Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die; to sleep;…
To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 1
Have you ever seen someone die? I have. I was present when my mother took her final breath after succumbing to the wasting of a long coma induced by head trauma from a fall, itself the result of the ravages of a decade of brain tumors and the invasive treatment triad of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.1 When the terminus was finally reached, after an initial interlude of loss and grief there followed a sense almost of relief. The anticipation was worse than the event. She was alive … and then she wasn’t. What transpired at that moment? I don’t know.
My father died in his car on his way to work—pulled over in a parking lot with the motor still running and the transmission in park. He must have known something was wrong. Was he aware he was dying? I have always wondered, and now that I’m older than he was when he died, I am curious if I will be given some warning—a thanatotic aura or the equivalent of a push notification from the grim reaper—before I go. Will I experience a transition, see a light, go through a tunnel and emerge somewhere else, or will it be boom boom—lights out? When I recently went under general anesthesia for surgery, I imagined that perhaps this is what it’s like to die. You’re conscious, then you’re not—99 … 98 … 97 … gone. But instead of coming to with missing time in between conscious states, you just never wake up. There’s no missing time because time has stopped. Is that what death is like?
The descriptor “clinical death” gives us a clue that the dying process is sometimes more like a lamp dimmer than an on-or-off light switch. Some people die quickly, as my father apparently did from cardiac arrest, while others die gradually, as my mother did from coma wasting. The physician Sherwin Nuland penned an elegant book encompassing all aspects of the dying process titled, simply, How We Die.2 The process is morbidly mesmerizing. Clinical death occurs when the heart stops beating and the lungs cease breathing. Without the oxygen-carrying red blood cells circulating throughout the body with each beat of the heart, deterioration of organs and cells begins. But that takes time. The oxygen that is already in the system lasts about four to six minutes following the final breath, which is why time is of the essence following cardiac arrest, drowning, and other traumatic events and why the CPR process of artificially pumping the heart and breathing into the lungs can be lifesaving. At room temperature, after around six to eight minutes—and no more than ten unless the body temperature has dropped dramatically, as in the rare cases of someone falling through ice into a frigid lake or river—biological death sets in as the rest of the body’s organs shut down and cells die.
From this point forward the trillions of bacterial cells in the body that help digest food and provide other vital functions begin to consume the body’s cells and tissues. After about an hour, algor mortis—death chill—sets in, as the body’s temperature drops two degrees Celsius the first hour and one degree Celsius every hour thereafter until it reaches ambient room temperature. After around three to four hours, postmortem rigidity—rigor mortis—sets in, causing muscles to stiffen as a result of calcium bonding with the proteins in the muscles, leading to the unfortunate descriptor “the stiff” in reference to a dead body. Decay and disintegration are an exercise in clockwork chemistry from which forensic anthropologists and detectives can determine much about the time of death. As carbon dioxide levels rise, cell walls weaken and burst, releasing intercellular fluids that, as a result of gravity, pool into the nether regions of the body. Putrefaction results from the by-product of the foul-smelling gases including sulfur, ammonia, and sulfide produced by those trillions of bacterial cells in search of nutrients. Left alone, over the course of many months the body will be consumed biologically and chemically in a process that most of us would rather not contemplate and is probably why all societies everywhere and at all times bury their dead within days. In this light, in considering the archaeology of the afterlife among the earliest humans who appear to have buried their dead (as we will discuss below), in addition to speculating about their higher spiritual thoughts in so doing we should also entertain the possibility that they buried the dead bodies because they stank to high heaven.
So, we understand the physiological processes in the body and the neurological changes in the brain that accompany death, but comprehending what the “spark” of life is and where it goes when we die remains something of a mystery. We can’t help but wonder what happens at that moment. We do not know, but at some point in our lives most of us ask such questions. At what age do we become aware of life’s impermanence?
