“In the 50,000 years that followed — a time four to eight times shorter than the entire length of time the Neanderthals existed — the replacement crowd not only settled on almost every habitable speck of land on the planet, they developed technology that allowed them to go to the moon and beyond.”
It is loss which teaches us the worth of things, Arthur Schopenhauer once said, and he may have had a point that reaches back to the earliest origins of humankind.
The dead were buried in a cave, more than a quarter-of-a-mile from daylight. DNA analysis has dated them back some 430,000 years, which would make them — if not the oldest exactly — certainly among the oldest found evidence of burial rituals. They were Homo heidelbergensis, our evolutionary cousins, an extinct subspecies of archaic humans. Some researchers believe heidelbergensis gave rise to Homo neandertalensis — the Neanderthals. The site, in Spain’s Sima de los Huesos “Pit of Bones,” an archaeological site in the Atapuerca Mountains almost equidistant between northern Portugal and the French border, is the final resting place of some 28 early humans, fractured into more than 5,000 pieces. Palaeontologists found the remains buried among bear fossils, plenty of mud, and a 15cm (six-inch), teardrop-shaped hand axe, which they dubbed, with a wry wink and a nod no doubt, “Excalibur.”
Sima de los Huesos has accounted for some of the most valuable discoveries known to science, and the knowledge continues to have far-reaching implications, even in the Age of Covid. The Neanderthal ancestors may have perished during the Middle Pleistocene period but the presence is very keenly felt today.
A recent essay in Discover magazine asked, rhetorically, when it was that ancient humans began to understand death — one of those existential questions that keeps both philosopher and scientists awake at night.
Early chimpanzee studies — by Jane Goodall and others — have observed a wide range of
reactions to death among apes, but it wasn’t until the past year that researchers at Japan’s Kyoto University collected all the known data into a single review and found that, with experience and age, apes learn death is final. A dead ape will not wake.
There is not the same evidence to suggest, though, that those same apes know that all animals — themselves included — will die one day.
“Whereas we, fortunately or unfortunately, are aware of it,” Kyoto primatologist and study author James Anderson told Discover.
Conscious of mortality, our ancestors created ways to remember the dead and the concept of the afterlife was born. The tradition of returning to a burial place again and again took hold, as a way of staying connected with the past, reaching out to the ancestors in perpetuity.
These are unsettled times. The SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, which has reached around the globe and affected virtually every person’s life and daily routine, has revived interest in ancient humankind and burial/death rituals, not just among the researchers who study palaeontology and anthropology for a living but for ordinary, everyday people who suddenly find themselves caught up in unpredictable and uncontrollable events.
That’s entirely understandable if you choose to believe, as many researchers now do, that our collective awareness of mortality may have evolved before we did. To the well-organized mind, J.K. Rowling famously said, death is but the next great adventure.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/when-did-ancient-humans-begin-to-understand-death
©Andrew Martin-Pixabay