7 Creepy Urban Legends That Happen to be True (Part 4!)

Once again, it's that time of year when Cracked goes out it's way to prove that friend-of-a-friend of yours isn't as full of bullshit as you always assumed. As we've shown three times before, sometimes the real world and the stories we told around a flashlight as a kid aren't as far apart as we might've hoped.

The Organ Thieves

The Legend:

We've all got them -- emails warning travellers that in certain corners of the world people are being abducted or drugged, only to wake up with a ragged scar where one of their kidneys used to be. These kind of stories sound like good fodder for an Eli Roth movie, but they couldn't possibly be true, could they?

The Truth:

Tell that to Indian construction worker Mohammad Saleem, who thought he had just lucked into a new higher paying job (which in India means he would be getting an extra dollar a day). Saleem was instructed to travel to a nearby city and wait in specific bungalow for further instruction, but unfortunately for Saleem the new employers he was waiting for never showed up. Who did show up were several men in masks who broke into the house and forcibly drugged Saleem. Suddenly that extra dollar a day seemed like it may not be worth it.

Job applicants should be enthusiastic, self-starters who aren't particularly attached to their internal organs.

Saleem would wake up sometime later on a cold metal gurney, with a shooting pain in his side. His kidney was gone, and his abductors told him in no uncertain terms that if he told anyone he'd be losing a lot more than a kidney. Saleem wasn't the only victim either -- police would later uncover a blood-soaked reverse Robin Hood scheme in which a band of men posed as doctors and stole numerous organs from the poor to sell to the rich.

Getcha' kidney! Getcha' kidney here! Tub-full-of-ice fresh kidneys!

This was hardly an isolated incident. The illegal organ trade is worth big money and from India, to South Africa, to Brazil to Eastern Europe there's plenty of folks out there willing to do anything to get their hands on new market fresh organs -- even if the people who own them aren't quite done using them yet. So yes, sometimes spam email isn't completely full of shit -- don't get your hopes up about getting the five grand you sent to that Nigerian Prince back though.

The Corpse in the Chimney

The Legend:

A person goes missing and their loved ones look high and low for them, but the search proves fruitless -- that is until a telltale smell begins to waft out of the fireplace. The family peer up the dark chimney, and well, they sure as hell don't find Santa Claus up there.

The Truth:

It all started when Jacquelyn Kotarac tried to get into the house of her on-again, off-again boyfriend. We're guessing they were "off-again" at the time, because instead of say, using her key to open the front door, she decided it would be a better idea to scramble up on the roof and descend into the house through the chimney. Apparently Jacquelyn didn't watch a lot of Looney Tunes as a kid, or she'd know these types of schemes almost never work out well.

Daffy Duck could tell you this isn't a good idea.

Halfway down the chimney Jacquelyn got stuck, and with her boyfriend away there was nobody to hear her cries for help as she hung wedged in what would ultimately become her soot-caked final resting place. Friends and family immediately began searching for Jacquelyn when she didn't return home, but nothing turned up until the boyfriend's house-sitter showed up to water the plants. Upon entering the house she immediately noticed an overpowering stench, and found the fireplace filling with -- and this is a technical term now -- corpse juice.

Jacquelyn Kotarac at the office. Sadly one of those folders behind her isn't labelled "Reasons You Should Stay the Hell Out of the Chimney".

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this story? Jacquelyn Kotarac was better known around the workplace as Doctor Jacquelyn Kotarac. If this story proves anything, it's this -- 11 years of college isn't going to keep some people from still doing some really, really stupid shit.

The Creepy Sewer Creatures

The Legend:

In addition to the regular disgusting things you can find in a toilet, legend has it sewer rats can crawl up through the pipes into your toilet, ready and waiting to inject rabies straight into your balls. Oh, and what about the most infamous sewer-related myth of all -- have alligators at any time roamed the sewers of New York City?

The Truth:

Late one night Ian went to go use the washroom, and found himself face to face with a furry creature, and it sure as hell wasn't one of those butt-wiping obsessed Charmin bears.

Although they're disturbing in their own way...