HOW CHILDREN CONCEIVE OF DEATH AND IMMORTALITY
The earliest memory I have of becoming aware of the finality of death was when my beloved dog Willy died. A scruffy-haired midsized mutt who was a bundle of playful energy for a young boy, Willy also afforded me much love and comfort at a particular time in my life when I needed it. My parents divorced when I was very young, and they both remarried, establishing two homes between which I was shuttled, and two new family configurations among which many adjustments had to be negotiated. My stepparents were warm and loving and as supportive of me as they were their biological issue, but it was a discombobulating experience nonetheless, so in quiet moments Willy gave me the kind of unconditional tenderness and devotion available only from canines. One day when I came home from school my mom told me Willy had died. As I recall, there was much sadness in the house, and I retreated to my bedroom to grieve as only a seven-year-old knows how: I cried and prayed for one more day with Willy. I felt bad for some time after, but then we got a new puppy, Kelly—an irresistibly adorable border collie whom I loved for his fifteen years on this planet.
The awareness of death’s finality appears to emerge in preschool children around the age of four. Before that, children believe, for example, that dead animals can come back to life if given food, water, medicine, or magic potions. They see cartoon characters and TV actors die and come back to life, and they seem to conceive of the dead as living somewhere else, such as a tomb underground or heaven above, where they still consume food, water, and oxygen, can see and hear and dream, and continue to exist in some other state. This conception is reinforced by parents when grandparents pass away and the children are told that their senior family members have “gone to a better place” where they are still alive and maybe even “watching over them.” (Maybe this is why I thought it possible that Willy might come back to me for a day.) Until they reach a certain age range children believe in immortality for everyone. Developmental psychologists tell us that that age range is between five and ten, when children come to recognize five features of death that make it real for them:
1. Inevitability. All living things eventually cease to live.
2. Universality. Death happens to all living things.
3. Irreversibility. Death is final, and once a living thing has died, it cannot come back to life.
4. Nonfunctionality. The bodily processes that characterize living things cease to function.
5. Causation. Death is the result of the breakdown of bodily function.
As with all stage theories in psychology, the timing and sequence of the stages vary, along with the ages at which children go through them, but the point is that by the age of ten, in the words of the clinical psychologists Virginia Slaughter and Maya Griffiths in their study on how young children understand death, “most children conceptualize death as a fundamentally biological event that inevitably happens to all living things and is ultimately caused by an irreversible breakdown in the functioning of the body.”3 That is, the dead cannot be resurrected. Slaughter and Griffiths encapsulate the chronology of how children reach this level of mortality awareness from infancy to age ten:
Infancy to age 2: The death of a parent or caretaker is felt as a loss, experienced as separation anxiety, and expressed in crying or changes in habits such as eating, sleeping, and activity, but there is no conception of death.
Ages 2–4: Preschoolers do not conceive of death as permanent and may wonder when the parent or grandparent who has died is returning. Their grief may be expressed as separation (and stranger) anxiety and they may exhibit higher than normal levels of clinging, bedwetting, thumb sucking, crying, temper tantrums, and possibly even withdrawal.
Ages 4–7: Death is still perceived to be reversible and superstitious causes are sought with an end to bringing back the deceased. Grief may be expressed in repetitive questioning, such as “What happens when you die?” and “How do dead people eat?” Eating and sleeping patterns change, possibly out of fear that they, too, may die.
Ages 7–10: The transition in the conception of death as temporary to permanent and reversible to irreversible takes place during these years. Children become curious about death and its causes, although they tend to see it as something that happens to old or sick people, and to people other than themselves or family members.
Ages 10–12: Conception of death is more intellectual than emotional, and grief may be expressed in silence, indifference, or regression from friends and family.
