Oscar Kiss Maerth

Oscar Kiss Maerth (1914–1990) was the author of The Beginning Was the End (1971), a pseudo-scientific book which claims that modern humans are descended from a species of cannibalistic apes. Maerth was born in what was then Hungary but what was, in 1974, Yugoslavia. He claimed to have lived in Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia. A persistent rumor, albeit unconfirmed, claims that he was either a Nazi or a concentration camp survivor.

The Beginning Was the End was written in a Chinese monastery. The book claimed modern man devolved from a species of brain-eating apes. According to Maerth, this diet increased the apes' brain size, sex drive, and aggression, but suppressed their innate psychic ability and eventually caused insanity. Maerth offered no evidence for his theories, basing them largely on his alleged meetings with cannibals in Java and New Guinea and his experiences eating raw ape brains in a restaurant in Southeast Asia. He hints at having activated his latent psychic abilities through altering the shape of his skull in the manner of Incan tribes and/or trepanation, and his theories are mostly derived from the resultant divine inspiration. The frontispiece of Maerth's book says that after his travels in Asia, South America and Australia he settled in Italy where he lived with his wife and three children on Lake Como, where he was involved in the restoration of Villa Passalacqua. While future volumes were promised in the course of the text, none ever appeared, with the exception of The Speech of Moltrasio, a very rare 8 page pamphlet.

Maerth's ideas acted as an inspiration for the band Devo.