Sometimes German People Eat People, Too, Y'know

“I think it would be mistaken to conclude from these bone finds that this was cannibalism or has some cultural background. In Germany too, corpses are dilettantishly discarded, that doesn’t just happened in the Second or Third Worlds.”
 — Adolph Gallwitz, professor of police psychology at the police college in Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany, makes a good point about a pile of human bones found on the South Pacific island of Huku Niva. Local police think the bones may be the remains of a German engineer, Stefan Ramin, who went exploring the island with a local hunter and has been missing since October 9th. Some say that the bones betray evidence of a ritual killing and perhaps even cannibalism — leading the German tabloid Bild to run the headline, “Do Cannibals Still Exist on the Death Island?” accompanied by a 19th-century etching of Polynesian natives flaying strips of flesh from a prisoner bound to a stake. Huka Niva authorities are concerned this could affect their tourism industry. But as we know, cannibalism is not strictly a South Pacific phenomenon. And there are other terrible things about this story.