Genocides
During the Second World War, between six million and twelve million people were killed in this, perhaps the most famous of genocides.
What is the Holocaust?
This term describes the stiffness of muscles which sets in between to 1 and 6 hours after death.
What is rigor mortis?
This disease, which ravaged Eurasia in the mid 14th Century, was named for the dark-colored buboes which appeared in sufferer's groins and armpits.
What is the Black Death?
This "unsinkable ship" proved to be quite sinkable in 1912.
What is the RMS Titanic?
If you are ever forced to eat a dead body to survive a shipwreck, this substance found inside human bones contains vital fats that can keep you alive for longer.
What is marrow?
This genocide is often considered one of the quickest in history; nearly a million people were killed in less than 100 days.
What is the Rwandan Genocide?
These creepy-crawlies appear on a corpse usually 2 to 7 days after death.
What are maggots?
This zoonotic disease, which originated in Wuhan, China, in 2020, caused the most recent global pandemic.
What is COVID-19?
On March 3rd, 2011, an earthquake and tsunami struck this country, killing nearly 20,000 people and causing a reactor meltdown at Fukushima.
What is Japan?
This ill-fated pioneer expedition resorted to eating one another after getting trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the winter of 1847.
What is the Donner Party?
The word "genocide" was coined to describe these massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917.
What is the Armenian Genocide?
Decomposition is usually prevented in modern embalming with this carcinogenic chemical.
What is formaldehyde?
This blood-borne disease originated in Central Africa and became a global pandemic in the early 1980s, spreading mainly through sexual contact.
What is HIV/AIDS?
In 1906, this American city was levelled by an earthquake and a three-day fire.
What is San Francisco?
The word "cannibal" is related to the name of this tropical sea, colonized by the Spanish in the late 15th Century.
What is the Caribbean Sea?
The Khmer Rouge killed two out of every seven people in Cambodia, most of them in these places.
What are the Killing Fields?
These facilities, despite the name implying growth, are places where bodies decompose so they can be studied by forensic scientists and crime scene investigators.
What are body farms?
What is the "Spanish Flu"?
This 2005 hurricane devastated New Orleans, killing 1,392 people.
What is Katrina?
This term for human flesh, originating in Fiji, emphasizes our similarity to swine.
What is "long pork?"
Sometimes called the "first modern genocide", the Herero and Nama genocide in what is today Namibia was carried out by this colonial power.
What is the German Empire?
This substance, also called "corpse wax", develops on corpses which are kept in anaerobic environments.
What is adipocere?
This disease, which killed hundreds of millions of human beings between 1500 BCE and 1978, is the only disease to have been declared eradicated by the World Health Organization.
What is smallpox?
The sinking of this German ship near the end of World War II, which killed 9,343 people, makes it the deadliest maritime incident in history.
What is the MV Wilhelm Gustloff?
This prion disease is caused by eating the brains of infected people, and is endemic to Papua New Guinea.
What is kuru?