When did humans first comprehend death? The question is unanswerable — we cannot know what people were thinking, and the archaeological record only shows us when they began doing something about it. What we can say is that humans “place a lot of meaning on the ways that our remains get treated” (378), and that we build rituals to carry us through the transition. Chapter 13 of The Human Story covers death, dying, and the dead, for Intro to Anthropology in the Human Story course, part of the Cross-Cultural Understanding hub.
Architecture: The Human Story has no dedicated religion chapter, so chapter 13 carries the book’s treatment of religious belief and ritual — approached through death practices rather than through theory. This page covers the chapter in two parts, with a video for each. For the foundational theorists of the anthropology of religion — Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Audrey Richards, Victor Turner, and Talal Asad — see Anthropology Religion Theorists. For the strange-familiar dual move, see Baseball Magic Anthropology.
Key Concepts
- Meaning attaches to remains. Humans “place a lot of meaning on the ways that our remains get treated” (378) — which is why rituals mark and guide the transitions of being born, becoming an adult, getting baptized, or dying (378).
- The origin question can’t be answered. When humans first comprehended death is unknowable; we can’t recover what people were thinking. What survives is the point at which they started burying with intent.
- Elephants stand in for the unanswerable. They attend to dead bodies, gather around them, and appear to hold some comprehension and memory of what has happened — comprehension of death is not ours alone.
- Neanderthals give the earliest archaeological evidence (379) — which is not the same as being first. It is only the earliest we have. The intentionality of that evidence is still debated.
- Human burials with grave goods appear around 30,000 years ago (380–381); cemeteries as designated places around 15,000 (381), roughly alongside more settled communities.
- The earliest deliberate burials weren’t for everyone. A striking share were of anatomically unusual people — congenital dwarfism, unusual size, visible physical difference. Which means these graves are poor evidence for hereditary hierarchy, and better evidence for something else.
- Some practices leave no archaeology at all. Cremation at the Ganges and sky burial by vultures are ritually elaborate and archaeologically invisible, so the burial record is skewed toward one way of treating a body.
- Burial goods don’t prove an afterlife — they show belief in one. Death may well be an ultimate demise. What the evidence shows is that many human groups have held it isn’t, individually or collectively (381).
- Rites of passage run in three phases. Separation from ordinary roles, a liminal transition where the usual rules are suspended, and aggregation back into society in a new role (386).
- Grieving is a human universal, its expression is not. “We openly lament or grieve loss” everywhere (386) — but some groups emphasize it, including by cutting off part of a finger, and others are far more subdued (387).
- Connection with the dead is maintained, not severed. The Qing Ming festival was outlawed for a period and returned (388); Día de los Muertos sets out food to establish communication with ancestors who come to eat and talk (389).
- Medicine has made the moment of death negotiable. Organ donation and life-extending technology complicate the timing (391), and whether “brain dead” counts as dead is socially variable.
Death Rituals in Anthropology
Death is a hard thing to deal with, and humans are not uniformly good at it. What we are good at is building machinery to get through it. Rituals are the events that mark and guide a person through a life transition — being born, becoming a grown-up, getting baptized, dying (378) — and dying is the ultimate case, because it is the hardest to comprehend.
The machinery is often impressive up close. Sitting through the Catholic ceremonies after a father-in-law’s death — three large ones in a row, then a series more as the months go on — is a different experience coming from a Protestant tradition. The Catholic Church has been doing this a long time, and it shows: every stage is accounted for, and the sequence carries people through.
When Did Humans First Comprehend Death?
The chapter opens with the question and it cannot be answered. There is no way to recover what people were thinking. So the textbook turns to elephants, which attend to dead bodies, gather around them, and appear to hold some comprehension and even memory of what has occurred. Comprehension of death is evidently not restricted to us.
Archaeology can only report when people began doing something visible about it. Neanderthals provide the earliest evidence of arranged burial, sometimes with material placed in the grave (379) — which does not mean they were first, only that theirs is the earliest evidence we hold, and the intentionality of it remains debated. For anatomically modern humans the evidence firms up around 30,000 years ago (380), with burials that carry objects placed deliberately alongside the body.