In three experimental tests of such conceptions with children of varying ages involving “the biological and psychological functioning of a dead agent,” the psychologists Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund found that “4- to 6-year-olds stated that biological processes ceased at death, although this trend was more apparent among 6- to 8-year-olds,” as predicted. In their second experiment, the researchers found that when 4- to 12-year-olds were asked about the psychological functioning of an agent, “the youngest children were equally likely to state that both cognitive and psychobiological states continued at death, whereas the oldest children were more likely to state that cognitive states continued.” This is revealing because it implies that there may be cognitive architecture in the brain for the religious belief in an afterlife where the biological dead continue to live psychologically (or “spiritually” in religious terms). This hypothesis was tested and partially confirmed in the third experiment, in which both children and adults were asked about an array of psychological states. “With the exception of preschoolers, who did not differentiate most of the psychological states, older children and adults were likely to attribute epistemic, emotional, and desire states to dead agents.”4 And if you add to that list the “soul,” then most adults hold such beliefs.5
Even very young children have a difficult time conceiving of the nonexistence of mind or soul. Using finger puppets representing a mouse and an alligator, Bering and Bjorklund presented a story to their young charges that the alligator ate the mouse, then asked them a series of questions: “Now that the mouse is no longer alive, will he ever need to drink water again?” “Is he still thirsty?” “Does his brain still work?” “Is he still thinking about Mr. Alligator?” Without exception the children maintained that the mouse’s psychological states continued after the death of its body. The evidence overwhelmingly points to the thesis that belief in a psychological or spiritual afterlife is natural and intuitive, and that the scientific null hypothesis—that the afterlife does not exist and all psychological functions cease with biological death—is unnatural and counterintuitive. The psychologist Leslie Landon Matthews, whose famous father, the actor Michael Landon, died when she was thirty, poignantly illuminated the conceptual differences in this first-person account about her half brother and sister:
Let us illustrate how the idea of reversibility affects different aged children. A father has died. Two months after dad dies, the four-year-old son, the seven-year-old daughter, and their mother go on a trip. They are away for one month. Upon their return, as they pull into the driveway, the four-year-old spots his father’s car in the garage and yells out with excitement, “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s back home!” The seven-year-old has a split second feeling of excitement as well, but will quickly realize through her own higher level of understanding that her brother’s comment is not true, and she may sob, for she knows that Daddy is not home.6
These bracketed age categories with their respective conceptualizations of death vary considerably within and between cultures and societies, but the point is that by our teenage years, we understand that death is inevitable, universal, and irreversible.7 At the same time, most people also tend to believe that some part of life may continue into the next life, a tendency reinforced by most religions and the language parents use with their children to describe what happened to lost loved ones: they’re “at rest,” “at peace,” “beyond the grave,” “gone to a better place,” “departed this world,” are “in heaven with God,” resting “at the feet of Jesus,” “in Abraham’s bosom,” “in the Promised Land,” and the like.
This sets up another mortality paradox: just as children come to understand the reality of death they are told that death is just a transition stage to some other place. This is a form of deceptive advertising we would not tolerate in other areas of life for our children. Revealingly, Slaughter and Griffiths ran an experiment with preschoolers in which they taught their charges biological facts about the body by having the kids don a cloth apron adorned with models of the body’s organs and explained the organs’ functions. They found that this led the kids to more rapidly develop a deeper understanding of those five characteristics of death (inevitability, universality, irreversibility, nonfunctionality, and causation). In a follow-up experiment with children aged four to eight, Slaughter and Griffiths discovered that the better the kids understood those five factors of death the less likely they were to express a fear of dying.8 The cognitive psychologist Andrew Shtulman draws out the implications for the corrosive effects of confusing young minds about death in this way: “Children know of death long before they understand it, initially conceiving of death as an altered form of life. How frightening it must be for them to think that we bury people who still need food and water or that we cremate people who still think and feel pain. And how sad it must be for children to think that a loved one has left home but is still living on somewhere else.”9
WHEN MAMMALS MOURN
