Researchers have offered insights to the group which is suspected to have ‘eaten’ millionaire Michael Rockerfeller in the 1960s.
The son of former US Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller, Rockefeller was just 23 years old when he traveled to a remote part of New Guinea with the hope of studying its Asmat region, and the people who live there.
He had previously been to the region to take photos of the tribe, but in 1961 he returned with Dutch anthropologist René Wassing.
Rockerfeller had visited the Asmat community previously (Francois Gohier/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
While traveling to the island, the pair found themselves in trouble when their boat capsized approximately 12 miles from the shore.
Rockerfeller told Wassing he could ‘make it’, referring to the shore, but sadly he was never seen again.
The community living on the island Rockerfeller had been aiming for are known for carrying out sacrifices and rituals, including one known as ‘headhunting’, which only came to an end in the 1990s.
The practice saw the Asmat people hunt down their enemies and remove their heads, before using their skulls as pillows or bowls.
Documentation of the ritual – which was still ongoing when Rockerfeller disappeared – revealed how the tribe would slit the subject from the neck down, before removing their entrails.
Asmat people decorated the skulls of ancestors (Francois Gohier/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The subject’s legs and arms would be put on to a fire and then passed around for the tribe members for taste, and their blood would be smeared over their bodies.
Author Carl Hoffman, who wrote about Rockerfeller’s disappearance in his book Savage Harvest, claimed: “If they’d killed Michael that was how it would have been done.”
According to a 2017 article from The Guardian, men in the tribe were left with little to do once the headhunting practice came to an end, though women kept busy caring for children and gathering food and firewood.
Farming is impossible in the landscape, so the residents collect and hunt food from the forest and ocean.
Wood is sacred to the Asmat community (Francois Gohier/VW PICS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
They also partake in a tradition known as the ‘resurrection feast’, which involves Asmat people paying their respects to their ancestors’ spirits.
Dive Concepts Bali reports that the Asmat people, one of the largest tribes in Papua New Ginuea, have inhabited the mangrove forests in the area for thousands of years.
Their population is believed to be around 70,000 people, all of who are split among a few hundred villages.
Members of the tribe have long held a belief that they arose out of wood, according to Dive Concepts Bali, and honor this belief by maintaining a close relationship with trees, including making artwork out of the bark.
Following Rockerfeller’s disappearance, authorities launched a huge search to try and track him down before the Dutch interior minister eventually declared there was ‘no longer any hope of finding Michael Rockefeller alive’.