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


JJ proposes a curious hypothesis for what eventually got turned into burying our dead. In that hypothesis, our ancestors of 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 ( Organ transplantation in China).

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

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I think the question is better asked, "Why do we deal with our dead?" The short answer is because it proved advantageous for the survival of the human species. The longer answer is that it could be any of the possibilities you mention.

Within the longer answer I would think all the possibilities compete with each other. Eating the dead is still practiced though only when the living are threatened with starvation, but can be fatal if the dead are diseased and consumption of same has not been selected for.

 

[fromderinside]

Why do we bury our dead? The dead begin to stink and we've had a few plagues. Don't need much of a mind for that.

 

[Trausti]

Isn't the answer that we try to keep the dead among us? And knowing that our deceased loved one is at a certain place, and not vanished from the Earth, provides comfort? Sometimes it's just hard to let go. In my own experience, we do these things for the emotional benefit of the living. The dead, of course, are dead.

 

[bilby]

Burial gives us a head start, come the zombie apocalypse.

Cremation ought (in principle) to be safer yet.

 

[Malintent]

Dead bodies carry disease. living among the dead will ensure you join them sooner than later... without modern medical protections.
It is obviously selectively advantageous to avoid contact with the rotting dead.. .or any other poison or disease..
the experience of revulsion is strong for a reason.

 

[lpetrich]

Dead bodies carry disease. living among the dead will ensure you join them sooner than later... without modern medical protections.
It is obviously selectively advantageous to avoid contact with the rotting dead.. .or any other poison or disease..
the experience of revulsion is strong for a reason.

That does not explain why we don't simply do what ants do, take our dead bodies some distance away and leave them there. This even has a name:  Necrophoresis.

Corpses will either be taken to a random point a certain distance away from the nest, or placed in a refuse pile closer to the nest, along with other waste.

...
Burial and cannibalism are other recorded methods of corpse disposal among social insects.

 

[Malintent]

That does not explain why we don't simply do what ants do, take our dead bodies some distance away and leave them there. This even has a name:  Necrophoresis.

Corpses will either be taken to a random point a certain distance away from the nest, or placed in a refuse pile closer to the nest, along with other waste.

...
Burial and cannibalism are other recorded methods of corpse disposal among social insects.

Your point suffers from the Naturalistic Fallacy.. .that because one species of animal does something, some other species of animal should do the same thing.

Although, what ants are doing is the same kind of thing that humans do... they are separating corpses from their community so as to prevent colony-destroying fungal infections.

Humans have completely dominated the entire surface of the planet.. there is no practical place "away" from other people to just drop our dead. We burry them because we don't live underground, like ants do. If ants buried their dead, then that might be some evidence that their behavior did not relate to separating the dead from the living.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Because they don't taste good.

 

[Malintent]

Because they don't taste good.

It really depends on the cause of death... Old age, not so good.... Drowned in a vat of honey, delicious!

 

[lpetrich]

That does not explain why we don't simply do what ants do, take our dead bodies some distance away and leave them there. This even has a name:  Necrophoresis.

Your point suffers from the Naturalistic Fallacy.. .that because one species of animal does something, some other species of animal should do the same thing.

I'm not saying that we *ought* to do what ants do. I'm asking why we don't do what ants do.

Although, what ants are doing is the same kind of thing that humans do... they are separating corpses from their community so as to prevent colony-destroying fungal infections.

If we did what ants do, we'd be taking our dead bodies and dumping them in nearby wilderness areas or garbage dumps.

But instead we have ceremonies like wakes and viewings and funerals, followed by burials and cremations and the like.

Humans have completely dominated the entire surface of the planet.. there is no practical place "away" from other people to just drop our dead.

That was not the case for most of humanity's history.

 

[fromderinside]

Humans have completely dominated the entire surface of the planet.. there is no practical place "away" from other people to just drop our dead.

That was not the case for most of humanity's history.

It's not the case now. I live in a town of 700 permanent residents who claim to be 1100 in a seventy seven thousand square mile county that has 22,000 souls. Most of us just get ashes and splash them about some pretty scene with a little prayer.

 

[tantric]

just fyi, humans are not alone in this. that elephants mourn for their dead and perform ritualistic behaviours is well accepted - but we now know magpies do as well.

magpie grief for the dead

 

[ronburgundy]

Your point suffers from the Naturalistic Fallacy.. .that because one species of animal does something, some other species of animal should do the same thing.

I'm not saying that we *ought* to do what ants do. I'm asking why we don't do what ants do.

Although, what ants are doing is the same kind of thing that humans do... they are separating corpses from their community so as to prevent colony-destroying fungal infections.

If we did what ants do, we'd be taking our dead bodies and dumping them in nearby wilderness areas or garbage dumps.

But instead we have ceremonies like wakes and viewings and funerals, followed by burials and cremations and the like.

Humans have completely dominated the entire surface of the planet.. there is no practical place "away" from other people to just drop our dead.

That was not the case for most of humanity's history.

Ants a much much stronger than humans in relative terms. One ant can easily carry the body of another a "long" distance (again in relative terms). To do what ants do on a human scale would mean carrying they body many miles away, which takes too much time and effort.
Also, an ant body would be eaten or decompose very quickly before there is any time for rot and disease. So, it wouldn't need to be as far from their nest to be safe as a human body would from a village.

Also, humans care about and feel sad about the death of their loved ones. Ants do not. Who wants to see the half-eaten, maggot-filled corpse of their son who died 2 months ago as they drag the latest death in their village to the dumping ground? That would be rather upsetting, no matter what one's metaphysical beliefs were.
Heck, even just the smell would be unpleasant, so they'd need to find a new place to dump every body.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Why do we bury our dead?

In the origin, people tried to put dead bodies out of reach from predators but not for the reason(s) you give. I think human beings tend naturally to care about what happens to the remains of people they had loved when they were alive. I think this is essentially because dead people can look pretty damn close to being still alive and lovable. So, actually, we started to bury our dead not because they would stink after a while but because they still look lovable for at least a few days and people can't help feeling protective of them. And that would have been the case also with early humans as we can see from mammalian behaviour.

Only in a second though early phase people more often opted for things like burial to avoid the stench of cadavers.

Later, cities started to develop and get crowed and this behaviour morphed into a sanitary, cultural and regimented ritual necessary to avoid contamination. But the motivation would still have been love first and then stench.

It still works that way.
EB