Why do we bury our dead?

[lpetrich]

Religion And Music… And Lions | διά πέντε / dia pente
reporting on
Music in Human Evolution - Melting Asphalt by Kevin Simler
reporting on
Joseph Jordania's book Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution.

I discussed that theory in another thread.

JJ also proposes a rather curious hypothesis: that our ancestors from a few million years ago had eaten their dead in order to deny their corpses to predators, so that predators don't experience that they are good to eat.

That's a rather odd hypothesis, but JJ and KS note a common pattern in societies of our species: protecting a dead body, then disposing of it in some way. There are a variety of ways that we like to use: burial, cremation, burial at sea, "sky burial", cannibalism, and weird ones like hanging coffins and tree burial. All of these are ways of protecting a dead body from land predators. Even "sky burial" is like that: it's putting a body on a platform for scavenger birds like vultures, with land predators kept away.

In the first half of the 20th cy., Bertrand Russell wrote in "An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish":

The sacredness of corpses is a widespread belief. It was carried furthest by the Egyptians, among whom it led to the practice of mummification. It still exists in full force in China. A French surgeon, who was employed by the Chinese to teach Western medicine, relates that his demand for corpses to dissect was received with horror, but he was assured that he could have instead an unlimited supply of live criminals. His objection to this alternative was totally unintelligible to his Chinese employers.

Something of that notion still exists there, despite the Communists attacking various traditions. It's widely rumored that the Chinese authorities harvest internal organs from executed people because hardly anybody there wants to donate organs.

BR also noted the objection to cremation that it would be difficult to resurrect a burned body at the end of the world. But as he noted, a body that got turned into worms would be just as difficult to resurrect.

It's the psychological impact that counts, it seems.

I'll close with this curiosity from Herodotus's History:

Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked- "What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?" To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said - "What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?" The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language.

Book 3, tr. George Rawlinson
The Internet Classics Archive | The History of Herodotus by Herodotus

 

[braces_for_impact]

Because they smell bad. I would imagine in the very beginning it was one of few available options. I mean, to primitives it's even easier than cremation.

 

[lpetrich]

Because they smell bad. I would imagine in the very beginning it was one of few available options. I mean, to primitives it's even easier than cremation.

But why bury a corpse when one can leave it out in the open? Or else eat it?

 

[Trausti]

I'd conjecture that we bury our dead so that we can keep our loved ones even though they are gone. They are not gone completely; there is a spot where we can still visit and talk to them. Anyone who's experienced the death of a close family member may have encountered this emotion.

 

[Angry Floof]

Because they smell bad. I would imagine in the very beginning it was one of few available options. I mean, to primitives it's even easier than cremation.

But why bury a corpse when one can leave it out in the open? Or else eat it?

Empathy? Even a dead body can elicit strong empathetic reactions. There's an urge to protect and respect, no matter how irrational it might seem. There's also the practical problems with rotting flesh laying around.

Anyway, human cultures have done all kinds of things with dead bodies, including sky burials.

 

[braces_for_impact]

If I were to guess, I would say that we may well have instincts not to be around dead things, for good evolutionary reasons. So what is one to do when a loved one dies? Primitively speaking what were the options? If we're averse to eating the dead, it's an easy leap to not wanting others (like scavengers) to eat them either. Burning may be psychologically harder to watch, and back then it was probably difficult to get a good hot fire going, which may otherwise leave quite a bit of the loved one still around. You can carry around their former possessions to remember them by, and carrying a head or arm or leg is somewhat difficult and unsanitary, not to mention smelly. So, bury them. Make them inaccessible to scavengers, plus they're out of sight but not necessarily out of mind. Now, keep in mind, I'm making this shit up as I go along, but it at least sounds plausible to me.

 

[Bronzeage]

Burial of the dead goes back very far in human history. It's not difficult to imagine several valid reasons prehistoric people would want to bury a dead person. We can be certain that ancient humans would be very familiar with what happens to dead bodies, either human or animal. A large part of the food chain consists of scavengers. Burial was probably the the most effective way to protect a body, but also keeping it intact until no longer in sight.

It is a lot of work, more than a cremation, so burial was a serious matter. As a custom, I'm sure it was more common in places where it was easy to dig.

 

[bilby]

Eating the dead makes good evolutionary sense, if the death was due to something that cannot be transmitted to those who consume the corpse - But it's difficult to be sure, and in most cases the risk is pretty serious. A person who died of anthrax or smallpox would not be safe to eat; A person who was poisoned or envenomed might or might not be; while a person who was struck on the head probably is.

And we find that those people who do eat human bodies tend to eat only those killed in war (and typically only enemies killed in war), or captured in good health; which makes sense from a risk perspective.

