The Oldest Human DNA Found Was Located In A Gruesome Place

Here's an up-front question for you: If you and your buddy were stranded on a frozen mountainside without food, and your buddy died, would you eat them? Not to be morbid or anything, but he might be an organ donor, anyway — provided you dig through all the fat and muscle. Gruesome? Of course. But far from being a mere thought experiment, this actually happened to plane crash survivor Piers Paul Read in 1972 in the Andes. He documented the whole thing in his 1974 book "Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors," which was made into the 1993 movie "Alive."

That film wasn't the first or last of its kind. 1973's "Soylent Green" famously depicts a dystopian future — 2022, of all years — where an overcrowded, environmentally ravaged, and impoverished world subsists on little processed wafers from the Soylent Corporation. The wafers, of course, are made from people. On the comedic side of things, 1993's "Cannibal! The Musical" — written by "South Park" and "The Book of Mormon" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone — retells the story of famed U.S. cannibal Alferd Packer. On the horrific side of things, 2016's coming-of-cannibal-age film "Raw" serves up some truly traumatizing imagery.
In the end, cannibalism acts as a kind of unbreachable moral barrier, beyond which dwells unhumans like Jeffrey Dahmer. But as it turns out, our vision of cannibalism is more modern than you might think. In fact, humanity's oldest DNA was found in the tooth of a cannibal. 

The Oldest Human DNA Found Was Located In A Gruesome Place