Dire reports that a German tourist may have been victim of cannibalism in French Polynesia are part of a widely held belief that there are still people in the South Pacific region of the world we live in, practising cannibalism.

Stefan Ramin, a German tourist and wanderer on holiday with his German girlfriend in French Polynesia went missing while hunting goats with a local guide in the forest. A week later, findings of charred human remains are discovered in a frost. Was Stefan Ramin victim of a brutal murder or was it cannibalism ?

Dreadful reports yesterday, local prosecutors believe it was the latter. “The probability is that he was murdered by a cannibal and parts of him were eaten,” one prosecutor stated. The local guide seems to be the suspect # 1 and is being hunted by local police and members of military. Meanwhile the charred remains are being flown to Paris for DNA analysis.

Tales of cannibalism from the South Pacific

Stefan Ramin, 40, from Hamburg, disappeared last month after reaching the remote tropical island of Nuku Hiva in French Polynesia. After a week of searches, charred human remains and clothes have been found near a campfire in a remote valley on the island, raising fears that he may have been attacked and eaten by cannibals. Testing in Paris will conclude whether the ashes belong to Stefan Ramin, but is expected to take several weeks.

A squad of 22 police officers on the island are now searching for Henri Haiti, a local guide who took Stefan Ramin on a goat hunting trip in the mountains of Nuku Hiva and is believed to be the last person to see him alive.

Animalistic: Arts of Cannibalism to freak you folks

After setting off on the hunt,  Haiti returned to tell stefan Ramin’s girlfriend Heike Dorsch, 37, that there had been an accident and that Ramin had been injured. But when she tried to raise the alarm,  Haiti allegedly attacked her and tied her to a tree, before fleeing the scene.

Stefan  Ramin set off with his girlfriend Heike Dorsch from Germany in 2008 on what was supposed to be the trip of a lifetime. They arrived on Nuku Hiva, largest of the Marquesas islands, in their boat on Sept 16. They have planned to spend several months in French Polynesia.

Stefan Ramin, who lists “travelling, blue water sailing, kiting, kitesurfing, surfing, diving” as his interests on Facebook, had been missing for a week when the Nuku Hiva police found his remains. Bones, teeth and melted fillings were also found in the campfire ashes.

Investigators believe a “human body was hacked to pieces and burned”. A spokesman for the German foreign ministry said it was “aware of the case and in contact with locals authorities.” News websites in French Polynesia said the incident had shocked the small and peaceful nation. “No one can believe what has happened,” Deborah Kimitete, the deputy mayor of Nuku Hiva, told the local news website Les Nouvelles.

“This has never happened here before, this is the first time, it’s horrible.”

Les Nouvelles also reported that Henri Haiti’s family had been out looking for their missing son, who is now stamped with cannibalism. He was described by locals as young man who loved sport and was well known in the village. Nuku Hiva has a population of just over 2000 and has a history of cannibalism, but the practice was believed to have ceased. The island featured in the stories of Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick.

Cannibalism Stories : History and Facts

“It’s true that French Polynesia once had something of a reputation for cannibalism, but that was a century ago,” says John Gimlette, the travel writer. “In 1910, the American anthropologist, A P Rice, described how the people of the Marquesas Islands ritualistically killed their captives. Here goes the list of cannibalism stories:

“First, they broke their legs, to stop them running away, then they broke their arms, to stop them resisting. This was an unhurried killing, because the Marquesans enjoyed observing their victim contemplating his fate. Eventually, the man would be skewered and roasted.”It seems like the Marquesans were a very very evil folk.

Such rituals have passed into Pacific mythology. But, in South America, the practice of cannibalism appears to have endured into at least the second half of the 20th century.

“In 2000, I visited a tribe called the Ache in central Paraguay,” says Gimlette, author of Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge. “I asked their warden if they still practised cannibalism. ‘Not for the past 20 years,’ he answered, ‘although they still think about it all the time.’”

Anthropologists distinguish between survival cannibalism and ritual cannibalism, endocannibalism (the eating of one’s own dead) and exocannibalism (the killing of outsiders). Survival cannibalism can be traced back to prehistoric times. A two-million-year-old cranium was once found with cut marks, suggesting that the flesh was carefully peeled away from the skull.

Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, observed two types of cannibalism in Asia: the reverential eating of one’s own dead and the triumphant demolition of one’s enemies. It wasn’t, however, until Christopher Columbus’s expeditions in the late 1400s that the term became widely known. His report on the flesh-eating “Caribs” tribe in the West Indies appears to have been misinterpreted as “Canibs”, hence “cannibals”.

Cannibal holocaust : We were all cannibals once !

The most bloodthirsty of the early known cannibals were the pre-Columbus Aztecs in Mexico, whose high priest used to flay their prisoners of war one by one, holding the beating heart aloft for the crowds.

More restrained cannibals were also common. Fijian warriors ate their enemies as a mark of respect. Endocannibals, such as the tribes of Papua New Guinea, believed that by eating the hearts and brains of their family and friends, they would take on their desirable qualities. In 1979, William Arens, an American anthropologist, decided that this was all nonsense. In his book, The Man-Eating Myth, he maintained that ritual cannibalism was an Imperial lie, a propaganda tool to help tame the ignoble savage. This view held sway until fresh anthropological and molecular biological research, including the study of ancient faeces, discovered that pretty much all of us had been cannibals once.

Cannibalism has certainly remained prevalent as tool of war in the past 15 years, including allegations against Congolese rebels, Indonesian tribes and Liberian rebels. And humans have always been prepared to eat one another in extremis: whether the crash-landed Uruguayan rugby team made famous by the film Alive or the emaciated citizens in the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.

What this latest story about cannibalism reveals is our abiding interest in a topic that fascinates and repulses in equal measure. Today, the only active endocannibals are thought to be the Korowai tribe in Papua New Guinea. Numbering around 3,000, they were unaware of the outside world until mid 1970’s. Unverified rumours exist of them eating the brain immediately after death, while it is still warm. In 2006, a television documentary claimed that they ate people they believed to be witches.

“It’s all a bit of a mystery,” warns Gimlette. “Stories of their cannibalism have been exaggerated in a bid to boost their appeal to mawkish visiting tourists.”

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