A tribe that habitually consumes the flesh of those who die, without regard for cause of death, would not last long before disease wiped them out - even those who limit their consumption to enemies killed in battle are at risk from prion disease. And any tribe that is discriminating about who they do or don't eat is going to have to find another way to dispose of the inedible corpses, and once such a thing is found, why not use it universally?

Animal corpses don't last long in the wild before being eaten by scavengers. But it's not a huge leap of intellect for early humans to decide that attracting dangerous scavengers like Hyenas is a bad idea, and to take steps to avoid doing that.

In fact, it seems that we traditionally use pretty much any option that there is, other than simply walking away and leaving a corpse where it fell. Cannibalism is rare, but not nonexistent; Doing nothing at all seems to be reserved for situations where to attempt to do something would be immediately and seriously life-threatening (such as trying to recover bodies from no-mans-land during a battle).

 

[Speakpigeon]

I would assume that humans, throughout prehistory, imagined and tried just about everything conceivable and then some with their dead. Each practice would have some advantages as well as some disadvantages, some of which have already been suggested here. What's unclear to me is whether those would prove enough to contribute to the survival or disparition of the group of humans doing it. If so, we would have to assume that burying the dead proved more advantageous than disadvantageous.

But those humans would have been doing all sorts of things in their lives beside taking care in some way of their dead, and I doubt that the latter would have been the one paramount factor in the survival or disparition of the different groups of humans. So, another explanation may well be that it just happened that one or several groups practicing burial were more decisively successful for some other reason that the practice of burial. If so, the relative success of burial would be somewhat like the success of the English, French or Spanish languages. I think this mechanism would be called "piggybacking".

So, the success of burial would have been essentially happenstance.

Unless it could be proved differently, which seems unlikely to me.
EB

 

[Speakpigeon]

Why do we bury our dead?

Just so I could pay a visit to Jim's tomb every now and then at the Père Lachaise cemetery.





It was closed yesterday, just because of one or two centimetre of snow...

It's getting better today, the weather.

Let's try again!
EB

 

[Politesse]

Not a question answerable through archaeology, I think; we're not clear on when the practice began, let alone what the practitioners were thinking about at the time. Indeed, the clock keeps getting pushed back by new finds, with the Rising Star cave being a good example of a hotly contested site.

On a more reflective and speculative mode, there is an old hymn that I am very fond of:

Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

A Christian hymn, but with very Pagan undertones. The second verse, which is more explicitly about Jesus, seems a bit tacked-on.

Earth is associated with rebirth, in a great many cultures actually. As is not surprising, since simple observation can teach you that it is where life starts. For an animist - and a great many people have conjectured that our earliest ancestors were animists - the earth contains even more obvious natural significance, not being seen as a "dead" thing but a living one, which the dead could indeed be seen as feeding.

 

[ruby sparks]

I happen to have just watched a fascinating documentary on BBC 4 on the subject of ancient Egypt, which at one point discussed what are thought to be the earliest examples of that culture burying their dead. It was suggested that the ritual was to do with keeping the body intact and preserved (later this was developed, when mummification started) so that it would still be 'me' (itself) when it entered stage 2 (the afterlife) and not just a pile of bones (avoiding "Aargh, I'm a skeleton!"). It was suggested that initially, bodies were buried in a foetal position to get them ready for a rebirth.

Obviously, not all cultures buried their dead. Some cremated, I think?

 

[Politesse]

I happen to have just watched a fascinating documentary on BBC 4 on the subject of ancient Egypt, which at one point discussed what are thought to be the earliest examples of that culture burying their dead. It was suggested that the ritual was to do with keeping the body intact (later this was developed, when mummification started) so that it would still be 'me' (itself) when it entered stage 2 (the afterlife). It was suggested that initially, bodies were buried in a foetal position to get them ready for a rebirth.

Obviously, not all cultures buried their dead. Some cremated, I think?

And a few other options besides. If Berger is right about Naledi, they deposited the dead intentionally in that place, but did not technically bury them unless you count the cave itself as cover. In general, interment in a chamber that is closed but not buried per se is fairly common, as are customs involving periodic removal of remains from wherever they are interred, to rejoin their families in a temporary ritual setting. Cremation is commonplace. Consumption is rarer than people think it is, but not unheard of. Mummification and storage are an option. Exposure to the elements in a planned way such as the Tibetan "sky burial" or the "leaf blanket" of Northern Australia. In South Korea, it has lately become possible and popular to mechanically compress loved ones' ashes into beads, which are then kept in the home.

Still, throughout the most recent two millenia, burial has been the most popular custom cross-culturally, and by a considerable margin.