What that evidence shows is worth stating carefully. It does not establish that death is anything other than an ultimate demise. It establishes that many human groups have believed it is not — that some further part of life follows, individually or collectively (381). Cemeteries as designated burial places appear around 15,000 years ago (381), roughly alongside the first signs of more settled communities, though not necessarily agriculture.
Who Actually Got Buried
Something the textbook passes over: the earliest deliberate burials were not of everybody, and the people who received them were frequently unusual. Some had congenital dwarfism and were very small. Some were unusually large. Some carried an obvious physical difference. Nobody knows why. What is clear is the care taken — bodies oriented deliberately, sometimes facing a particular direction, decorated with objects they had used in life, with shells and other items worked in among the bones.
This matters for how the graves get read. Archaeologists have often treated rich grave goods as evidence of hereditary hierarchy, especially when the burial is a child’s. But if the people receiving elaborate burial were disproportionately anomalous individuals, that reading gets much harder to sustain — and these are not cases of some people buried richly while others were buried plainly. They are frequently the only burials we have. That argument is developed at length in Seasonality in Human Societies, where David Graeber and David Wengrow propose that these were the tolerated eccentrics — the non-conformists who might be ignored most of the year and called on in a crisis — rather than a stratified elite.
What the Archaeology Cannot See
A further caution about the record itself. Hindu cremation at the Ganges could have been practised for thousands of years before anything we could recover, because cremation leaves nothing to find. The same holds for peoples who deliberately exposed remains to be eaten by vultures. Both are elaborate ritual treatments of a body, and both are archaeologically invisible.
So the burial record is not a neutral sample of what humans have done with their dead. It is the portion that happened to survive, skewed toward one way of handling a corpse. The Homo naledi finds in South Africa are the live test of how hard this gets: some argue the remains are so well preserved because these small-brained hominins buried their dead deliberately, and it is very difficult to prove either way. What would settle it is a body adorned or ritually laid out.
Rites of Passage
The various ways people handle death fall under rites of passage — rituals, in the sense of rites, that mark off a life stage (386). Birth, coming of age, a fifteenth or sixteenth birthday, marriage, death. Arnold van Gennep, the French ethnographer who surveyed these across societies, found that nearly all of them run three phases, and the pattern holds up remarkably well.
Separation. People exit their ordinary roles, dress in unusual clothes, or assemble somewhere outside their usual places.
Liminality, or transition. Betwixt and between two worlds, with the usual rules suspended. At a wedding people feed each other cake, dance strangely, and the ordinary social relationships get upended.
Aggregation. Rejoining society in the new role — husband and wife, or husband and husband, whatever the marriage is.
Commencement runs the whole sequence in miniature. The funny robes are the separation; the stage and the graduation party are the liminal stretch, when the usual rules go loose; and then you reenter society as a full-grown adult expected to get a job, because you have a degree now.
Grieving Is Universal, Its Expression Isn’t
“We openly lament or grieve loss” (386), and this looks like a genuine human universal, visible across societies. Funerals — themselves rites of passage — do the work of managing that loss: crying, lament, and the near-invariable sharing of food.
How much is shown varies widely. Some groups emphasize grief strongly, including the practice, not common now but once real, of cutting off part of one’s own finger to mark it. Others are considerably more subdued (387). The grieving is common; the display of it is cultural.
Staying in Contact with the Dead
In perhaps all societies, and in some far more explicitly than others, people maintain a connection with those who have died — through altars, or through annual festivities. The Qing Ming festival was outlawed for a period and came back as soon as it could, which says something about the durability of these practices (388).
Closer to home, and better known lately thanks to a Pixar film, is Día de los Muertos — associated in the United States with Mexico but celebrated across Latin America, around the same time as Halloween (389). Food and personal items are set out to establish communication with deceased ancestors and to honor them. Sometimes they visit, to eat and to talk. The film is Coco.
Between Life and Death
A later section of the chapter takes up what organ donation and life-extending medical technology have done to the timing of death (391). It has become complicated to say when death occurred, and the answer is socially variable: some people talk about brain death, and others hold that this is simply not what dying is.
