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Why we think ancient humans believed in an afterlife or spiritual outcome

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http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2...afterlife/

EXCERPT: . . . They were laid to rest wearing over 13,000 mammoth ivory beads, hundreds of perforated fox canine teeth and other adornments. [...] Archaeologists estimate the ivory beads alone would have taken 2500 hours of labor to produce. We’ll never know what particular beliefs these ancient people held. [...but...] In all likelihood, the 34,000-year-old Sungir burials were created by people with spiritual beliefs and “modern” funerary behavior. [...]

[...] Evolutionary speaking, devoting energy or resources to dead members of your species doesn’t seem very worthwhile. But it’s done, to a limited extent by chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives. [...]

To get from animal-like responses to death to the funerary behaviors of contemporary humans, in a Proceedings of the Royal Society B article, archaeologist Paul Pettitt proposed four evolutionary stages.

“The first of these is purely chemical,” he says. “A chemical stimulus tells a part of your brain that it’s not good to have that corpse rotting away, so you do something about it.” Many animals, including insects, detect necromones (like hormones, but emitted from decomposing organisms) and respond by avoiding, eating or even burying corpses.

The second stage of emotion — being upset by a particular individual’s death — is exhibited by numerous social species like birds, elephants and primates.

But humans are probably unique when it comes to the third stage, what Pettitt calls rationalization. This is, “cognitively speaking, the most exciting stage in the evolution of mortuary activities,” says Pettitt [...] It entails understanding that death is inevitable, that all organisms will die, including oneself. According to Pettitt, this understanding leads to rationalization, or attempts to explain death and in many cases overcome it through beliefs in the afterlife. “We can’t stop [death] in the biological sense but we can deny it by coming up with all these weird and wonderful ways we’ll continue to exist,” says Pettitt. “Many of the great religious systems in the world effectively act as mechanisms for denying death.”

Lastly, came cultural elaboration, the appearance and diversification of funerary practices according to particular cultures and belief systems. How to handle the dead became governed by norms and laws, specific to each society — what we’re accustomed to today, when it comes to death.

The above is a theoretical model for how, through a cumulative process, behaviors surrounding death could evolve from what we see in other animals to what we see in humans today, across all cultures. I’ve omitted details and nuances, but even simplified, the four stages are useful for trying to understand the archaeological record of mortuary practices across human evolution....

MORE: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2...afterlife/
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