Saturday, December 27, 2008

The tale of the advanced monkeys

I like doing research, I like reading about stuff.
In the case of the Tale of the Advanced Monkeys, I read the part in Hamlet where Hamlet describes how people get eaten by worms when they die. It's written beautifully, but, turns out, it's not true.

Worms are vegetarians. They eat earth, digest the organic material and shit out the earth again. They don't eat meat. Maggots however, do. But maggots can't get to a corpse because its either buried in a hole in the ground or buried in a coffin. Especially in the case of kings.
Corpses are being eaten by bacteria, from the inside out. These bacteria turn human organic material into minerals. These minerals are used by plants or eaten by worms.

In the long run, we are eating dead people, yes. Nothing goes to waste, everything gets recycled. But a properly buried corpse does NOT get eaten by worms and maggots directly.

Thank you for reading, sorry for spreading wrong information.