It was beady-eyed, sopping wet sewer rat. Ian's first move was what any sensible person would have done -- he tried to flush it. A cleansing flush has removed so many other unwanted things, why not a rat? That shit only made it mad. In the end Ian had to trap the squealing struggling beast between the bowl and the toilet seat and murder the vermin with his own hands like the final "hero finally realizes the horrible thing he must do" scene from a Saw movie. If you're not afraid of catching liberal bias, you can hear the whole story from Ian himself courtesy of NPR here. Turns out Ian's not the only one this has happened to, and plumbers agree it's entirely possible, especially if your toilet is on the ground floor. So next time you're running to the bathroom post Taco Bell visit, make sure the check the bowl first...not even a rat deserves that.

Orrrr maybe they do.

But what about alligators in the New York sewers? While there's debate over whether they exist now (you're more likely to be bit by a homeless person than an alligator down there) there are several credible stories that seem to prove that they roamed the pipes at some point.

Take the story from 1935 of a group of teenagers managing to yank a full eight foot gator out of the sewer, or the tales of sewer superintendent Teddy May who claimed that at one time, gators were downright common in New York sewers. It may sound far-fetched, but we're sure not going to go down there to prove him wrong, are you? We didn't think so.

The Human Grease Vampires

The Legend:

In parts of South America people tell tale of the fearsome Pishtacos, shadowy figures who stalk peasants along dark roads, kill them and drain them of their fat. Stories of these cholesterol-laden vampires are hard to believe -- if Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer are to be believed vampires spend most of their time shirtless, and that's not going to impress anyone with if you spend all your time drinking liquid fat. Could South American human grease thieves actually exist?

The Truth:

When police arrested the gang which operated deep within the jungle highlands of Peru, they made some grisly discoveries -- a pile of human ribs and thighbones, a decomposing human head, and yes, two plastic Coke bottles filled with what appeared to be human fat (which for the record is the second most disgusting thing to be kept in a plastic Coke bottle, after Coke Zero). It seems the gang would confront people along the quiet back roads, lure them to their laboratory, bludgeon them to death, dismember them, and then using candles render the fat out of the body, which they captured in a basin below. But what do you do with a bottle of human pan drippings?

You really don't want to know Outback Steakhouse's secret to frying a blooming onion.

The police at first claimed they were selling the fat to cosmetic companies to be used in anti-aging creams, while the criminals themselves claimed they were selling it to local shamans to use in satanic rituals. The motives of the murderers may never be known for sure, but this much is clear -- the South American version of The Biggest Loser best stay clear of the Peruvian jungle.

The PCP Cannibal

The Legend:

The legend has been floating around for a while that the drug PCP doesn't merely inspire regular garden variety hallucinatory freak-outs, it actually has the ability to turn somebody into a human flesh hungry maniac. Surely this is merely Reefer Madness-esque propaganda though -- something dreamt up by Nancy Reagan in one of her more creative moods?

The Truth:

The story of Antron Singleton, a rapper with the appropriately creepy sounding handle "Big Lurch" says otherwise. In 2002 Big Lurch was found, well, lurching around the streets of Los Angeles in the dead of night, naked, covered in blood and howling at the moon after going on a near week long PCP binge. Of course none of this is overly strange for a rapper -- Snoop Dogg considers drug-fuelled naked moon howling part of a regular Saturday night -- but things got much more sinister once they inspected Antron's apartment.

Rapper Big Lurch in his more innocent pre-human flesh ingesting days.

There they found his roommate brutally slain, with her lungs torn from her torso, and her body and face covered with...bite marks. An examination of Antron's stomach contents found it was full of human flesh, officially eliminating the "uh, I think the dog must have done that" defense. Turns out PCP can be a bit of a gateway drug -- a gateway towards becoming a goddamn zombie that is.

80s anti-drug PSAs needed less frying eggs and more zombies.

Of course we don't want to be alarmists -- we're sure there's plenty of fine upstanding PCP addicts out there. All we're saying is you might want to hit up the Burger King before you go on a PCP bender, as this clearly isn't the drug you want to be doing on an empty stomach.