Like us, dolphins are mammals, and they appear to pass the mirror test of self-awareness: put a giant mirror in their tank and a mark on their side and they’ll stare at it as if it doesn’t belong there, implying that they have some sense of body awareness, which is elemental to self-awareness.10 It is not surprising, then, to hear stories from fishermen that dolphins have been seen pushing sick or wounded members of a pod to the surface so that they may catch their breath, and mothers who support their dead or dying offspring on their backs so that they may breathe. The marine biologist Filipe Alves recorded two such instances near Madeira Island off the northwest coast of Africa, in which the rescue dolphins made a concerted effort at resuscitation or resurrection.11 Is this grieving behavior? Alves thinks so: “Species that live in a matrilineal system, such as killer whales and elephants; species that live in pods of related individuals, such as pilot whales whose pods can comprise up to four generations of animals, when they spend a lifetime together, sometimes 60 years or more, yes, I believe they can grieve.”12
Observations of a bottlenose dolphin population in the Amvrakikos Gulf on the west coast of Greece by the biologist Joan Gonzalvo corroborates the behavior. A dolphin mother lifted the corpse of her newborn calf above the surface. “This was repeated over and over again, sometimes frantically, during two days of observation,” Gonzalvo noted, adding, “The mother never separated from her calf. She seemed unable to accept the death.” A year later the team came upon a juvenile dolphin struggling to stay afloat to breathe. His podmates were noticeably upset: “The group appeared stressed, swimming erratically. Adults were trying to help the dying animal stay afloat, but it kept sinking.”13
Does this grieving behavior correspond to mortality awareness? We don’t know for sure because we cannot know what it’s like to be a dolphin, but marine biologist Ingrid Visser of the Orca Research Trust in Tutukaka, New Zealand, thinks that it is possible because “we do know that cetaceans have von Economo neurons, which have been associated with grief in humans.” Whales also have these neurons, and when Visser observed a stranded pilot whale, she noted
When one died the others would stop when passing by, as if to acknowledge or confirm that it was dead. If we tried to get them to move past without stopping, they would fight to go back to the dead animal. I do not know if they understand death but they do certainly appear to grieve—based on their behaviors.14
Whales have also been observed putting themselves in harm’s way of whale hunters to protect or defend a wounded member of their group, and they have been seen circling their injured mate and striking the water with their flukes, behavior that was exploited by the whale hunters to locate the targets of their hunt. What looks like self-destructive behavior is in fact cooperative behavior tied to an apparent awareness of the possible death of a podmate.
Elephants have also passed the self-awareness mirror test, and they, too, appear to grieve. When they encounter the bones of long-dead elephants, especially the skull and tusks, they have been seen to stop and ponder the find and carefully touch and move the bones with their trunks in what looks like deep curiosity or concern. According to the animal behaviorist Karen McComb, “their interest in the ivory and skulls of their own species means that they would be highly likely to visit the bones of relatives who die within their home range.”15 To test this hypothesis, McComb and her colleagues placed objects about 25 meters from the elephants they were studying in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. In the first condition, they planted the skulls of a rhinoceros, buffalo, and elephant near seventeen different elephant families, noting that their subjects spent the majority of their time carefully examining the skulls of their own species, smelling and touching them with their trunks. In a second condition a different set of nineteen elephant families were confronted with a piece of wood, a piece of ivory, and an elephant skull. Predictably, their interests scaled from most to least relevant: ivory, skull, wood. But, McComb notes, “Their preference for ivory was very marked, with ivory not only receiving excessive attention in comparison with wood but also being selected significantly more than the elephant skull.” As McComb elaborated to me in an email, the elephants also habitually touched and rolled the ivory with the sensitive soles of their feet and picked it up in their trunks to hold and carry. Why? “Interest in ivory may be enhanced because of its connection with living elephants, individuals sometimes touching the ivory of others with their trunks during social behavior.” In the third condition, three elephant families were presented with the skulls of three deceased matriarchs, one of which was their own, but there was no observed difference in preference by the living elephants. That’s not a trivial discovery, and McComb’s concluding remarks about the significance of the ivory touching is even more revealing (figure 2-1): “Elephants may, through tactile or olfactory cues, recognize tusks from individuals that they have been familiar with in life.” Imagine that: grieving over the remains of someone you knew. How human.
