LAST September, a lawmaker in Indian-controlled Kashmir stood up in the state's legislative assembly and spoke of a valley filled with human carcasses near his home constituency in the mountains: "In our area, there are big gorges, where there are the bones of several hundred people who were eaten by crows".
This curious desire was in full evidence recently when two men announced their discovery of a half-ape, half-human carcass in the backwoods of Georgia: an ex-Bigfoot that had ceased to be.
These processes are consistent with bone marrow extraction, and suggest a common butchery practice aimed at extracting edible tissues from both human and non-human carcasses [35], [37], [50].
But the stark differences in the way that human and nonhuman carcasses break down casts doubt on experts who estimate the time since a human's death from animal carcasses and the study's results could one day be used in court to argue against those experts' testimony. .
The finding is important because "so far there [hasn't been] any study based on monitoring human and pig carcasses under exactly the same conditions," says Agapios Agapiou, an analytical chemist at the University of Cyprus in Nicosia who was not involved with the work.
But it also meant plastic, styrofoam, electronics, metal cans, rubber tires, ammunition, explosives, human feces, animal carcasses, lithium batteries, asbestos insulation, and human body parts -- all of it doused in jet fuel and lit on fire.
Fear of the dead is common in many if not all human cultures, and carcasses are repulsive to most people, but this issue has not been addressed in depth concerning mammalian herbivores.
Then there's the dubious experience offered by the spectacle of accusation, grief and rage he must daily oversee: sometimes Stanfield "feels as if he's sitting in an abattoir, where all around him is the raw carcass of human suffering being boned and filleted while the steady drip of human hate coagulates on the floor of the chamber".
Seagulls stood their distance, looking unsure what to do as the gathering of humans stood beside the carcass, discussing the daunting tasks ahead.