The Ice Woman

The Legend:

A person is brought into the hospital completely frozen and assumed to be dead. The doctor taps the body with his pen, declares, "Yup, that's dead" and the presumed corpse is taken to the morgue before any kids can accidentally get their tongue stuck to it. But that's not the end of the story -- as the body thaws it begins to stir, and eventually rises to its feet and walks out of the hospital as if nothing happened.

The Truth:

When a neighbour found Jean Hilliard in the snow she was frozen solid. That's not euphemism; she was literally frozen like a turkey in your grandma's deep freeze. Her body was too frozen to pierce with a needle, her temperature too low to register and when they took her to the hospital they loaded her into the car diagonally like a piece of lumber from Home Depot. She was, by nearly every measure, stone cold dead.

When this Jeansicle arrived at the hospital doctors tried to thaw her out, but nobody had much hope for a happy ending -- even if she wasn't dead she'd almost certainly have severe frostbite and brain damage. Or would she? As Jean lay wrapped in an electric heating pad her eyelids began to flutter, and after some time she thawed completely, returning to life as if nothing had happened. She showed absolutely no ill effects from her little nap in the snowbank -- no frostbite, no brain damage, not even any freezer burn. This 19-year old woman from North Dakota had, essentially, come back from the dead completely unharmed. Had she been sipping on antifreeze cocktails earlier in the evening? Did Mr. Freeze secretly give her up for adoption as a baby? Nobody knows for sure, but she certainly has a hell of scare story to tell her future kids if they ever try to go out in the cold without their hats or mitts on.

The Killer in Cop's Clothing

The Legend:

Depending on the story a police officer approaches somebody in public, or knocks on their door, tells them there's a dangerous criminal on the loose in the area, and that it's important that they let them inside or that the person comes with them. The person being an upstanding -- yet not particularly perceptive -- citizen, does what the officer tells them to, but then asks what this criminal looks like.

"Oh," the officer replies "a lot like me actually."

The Truth:

Carol DaRonch was browsing through a Utah city bookstore when she was approached by a police officer who informed her that her car had been broken into in the parking lot and that she should come with him down to the station to file a report. A perfectly reasonable sounding request, except for one rather important fact -- this police officer was, in reality, infamous serial killer Ted Bundy.

We're not sure that haircut is in compliance with police guidelines.

Carol started to suspect something was up when Bundy didn't pick her up in a shiny police issue Crown Victoria, but his shitty VW Bug. Granted she still got in the car, but hey, it was the 70s -- creepy looking guys driving Volkswagens made up 90% of the male population back then.

How did any guy ever get laid in the 70s?

Thankfully Carol finally caught on when Bundy pulled out a gun and a pair of handcuffs, and she managed to kick him in the balls (unfortunately she had left her steel toed boots at home that day), escape the car and flag down another vehicle...which drove her to the police station. After what she'd just been through we suspect she made sure every cop at the station showed her their badge about half a dozen times.

Well, your Federal Breast Inspector's badge looks official...

Bundy was hardly the first, or the last to try this kind of stunt, and unfortunately others have pulled it off with deadlier results. In other words, it may be a good idea to ask a few questions before you blindly do whatever the man tells you to do -- just don't tell the cops that advice came from us as you're laying face down on the pavement with a knee to the back of your head.

As always, Nathan Birch also writes the disgustingly cute webcomic Zoology.

The Bristol Stool Scale

If you were to ask most folks to design a scale describing their poop, they'd probably come up with only two classifications -- "everything's fine, stop asking!" and "oh shit, oh shit, oh goddamit where's the nearest bathroom?!"

Ma'am, if you had to assign a number to your last shit, what would it be?

The average person may not be too discerning about their poop, but healthcare professionals tend to be, by necessity, much more preoccupied with the human body's various excretions, and thus the Bristol Stool Scale was created. You've heard of taking a number 2, but it turns out you can actually take a number 1 through 7.