In her moving memoir Elephant Memories, Cynthia Moss recorded the responses of a community of elephants to one of their members being shot by a poacher. As the wounded elephant’s knees buckled and she began to go down, her elephant comrades struggled to keep her upright. “They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and Tallulah even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it into her mouth.” After the elephant died, her friends and family members covered the corpse with dirt and branches.16
Hundreds of such anecdotes exist in scientific literature, and thousands more in popular prose.17 There is, understandably, much skepticism of such accounts by more cautious scientists concerned about the anthropomorphizing of animals, but it is pertinent to note that we are animals, too, and just as there is an unmistakable continuity in our anatomy and physiology with our evolutionary cousins (about which no one accuses scientists of “anthropomorphizing”), so, too, with our behaviors and emotions, correspondences of which may be found, in some degree, in our fellow mammals, including and especially primates and cetaceans. These include not just base emotions such as hunger, sex, and territoriality, but more elevated emotions such as attachment and bonding, cooperation and mutual aid, sympathy and empathy, direct and indirect reciprocity, altruism and reciprocal altruism, conflict resolution and peacemaking, deception and deception detection, community concern and caring about what others think about you, and awareness of and response to the social rules of the group. The fact that such emotions exist in our nearest evolutionary cousins is a strong indication of their deep evolutionary roots. If we grieve over death, is it not reasonable to presume that these other closely related mammals do as well?
Figure 2-1. Elephants Grieving
The animal behaviorist Karen McComb photographed these elephants mourning the loss of family and group members. Photograph courtesy of Karen McComb.
The grief psychologist Russell Friedman thinks so. Using his definition of grief as “the conflicting feelings caused by the end of or change in a familiar pattern of behavior,” Friedman infers that since “all mammals are creatures of habit, there can be no doubt that mammals are affected by the deaths of their group members—if only because the deaths represent the end of the ‘familiar’ interactions for the surviving member.” Thus, he concludes, “it is not far-fetched to suggest that the process of adapting might be affected by the nature and intensity of the individual relationship the surviving member had with the deceased member.”18 That resonates well with what we know about the evolution of nonhuman mammals. What about humans and our evolutionary past? When did our species first become aware that we are mortal?
SHADOWS OF OUR GRIEVING ANCESTORS
Thoughts don’t fossilize, but sometimes actions do, such as burying the dead with flowers, belongings, or other people. For decades archaeologists thought that a burial site in the Shanidar Cave complex in the Zagros Mountains of northern Iraq might be the oldest example. Dated to around sixty thousand years ago, one of the sites contains the body of a man lying in a fetal position alongside two women and an infant child in a grave scattered with the pollen of flowers.19 Indicative of the difficulty of fossil interpretation, however, archaeologists now think that the pollen was accidentally introduced into the site by the actions of animals, as nearby were found burrows of a gerbil-like rodent that is known to store seeds and flowers.20 But how did the bodies end up in that configuration?
In 2013 it was announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a fifty-thousand-year-old Neanderthal skeleton was intentionally buried at the famous La Chapelle-aux-Saints site in southwestern France. The bones were buried in a depression in the ground that archaeologists conclude could only have been intentionally dug, and taphonomic analysis of the fossils indicate that they did not show cracks and weathering, as was found in nearby bison and reindeer bones. “These multiple lines of evidence support the hypothesis of an intentional burial,” the authors conclude.21 Evidence from other Neanderthal sites indicates that individuals decorated themselves with pigments, wore jewelry constructed of colored shells and feathers,22 and like the Shanidar finds, some showed signs of having been cared for by others after injury or in old age. One man, for example, was missing most of his teeth and had serious hip and back problems that may have required the assistance of others in order for him to survive (figure 2-2).23 Keep in mind that Neanderthal brains were as large as our own, and though their cultural artifacts do not show the same rate of progress as those of early modern humans, they were sophisticated enough that we may reasonably infer that these were thinking and feeling hominids who had some awareness of their own mortality.
