A Look Back at Life and Death in the Age of Covid

“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.”

— Svante Pääbo

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

Monkey Do, Human See: Emotional Intelligence v. Scientific Interpretation

“The Anthropocene, often called “the age of humanity,” really is “the rage of inhumanity,” and some people feel very comfortable killing other animals while at the same time claiming to love them.”

— Dr. Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado (Boulder)

The article in Psychology Today landed in my in-box alongside a ringing endorsement from a Facebook friend, so who was I to argue? The article, as it turned out, about anthropomorphism and our habit of applying human traits to animals, was incomprehensible — turgid and badly written — but it had some interesting points to make nonetheless.

I’ll spare you the academic details — the writing is the kind of academic navel-gazing that should never, ever see light-of-day in a public forum, if the idea is to win converts over to a new, if not entirely novel idea.

Never mind what we think of animals. Dr. Marc Bekoff, Professor Emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado (Boulder) has dedicated much of his career to trying to figure out what animals think of us. His writing on Twitter, in flagging a Washington Post article about how conservation is turning a natural laboratory into a time capsule (“We’re trying to keep the Galapagos Islands pristine. That might destroy them”), is clearer and more succinct than his writing for Psychology Today (“Geese-Human Relationships Offer Lessons for Coexistence:  A consideration of geese-human relationships has wide-ranging importance”), but that’s the nature of the beast. He’s on firmer ground — or easier to understand, anyway — when discussing “compassionate conservation,” not to be confused with compassionate conservatism, which many would argue doesn’t exist.

A clue to the nature of his life’s work is evident in the fact that, together with Jane Goodall — no introduction needed — he co-founded the self-explanatory group Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He’s a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, and a former Guggenheim fellow.

He knows his stuff, in other words, insofar as it’s possible to ever know what an animal is thinking.

Seeing a part of ourselves in the animals we see and surround ourselves with, is only natural, Bekoff insists. 

Most of us agree, after all, that people and animals — or mammals anyway — share

many traits, including emotions. We’re not imposing our way of thinking onto animals, in other words, but rather identifying what we share in common.

The scientific community used to dismiss the notion of imprinting our own thoughts, feelings and emotions on animals as sentimental and unprofessional; much of Goodall’s early observations of chimpanzee behaviour in the wild was dismissed out-of-hand, because she lacked an advanced degree in zoology at the time.

The scientific community is coming round to a new point of view, though, Bekoff insists: Seeing our own desires, values  and emotions reflected in animals is not such a wild idea after all. In the eyes of science writer Brandon Keim, who Bekoff cites at length in Psychology Today, it’s becoming “both common and common-sense.”

And rightly so, Bekoff says.

The conservation debate comes down to a simple question: Do you hold with the statement that, “Humans should manage fish and wildlife populations so that humans benefit,” or do you lean more toward the idea that, “All living things are part of one big family.”

Or to put it more simply, do you view the world in terms of domination (as in, humans’ right to rule the planet) or co-existence? The guiding principle of compassionate conservation, Bekoff says, is, ‘First, do no harm.’

It’s all about empathy.

“The best guard against the inappropriate use of anthropomorphism is knowledge or the detailed study of the minds and emotions of animals,” Bekoff writes in Psychology Today. “And, in fact, all sorts of scientific research, ranging from observational studies to neuroimaging projects, strongly support the fact that we’re not alone in the emotional arena.”

Animals and people share emotions, in other words.

And that gives us added reason, as if more were needed, to conserve and protect what remains.

©Pixabay-CC0 Creative Commons

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