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Adam Kuper

On 21 September 2001, a man walking across Tower Bridge saw what appeared to be a corpse floating in the river. Twenty minutes later, a police launch took the corpse on board and discovered that the head, arms and legs had been severed. The torso was identified as that of an Afro-Caribbean boy of around five years old. The only evidence of identity was a pair of orange shorts labelled ‘Kids and Company’.

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Adam Kuper, whose most recent book is The Reinvention of Primitive Society, is a professor of anthropology at Brunel University.

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