In Homo sapiens sites, features of ritual burial date back at least a hundred millennia. In modern Israel at the Skhul cave at Qafzeh, for example, archaeologists discovered hundred-thousand-year-old remains of a child buried with ritual goods and the antlers of a deer in its hands, several bodies in various contrived positions nearby, and the mandible of a wild boar grasped by the hands of another child.24 A 2013 review study of eighty-five such burial sites ranging in age from ten thousand to thirty-five thousand years revealed that most were relatively plain with items from daily life, but a few contained more lavish grave goods such as ornaments of stone, teeth, and shells. Curiously, there was no sign of progression over time, as is often found in tools and other artifacts. “So, the behavior of humans does not always go from simple to complex,” explained Julien Riel-Salvatore, the principal investigator of the study; “it often waxes and wanes in terms of its complexity depending on the conditions people live under.” Also, intriguingly, the sites do not differ significantly from earlier Neanderthal graves, implying that the latter had the same cognitive capacities as modern humans, at least with regard to mortality awareness.25
Figure 2-2. Skull of Neanderthal Man from La Chapelle-aux-Saints Burial Cave
Photograph by DEA / A. Dagli Orti. Courtesy of Getty Images.
A thirty-thousand- to thirty-four-thousand-year-old site at Sunghir, 120 miles north of Moscow, contains the remains of an adult man who was buried with 20 pendants, 25 rings, and 2,936 beads, all made of mammoth ivory and evidently sewn into his clothing (figure 2-3). Nearby is another grave containing a ten-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy who were also interred with some 10,000 ivory beads and other grave goods, such as mammoth tusk spears and hundreds of teeth of a species of arctic fox.26 Similar grave goods were discovered in the Arene Candide cave on the Ligurian coast of Italy, dated to about twenty-nine thousand years ago, in which an adolescent male was laid to rest with hundreds of pierced deer canines and shells wrapped around his head, presumably originally sewn into a cloth or leather head covering, now disintegrated, along with mammoth ivory pendants, elk antler batons, and a ceremonial-length flint blade carefully placed in his right hand.27 Such exquisitely carved items would have required considerable time to prepare, so whatever their purpose in life, it was evidently important to these Pleistocene hunters and foragers to equip their lost loved ones for the next life.28
More controversial still was the announcement in 2015 of a small-brained hominid species branded Homo naledi, whose fossil remains were discovered in the deep recesses of an almost inaccessible cave in South Africa. How did the bodies end up in such a remote location? The paleoanthropologists Paul Dirks, Lee R. Berger, and their colleagues suggested that the site represents the earliest example of “deliberate body disposal.”29 After the paper was published it wasn’t long before “deliberate body disposal” was transmogrified into something more spiritually transcendent. Reuters, for example, announced: “Fossil first: ancient human relative may have buried its dead.”30 PBS inquired rhetorically: “Why did Homo naledi bury its dead?”31 The discovery is controversial for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that the classification of the bones remains unclear as to where in the hominid lineage they fall, and their age is unknown. In a column in Scientific American I argued that intentional burial may be the result not of mourning but of murder,32 but this hypothesis generated much skepticism, and most scientists are withholding judgment on the find until more research is conducted. Whatever the cause of death, however, and however long ago these hominids died, that such a small-brained primate would deliberately dispose of the bodies of their dead is a remarkable discovery and indicative of the deep evolutionary history of how our ancient ancestors dealt with death.33
Figure 2-3. Burial of Man with Beads in Sunghir, Russia
Dated between 30,000 and 34,000 years old, this man was interred with 2,936 beads, along with 20 pendants and 25 rings, all made of mammoth ivory sewn into his clothing, since disintegrated, leaving this remarkable scene. Courtesy of José-Manuel Benito Álvarez.
What were any of these ancient hominids thinking when they buried their dead? Perhaps it was for purely sanitary reasons because, like so many other animals, they would deem it unhealthy to foul one’s nest (or cave), so the prudent act would have been to bury the body. In addition, however, perhaps they also came to believe in something like what we conceive of as a soul. Did our ancient ancestors have some inchoate conception of an afterlife to which their charges would transcend from this life? We do not know, but at some point in those long-gone millennia the first beliefs in and conceptions about the afterlife arose. From there it was only a matter of time after the invention of writing some five thousand years ago that people began to compose stories and myths about the afterlife. These are the heavens of the world’s major monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—to which we turn next along our journey.