Designed by the University of Bristol and the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology, it's clear these people spent a serious chunk of time looking at our chunks, as this scale describes such things as consistency, cracks, lumps, ragged edges and fluffiness in gloriously disgusting detail. That said, we say the scale could stand to be even more detailed -- hell, they don't even Taco Bell in Bristol or Scandinavia. Come let America show you what diarrhea is all about.


Life Change Units

Life can be an exciting, unpredictable ride marked by moments of both great happiness and sorrow -- you'd think it'd be impossible, absurd even, to create a scale that measures all the changes a person will go in their life, but don't tell that to Thomas Holmes and Richard Rache.

They created the Holmes and Rache Stress Scale, which lists all the major tragedies and life-altering changes a person might go through in a given year, ranking them according to much stress they would cause. The higher an event ranks on the scale the more "Life Change Units" it's worth.

We wonder what this ranks.

For instance going to jail is 63 Life Change Units, but hey, at least going to prison for murdering your wife spared you a divorce, which would have net you 73 Life Change Units. Your plumbing being on the fritz may actually be a blessing in disguise ("sexual difficulties" is rated at 39 units) since at least you'll be avoiding any pregnancies in the near future (40 units). Whatever the stress or trauma you've experienced, there's a good chance Holmes and Rache have a seemingly arbitrary double-digit number assigned to it.

But what do you get for accumulating these Life Change Units? Death, that's what. According to the Holmes and Rache those who rack up over 300 life change units in a year are at serious risk of illness. That's the kind of high-score you may not want to attach your initials to.

Oh and hey, obsessively compiling your stresses and fearing the icy hand of death isn't just for adults either, there's a version for you youngsters out there too!


Sperm Motility Grade

As we've seen so far researchers love to come up with creative ways to judge every little thing you do -- not even being microscopic will let you hide from their stern judgement.

Judging you on a cellular level.

The Sperm Motility Grade scale not only how rates effective your troops are, but describes in specific detail how they're storming the beaches...

At the top of the class you have the eye-on-the-prize straight-line swimmers, while at the bottom you have the sperm equivalent of you and your buddies in high school -- they'd rather spend their time loitering in an apathetic pack than actually chase after the girls.

Strangely, the according to the Sperm Motility Grade scale the guys on the level second from the bottom may actually move backwards, which we have to say actually sounds worse than the sperm at level one. Your sperm merely being lazy bastards is one thing, but when they're actively running away from the egg it may be time for you and your fellas to have a heart-to-heart.

Nathan Birch writes the off-the-scale great webcomic Zoology. JD Niemand also does a webcomic, Stickman and Cube.

The Show Must Go On: X Roles Played by People (Who Happened to be Dead)

The entertainment industry is willing to overlook a lot when it comes to its stars--arrests, adultery, drug abuse, and sometimes even the fact that they're no longer among the living. Here are some of the more awkward examples of stars getting their name on the marquee from beyond the grave...


Bruce Lee in Game of Death

In 1973 Bruce Lee burst onto the scene with "Enter the Dragon" and was on track to become a major star, or at least he would have if he hadn't died three months before the movie's release. The producers of Enter the Dragon weren't about to let the minor issue of Lee's mysterious demise sidetrack a promising young career though.

Before filming Enter the Dragon, Lee had been working on his own film, "The Game of Death", but had only managed to finish filming part of the climatic action scene, which featured him fighting the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar while encased in a yellow track suit that proved his skill at martial arts did not extend to costume design.

We dare say Uma Thurman pulled the look off better.

The director of Enter the Dragon took these fragments and tried to cobble together a finished film using new footage featuring several stand-ins who, aside from also being Asian guys who knew how to kick and punch good, didn't much resemble Bruce Lee. Ah, but the producers of Game of Death had a plan--they had access to footage of Bruce Lee's actual funeral, which they inserted into the movie, explaining that the main character had faked his own death, thus allowing Bruce Lee's fill-ins to spend the rest of the movie wearing fake beards and other wacky disguises. We don't like to judge, but when you're including shots of your star lying in his actual casket in your film, you've officially pole vaulted over the line from inventive, to tragically desperate.

Stay classy Game of Death.

