page_title: Liver
section_title: Giraffe liver
hierarchical_section_title: Liver / Society and culture / Giraffe liver
context_page_description: The liver is an organ only found in vertebrates which detoxifies various metabolites, synthesizes proteins and produces biochemicals necessary for digestion and growth. In humans, it is located in the right upper quadrant of the abdomen, below the diaphragm. Its other roles in metabolism include the regulation of glycogen storage, decomposition of red blood cells, and the production of hormones.
  The liver is an accessory digestive organ that produces bile, an alkaline fluid containing cholesterol and bile acids, which helps the breakdown of fat. The gallbladder, a small pouch that sits just under the liver, stores bile produced by the liver which is afterwards moved to the small intestine to complete digestion. The liver's highly specialized tissue, consisting of mostly hepatocytes, regulates a wide variety of high-volume biochemical reactions, including the synthesis and breakdown of small and complex molecules, many of which are necessary for normal vital functions. Estimates regarding the organ's total number of functions vary, but textbooks generally cite it being around 500.
context_section_description: The Humr, one of the tribes in the Baggara ethnic grouping, native to southwestern Kordofan in Sudan and speakers of Shuwa or Chadian Arabic, prepare a non-alcoholic drink from the liver and bone marrow of the giraffe which they call umm nyolokh, and which they claim is intoxicating  ( Arabic  سكران  sakran ), causing dreams and even waking hallucinations. Anthropologist Ian Cunnison, who accompanied the Humr on one of their giraffe-hunting expeditions in the late 1950s, notes that:
  It is said that a person, once he has drunk umm nyolokh, will return to giraffe again and again. Humr, being Mahdists, are strict abstainers [ from alcohol ] and a Humrawi is never drunk ( sakran ) on liquor or beer. But he uses this word to describe the effects which umm nyolokh has upon him.
  Cunnison's remarkable account of an apparently psychoactive mammal found its way from a somewhat obscure scientific paper into more mainstream literature through a conversation between Dr. Wendy James of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford and specialist on the use of hallucinogens and intoxicants in society Richard Rudgley, who considered its implications in his popular work The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances. Rudgley hypothesises that the presence of the hallucinogenic compound DMT might account for the putative intoxicating properties of umm nyolokh.
  Cunnison himself, on the other hand, had found it hard fully to believe in the literal truth of the Humr's assertion that their drink was intoxicating:
  I can only assume that there is no intoxicating substance in the drink and that the effect it produces is simply a matter of convention, although it may be brought about subconsciously.
  The study of entheogens in general - including entheogens of animal origin ( e.g. hallucinogenic fish and toad venom ) - has, however, made considerable progress in the sixty-odd years since Cunnison's report and the idea that some intoxicating principle might reside in giraffe liver no longer seems as far-fetched as it was in Cunnison's day, although conclusive proof ( or disproof ) will have to await detailed analyses of the animal organ  in question and the drink prepared therefrom.
caption: 19th century drinking scene in Kordofan, home to the Humr tribe, imbibers of a drink prepared from giraffe liver. Plate from Le Désert et le Soudan by Stanislas d'Escayrac de Lauture
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