It sounds like something straight out of a horror novel or movie: A tribe in Papua New Guinea, the Fore, ate the brains of their dead relatives at funerals, according to the Guardian.

This startling finding comes from researchers in Britain and Papua New Guinea, who were trying to better understand the causes and links to Parkinson's and dementia, by doing research on mad cow disease and other prion conditions with similar characteristics.

The cannibalistic practice of eating human brains, it is suggested, has given the Fore a genetic resistance to diseases like Mad Cow Disease. On the other hand, the desease known as kuru -- an incurable neurodegenerative disorder, was actually initially spread by the tribe up until the late 1950s, with two percent of their population succumbing to the disease every year. The tribe's cannibalistic practices have since been abandoned, and cases of kuru have diminished.

Researchers published their findings in the scientific journal Nature, claiming to have identified the gene responsible for the Fore's remarkable resistance to genetic neurodegenerative diseases. The prion resistant gene has also been found to protect against all other forms of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which in turn leads to a much more stable mental life in later years.

Prions are infectious agents, technically proteins rather than viruses or bacteria, that cause often-fatal brain diseases such as CJD. Prions are also responsible for causing Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or Mad Cow Disease, in sheep and cattle.

"This is a striking example of Darwinian evolution in humans, the epidemic of prion disease selecting a single genetic change that provided complete protection against an invariably fatal dementia," John Collinge of the Institute of Neurology's prion unit said at University College London. UCL led the research amongst others.