Of course this death fakery plot needed some sort of set-up, so early on in the film they had to shoot around the impostors using shadows, giant sunglasses, incredibly awkward editing and "special effects" that a 15-year-old making videos on YouTube would find embarrassing.

No, you're not imagining things, they actually glued a cardboard cutout of Bruce Lee to the mirror to cover the other actor's face in that scene. At least they were still sort of trying at that point though, unlike the end of the movie where they just throw up their hands and don't even make the slightest attempt to disguise the new actor's appearance.

The producers of Game of Death weren't content to sew together just one ridiculous mockery of a film out of unused Bruce Lee footage though, they were hoping to make it a full-on franchise, producing Game of Death 2 three years later. Bruce Lee's character is actually killed off early in the 2nd movie, but you sure as hell wouldn't know it from the trailer...

John Candy in Wagons East!

This comedy about a bunch of whiny pioneers (who talk like characters on a C-grade Seinfeld clone) deciding to give up on the West and head back East was pretty much doomed from conception, but the situation was only made worse when star John Candy died during production. The producers swore up and down that Candy had finished all his scenes before he had passed away, but clearly this was a John Candy sized load of bullshit.

Just sayin', he was kinda a big guy.

Even though he was the top billed star, Candy probably ranks third or fourth in terms of total screen time, and the the filmmakers fill the movie with reaction shots of Candy nodding or staring blankly into space just so you won't forget he's there. At one point it's revealed in front of everybody that Candy was, no joke, the wagonmaster for the Donner Party, and so Candy gets sad, rides away and is simply missing for a large chunk of the movie. Nobody seems to care that he's gone, nor are they particularly concerned about his dabblings in cannibalism once he comes back.

"Yeeeeah...I'm blowing this shitty movie guys."

However the most damning evidence that Candy hadn't finished all his scenes before dying was the fact they actually reused certain bits of footage, awkwardly superimposing it over new backgrounds, such as these eerily similar scenes where Candy's character gives up drinking not once, but twice...

Nancy Marchand in The Sopranos

Back in the year 2000 Nancy Marchand, the actress who played Livia Soprano, passed away and the producers of the show decided to use the futuristic 21st century technology now available to them to create one final scene between Tony and his mom using a combination of existing footage and CGI. The results ended up being slightly less convincing than if they'd used a sock puppet or taped a picture of Tony's mom to sack of potatoes.

They taste like spite.

It all comes off as creepy, with Tony's mom looking oddly washed-out and otherworldly, and far from being her usual spunky murder-plotting self she just repeats a handful of tics and mumbles. The effect almost makes it seem as if she's already dead and Tony is yelling at a ghost.

Then in the very next scene we're informed she died off-camera anyways, making one question what the purpose of the scene was, other than to underline for the millionth time what a cock Tony is (which admittedly was kind of the entire point of The Sopranos).

God dammit, you're not supposed to like Tony. If you people don't stop I'm going to write the most anticlimactic series finale ever. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Laurence Olivier in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow began life as a teaser trailer produced by two guys in their living room, which impressed movie producers so much they gave them a giant stack of money to make a full film that ended up looking like a blurry Xbox game. Plus it lost like, 80 million dollars.

Oh my God...are those the first weekend receipts?

The movie's plot revolves almost entirely around the question of "who is Dr. Totenkopf?" His name is mentioned literally every 30-seconds, usually in hushed dread-laced tones, until you're sure this dude must be Voldemort, Darth Vader and Sauron all rolled into one. So after over 90 minutes of build, they finally come face to face with Dr. Totenkopf -- and it turns out he's basically Zordon from the Power Rangers as played by old archival footage of Laurence Olivier.

The conversation they have with him is stilted, feels out of context and the effect is cheesy (the Wizard of Oz did floating heads better back in 1939). Why'd the filmmakers bother doing something so pointless? We're not sure, but they've had plenty of time to contemplate their mistakes, since Hollywood promptly deposited the guys back into their living room after the failure of Sky Captain and they haven't made another movie since.


