RE: Question: ancient burials.
April 21, 2019 at 12:47 pm
(This post was last modified: April 21, 2019 at 12:48 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(April 21, 2019 at 11:34 am)Anomalocaris Wrote:(April 21, 2019 at 11:11 am)Gawdzilla Sama Wrote: Some of the First Nations put their dead on elevated platforms, so only flying scavengers (and those good at climbing) could get at the body. Others left their elderly, men and women who couldn't keep up, under some bushes to wait for the inevitable.
if scavengers can’t get at it, its smell would still attract them. So if the goal is to keep the band safe from powerful scavengers who are not averse to live meal that happen to be near by, then, it would be necessary to take the corpse some distance away.
So it seems to me the practice of First Nation is a highly evolved ritual of a societies that has long possessed the ability to easily fend off large predators, so the ritual is no longer closely shaped by the original considerations behind its initial practice.
It's also useful to note that there's not any real labor advantage between dragging a body and digging a deep hole. Burials have always been ceremonial, entirely divorced from any practical benefit. That, in part, is why we use them to mark full modernity. We'd been anatomically modern for a long time, burials strongly suggest behavioral modernity.
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