Question: ancient burials.

[Succubus]

Gone are the days when bodies were thrown down your enemies water well.
People have no sense of tradition.

Yeah, and what about catapulting them over the enemy’s walls?

I don't want to go in the catapult.

What?

I'm not dead.

You will be in a minute.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

[Anomalocaris]

The first burials might be opportunistic, there is already a hollow in the ground and some loose dirt with which to fill it. It may have been carried out repeatedly and over very long periods of time (hundreds of thousands of years) concurrently with other means of disposing of body in a manner conducive to safety of the band, without there necessarily being particular ritualistic significance being attached to the practice.

However, I think the manner of the development in perception and cognition do not perfectly correspond to external pressures. Much of the development is shaped and constrained by prior existence of other perceptual and cognitive mechanism in the brain that can be co-opted and combined to adequately serve some new function or role. I suspect the perceptual mechanism for evaluating another member of the group, band, or clan always involved one set of mechanisms that evaluate physical behavior, and another for assessing intentions and emotions. These probably evolved at widely different times in our evolutionary history, and involve totally different mechanisms. Hence the perception of physical behavior have a different feel from perception of intent and emotion. So there was always some underlying neurological basis for not totally and completely associating the person defined by emotion and intent with the person defined by form and flesh and blood. So my guess is the earliest ancestors of notion of afterlife and soul long predated the first specifically ritualistic burial.

[arewethereyet]

Personally I am not against burying ancients, though think its good manners to wait until they are dead 

Depends on the ancient in question.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The dividing line would be when we started doing more than was minimally necessary. Adding a garland of flowers around the neck of the deceased, for example.

[The Grand Nudger]

That's the core of difference between burial and disposal, yeah.

So my guess is the earliest ancestors of notion of afterlife and soul long predated the first specifically ritualistic burial.

The burials give us a "no later than" date - it's assumed that people thought things like this (and were doing things like this) before we find evidence of it.  The chances that we happen to have found the very first example of anything are monumentally low.

[LastPoet]

Meh burials. I want that to myself, save the money from the wood pajama and throw me naked onto the hole and buy a big ass keg of beer instead for the sorry asses that live.

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Besides, worms and other critters have to eat too.

[Fireball]

Meh burials. I want that to myself, save the money from the wood pajama and throw me naked onto the hole and buy a big ass keg of beer instead for the sorry asses that live.

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Besides, worms and other critters have to eat too.

When I worked in aerospace, fellow Systems Engineers in my department considered themselves the top of the food chain. I pointed out that eventually the molds and bacteria are going to claim us. Who's on top, now!?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The bacteria might "win", but they'll still be bacteria.

[Succubus]

The bacteria might "win", but they'll still be bacteria.

Aye, if it wasn't for bacteria we would be Martian slaves.