Shemp Howard in various lousy Three Stooges shorts from 1959

In 1959 everyone's favorite Stooge, Shemp, sadly passed away from a stroke. Despite the death the Stooges were still under contract to deliver four more shorts featuring Shemp that year, so they cobbled them together using the small amount of footage Shemp had filmed for these final shorts, along with old material. Not the most dignified way to treat a brother or friend, but let's be honest, the remaining Stooges probably would have dug up Shemp and done wacky pratfalls with the corpse if they had to.

Curly's head went on to star in several classic Stooge shorts after his death.

Throughout the shorts remaining Stooges Moe and Larry spend a lot of time scratching their melonheads and wondering aloud where that darn Shemp has got to. When Shemp is seen on screen the difference between old and new footage is blatantly obvious -- Shemp was in a bad way towards the end and so he bounces back and forth between his regular merely hideous appearance and looking like something out of a George Romero movie.

These shorts were particularly infamous for their use of "Fake Shemp" stand-in Joe Palma. For the most part Palma was only shown from the back (and even the back of his skull didn't look much like Shemp's), which came off as jarring in the hijinks heavy Stooge shorts. It's one of those basic rules of cinema -- when a character is the center of attention you show their face, so it came off as particularly odd to have somebody performing wacky physical comedy with their back to the camera. But hey, screw you cinema, the Three Stooges don't play by your rules.

Besides, we doubt audiences were really that disappointed to see less of Shemp Howard's face.

Proud winner of the prestigious "Hollywood's Ugliest Man" award from 1950 to 1957.

Beloved celebrities in some pretty awful commercials

Most celebrities today would be willing to take a camera crew to their mother's funeral to film a Pledge Casket Wax commercial, but ironically this very whorishness means folks are more willing to take shopping advice from a guy in military fatigues screaming on a street corner than a celebrity these days. But hey, what if you could resurrect a beloved dead celebrity from an era when stars had integrity? Start the voodoo incantations, we've got steak knives to sell!

One of the earlier examples of advertisers harnessing the power of new-fangled computer effects to reanimate the dead was a 1997 commercial for Dirt Devil in which Fred Astaire has his old dance partner Ginger Rogers replaced with a vacuum cleaner.

Dirt Devil - Fred Astaire - Ceiling (1997) - 0:15 (USA)

Volkswagen wasn't about to be one-upped when it came to defacing the work of a legendary dancer though, unleashing a commercial featuring Gene Kelly breakdancing through his iconic scene from Singin' in the Rain. Kelly's moves are so jerky and unnatural looking you'd swear Skynet accidentally sent a Terminator back to the 50s.

Now what if your company made a fortune selling something completely unremarkable, like say popping corn, based entirely on the strength of your spokesperson, and then that person dies? There's only one solution -- ZOMBIE REDENBACHER.

Peter Sellers in Trail of the Pink Panther

Trail of the Pink Panther was the last movie in the long-running series to star Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau, which was an impressive feat considering he was over two years dead when the movie came out. While filming earlier movies in the series Sellers had left behind a wealth of outtakes and unused scenes, which the producers of Trail tried to piece together into a "new" film. The result was less than flawless, with characters miraculously changing age from scene to scene, and frequently seen driving cars, using phones and sporting fashions a decade or two out of date.

Hey kids, find the hundred things from this shot that prove it probably wasn't filmed in the mid-80s.

At one point Clouseau has to fly to England for no good reason other than they had an unused scene filmed in England they wanted to use. One problem -- they had no pre-existing footage of Clouseau on a plane. Their solution was almost brilliant in it's sheer stupidity...

They had Clouseau wrap himself up in bandages for the plane ride, a move the script makes no effort whatsoever to explain. Apparently by that point the producers of the series thought, "come on guys, Clouseau is a moron, nothing he does actually has to make any sense" was explanation enough. The few glimpses you get of the guy behind the bandages looks more like Saddam Hussein than Peter Sellers, and at the end of the scene his cast and most of his bandages magically vanish as they cut to back to old footage.

