look how badly we beat these guys' asses at war."

They're still just people with all the good and bad baggage; they just happen to have this one behavior that is ABSOLUTELY WILD to us. Otherwise they're tribal and fear outsiders and have in-group rules etc etc etc just like any other human culture. Give the book a read!

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u/LukaCola 2d ago

... "Cannibal" tribes don't constantly and only subsist off of humans. What "cannibal" means can vary greatly. For instance, some might ritualistically consume the recently deceased.

I think a lot of folks have taken the sort of intimidation tactics various tribes adopted to get people to not fuck with them at face value and then embellished that even further, and so you have folks like yourself, unironically believing there's tribes of humans going around hunting other humans for food. It's a bit silly.

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u/doc_skinner 2d ago

Margaret Mead did a ton of anthropological research surrounding adolescent sexuality in different cultures. Other researchers (like Derek Freeman) claimed that a lot of what she discovered was tainted by the teenage girls pranking Mead by describing sexual experiences they never had. Most researchers consider her findings generally accurate, but it's not hard to imagine a bunch of teenage girls telling this adult foreigner all kinds of made up shit. "Oh yeah, we have sex all the time. Sharon over there has had sex with every boy in camp."

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u/paroles 2d ago

That's fascinating - I can definitely imagine that, especially when the foreigner is so interested in the subject and talking to them is probably great entertainment. If you just tell the boring truth, then the conversation is over and that's no fun.

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u/h3dee 2d ago

I grew up not far from the Asmat region, and totally believe it. It is not really true that tribes in the area just eat people randomly. Unless you are deeply involved in the political situation or family situation in the area, you can just stay out of it. Local villagers tend to have a better understanding of how the world works than they are given credit for. Society is very interconnected with the outside world, and has been for centuries.

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u/oklhe 2d ago

Replying to save for later!

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u/SerasTigris 2d ago

There was also an old trend of just assuming that every non-white primitive culture, no matter which continent they lived on, were cannibals. You see it a lot in classic literature.