The ethical complications run from there. The argument for controlling your own lifespan and the timing of its end matters a great deal to people, and it meets a standing counterargument that such control slides toward euthanizing the old. Acceptance of hospice care and of end-of-life decision-making has grown, and people have also fought enormous legal battles over whether a particular person should be allowed to die. It remains a live issue.
Forensic Anthropology and the Ethics of Studying Human Remains
Why Study the Dead?
The second half of the chapter turns to the ethics of studying human remains, and there are legitimate reasons to do it.
Revealing the forgotten. Remains from the Irish Potato Famine workhouses carry the record of conditions people endured. Skeletal analysis lets those stories be told.
Seeking justice. Forensic anthropology identifies victims of violence, documents historical trauma, and supports legal investigation. Biological profiling can establish age, sex, ancestry, and evidence of violence, matching remains against missing-persons records. Taphonomy — the study of how bodies decay — helps establish time and circumstance of death.
Understanding the past. Ancient remains carry information about burial practice, environment, and evolutionary history.
The Problem of Consent
For the recently deceased, consent is reasonably clear: people donate their bodies, register as organ donors, or relatives authorize study. For people who died long ago it is not clear at all.
Some groups have actively sought the work. Descendants of enslaved Africans have used genetic testing to recover origins the slave trade deliberately obscured by mixing groups and stripping cultural identity — where the historical record is thin, skeletal analysis can supply what nothing else will.
Others regard it as a fundamental violation on religious or cultural grounds about not disturbing the dead. And there is a power dynamic that cannot be set aside: certain groups, Native Americans especially, had their graves systematically ransacked in the name of science across the past century. No consent was given. Many of those remains are still held in museums.
Two Cases
Kennewick Man. A skeleton roughly 10,000 years old was found in the Pacific Northwest, and scientists saw an opportunity to study migration and human evolution. Local tribes objected, reading it as another instance of taking without permission. The scientists prevailed initially and ran DNA testing — which showed genetic connection to the local tribes. The remains were eventually returned and reburied. The case shows both what the science can establish and how much the ethics cost when consent was never sought.
The African Burial Ground. Lower Manhattan once held designated areas where African Americans could live and be buried, and many such grounds were built over — Central Park sits on what was once an African and Native American community. When construction workers in Manhattan uncovered remains, the discovery was painful. What followed was a successful collaboration between researchers and the descendant community, and the African Burial Ground is now a site of ritual and celebration that has substantially raised recognition of African American contributions to building New York. Done respectfully, studying remains can be worth doing.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did humans first comprehend death?
Unanswerable, and the chapter says so. We cannot recover what people were thinking. What archaeology supplies is when people began burying with evident intent — Neanderthals give the earliest such evidence (379), which is not the same as being first, and anatomically modern human burials with grave goods appear around 30,000 years ago (380). That elephants attend to their dead suggests comprehension of death is not exclusively human.
Do grave goods prove people believed in an afterlife?
They show that many human groups believed some part of life continues after death, individually or collectively (381). That is a claim about what people believed, not about what is true — death may well be an ultimate demise. The objects placed deliberately with a body are evidence of preparation for something further.
What are the three phases of a rite of passage?
Separation, liminality, and aggregation (386). Participants leave their ordinary roles and dress or gather differently; they pass through a betwixt-and-between stretch where the usual rules are suspended; then they rejoin society in a new role. Commencement runs all three — the robes, the party, and the reentry as someone expected to get a job.
Is grieving universal?
The grieving appears to be; its expression is not. “We openly lament or grieve loss” across societies (386), but some groups emphasize it dramatically — including, historically, cutting off part of a finger — while others are markedly subdued (387).
Why is defining the moment of death contested?
Because organ donation and life-extending technology have made the timing negotiable (391). Some accept brain death as the end of life and others hold that it isn’t death at all. The disagreement is cultural as much as medical, and it runs into questions about hospice, end-of-life decisions, and how much control a person has over the end of their own lifespan.
Course Navigation
This class covers chapter 13 of The Human Story for the Human Story course. Previous: Marriage Systems. Next: Race & Racism. Because this book has no dedicated religion chapter, the theoretical treatment of religion sits elsewhere: Anthropology Religion Theorists and Baseball Magic Anthropology.