After about 45-minutes of this, the editor of the movie apparently shot himself in the head out of embarrassment, and so Clouseau "dies" off screen in a plane crash, and the rest of the movie becomes a straight-up clip show. When not replaying favorite moments from past Pink Panthers, the 2nd half of the movie basically forgets it's supposed to be a comedy, instead revolving around a plucky lady reporter standing up to the mob while trying to locate the missing Clouseau. Unfortunately while she has plenty of pluck, she's also kind of incompetent because after 90 minutes the movie just ends with Clouseau never found. No resolution at all. An entire additional movie, Curse of the Pink Panther, continued the "Search for Clouseau" storyline, and when he's finally found he's played by Roger Moore doing a terrible Sellers impression while sporting a bucket on his head.

Still not as stupid as half his Bond movies.

Sellers' widow actually filed a lawsuit against the film's producers, claiming that the movie was so bad it had sullied her husband's reputation forever, and she won. Trail of the Pink Panther, a film so shitty it's practically illegal.

Nathan Birch also writes the dead celebrity-free webcomic Zoology.

X Character Flaws That Made Human Beings What They Are Today

Most of us are taught from a young age what it takes to be a good person. Be confident and independent, eat right and wash behind your ears our parents tell us. It’s all fine advice for those living in the modern world, but if our ancient ancestors had followed it we’d probably still be hanging out in the forest munching chiggers off each other’s backs. Turns out in order to become nature’s biggest winners, we first had to act like pretty big losers.


Gluttony

Today’s world is one in which it’s possible to legitimately purchase fried chicken filled donuts, given you accept the fact you’ll likely be stealthily filmed from the neck down when buying one for the local news’ latest “obesity epidemic” cover story. Should we feel guilty about our eating habits, or has humanity actually benefited from our hardwired urge to cover with gravy and devour anything dropped in front of us?

The thing is, there are plenty of animals that eat simple, healthy, plant-based diets, and for the most part, they don’t tend to be particularly bright.

Dumb, yet delicious.

Most of the planet’s sharper animals are, like humans, essentially scavengers, as a certain amount of intelligence and long-term memory is required to remember, for instance, which berries are a tasty treat and which will make you shit your intestines inside-out. Once a species develops this basic intelligence it becomes infinitely more resilient and able to adapt to new ecosystems. Just compare rats, which will be around long after we’ve killed each other off, because they’re willing to eat filth, to those snooty bamboo-munching pandas who probably won’t survive another decade. If you want to make it big as a species, your dignity has to be the first thing to go. Now, let’s piss off some vegetarians…

Best to just skip to the next entry vegetarians.

It wasn’t just ancient man’s willingness to shove just about anything in his mouth that contributed to his intelligence--much of it can be attributed to our ancestors starting to consume large quantities of meat and fat. Our large juicy brains consume a huge amount of energy, the kind of energy that could only be provided by big greasy slabs of animal flesh in those primitive pre-high fructose corn syrup times. The hunting of ancient critters also contributed to the creation of the first tools, and strengthened tribal bonds. So chew that gristle with pride friends, turns out it’s brain food.


Bad Hygiene

Scientists have long questioned why human beings evolved to become one of the few mostly hairless mammals on the planet. One leading theory is that our ancestors were dirty little monkeys who lost their hair as a way of escaping rampant parasites, particularly body lice we picked up from gorillas (don’t judge, the Pleistocene period was a crazy, experimental time man).

But how did losing our body hair help us become what we are today? Well now that we no longer had insulating fur covering us, we had to create clothing, and groups living in different areas produced varying levels of pigmentation to protect their exposed skin from the sun, leading to the development of race. Oh, and the need to keep warm may have also contributed to our ancestors learning one other mildly important skill…

The marshmallow was discovered shortly thereafter.

Give those crazy cavemen credit, they knew how to make the best of a bad situation. Most people who catch gorilla crabs these days just end up with a prescription for special shampoo and a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Gossip

It was long thought that human beings developed language to aid in cooperation during hunting, but a new theory suggests that language may not have developed out in the forest with the men, but back around the campfire amongst the gossiping women. The fact that women may have been responsible for language is easy enough to believe considering even today when guys get together their vocabularies don’t seem to extend far beyond the words needed to describe a pair of tits or their buddies’ total gayness.

Clearly female cavepersons were a lot more advanced.

So, ironically what many consider the lowest use of language may have been what led to its creation in the first place, but did gossip have any other positive ramifications? Yes, gossip was absolutely essential in holding together larger more complex human social groups. Most ape societies max out at around 50 members since the primary method of socializing for them is grooming, and picking all the tasty critters off your neighbour’s backside can be a time consuming process. Gossip on the other hand can help you find out who’s been dragging who by the hair to which cave, or who covets whose pile of shiny rocks, much more efficiently, which allowed early man to hold together larger social groups up to around 150 members (gee, that number seems familiar). But why are these larger groups important? Well…


Social Anxiety and Depression

Our brains are about six times too big for an animal our size. Did mankind develop this massive amount of grey matter to help us in our long-standing mission to make mother nature our bitch? It seems unlikely since even animals that aren’t particularly brainy still make out okay in the wild. It’s more probable that humans managed to get a hang of the nature stuff pretty early on, and the real purpose of our huge leap in intelligence was to help us figure out our increasingly large, complex social groups. In other words, trying to navigate the perils of the lunchroom at school probably stimulates your mind more than any of your classes ever will.

Studying the skulls of our ancestors, scientists have found disproportionate growth in the parts of our brains used to construct mental simulations. Being able to play out different situations in your mind and predict possible outcomes is not just essential to surviving the social jungle, it’s also the basis of all problem solving. Basically every scientific or creative breakthrough in human history can trace its roots to some sweaty palmed caveman sitting alone in his hut fretting about whether the other cavemen think he’s cool, and conjuring up fantasies about what it would be like to finally talk to that cavegirl with the shapely brow ridge.

Depression played it’s part too, as some speculate depression evolved as a way to make people separate themselves from the group in times of stress, so they could try to simulate a solution to their problems in peace. So yeah, if your teenager’s being an angsty little punk, don’t worry, they’re actually contributing the betterment of the human race. Well unless they’re goth—everyone knows Goths are an evolutionary dead end.

Scientists suspect the Homo Gothius subspecies were quickly wedgied out of existence.

Refusing to Grow Up

There are few quicker ways to get under a person’s skin than to call them childish. From a young age we’re pressured to be mature, but as it turns out refusing to grow up is a cornerstone of human evolution, so take that mom and dad.

Human childhoods are unique in that we’re born with a massive brain (just ask any woman who’s had to birth one of ‘em) and wriggling vestigial bodies, that grow slowly and don’t really change significantly until puberty. While most animals put all their energy towards quickly growing adult-like bodies, humans instead spend our early years strengthening the pathways in our brains and absorbing information. Our species’ unique ability to pass information and knowledge from one generation to the next, is due to the fact that humans essentially spend 20-years barfing in their offspring’s mouths before they finally kick them from the nest (and even then the barf keeps coming in the form of college tuition, weddings, and their old room again after the divorce).

Cracked.com--validating man-children using science since 2006.

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Drunkenness

As diverse and sometimes conflicting as the world’s countless cultures can be, there’s at least one thing we share—we all love of getting shitfaced. Scientists suspect humans have been boozehounds since our very earliest days when we looked like something you’d hire an exterminator to chase out of your attic. Hell, our bodies are specially designed for alcohol consumption, with portions of our livers specifically designated for metabolizing alcohol. So human beings have been getting tanked for ages, but aside from helping ugly cavemen hook up, has it had any major effect on human progress?

Surprisingly it has. Human beings only truly started to thrive once we developed agriculture, as it allowed us to settle down, found cities and start multiplying like catholic bunnies. Generally it’s been assumed we began farming to provide ourselves with a food source and that brewing alcohol from these plants came later, but some scientists have begun to question whether we might have the timeline backwards. They think we liked getting snookered so much we established agriculture in order to give us plants to brew, and that the whole growing food to feed our children thing was just a happy side effect.

So our entire modern society was founded on getting plastered. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nathan Birch contributes to the development of the human culture with his webcomic Zoology.