What did these early hominins observe? Within hours of death, a person’s skin becomes blotchy in areas where the blood has settled and ashen elsewhere. Rigor mortis stiffens the muscles for a couple of days, by which time decomposition has begun. The first organ to go is the brain, which breaks down to amino acids and lipids and becomes a viscous gray liquid that may seep out of the person’s ears, nose, or mouth.
Decay of the rest of the body usually begins by the third day and comes from both within and without. Within the intestines, millions of bacteria, which were previously held in check by the body’s immune system, digest the intestine and other organs. In so doing, they produce gas, which bloats the body, especially the stomach, male genitals, lips, and tongue, which may cause it to stick out of the mouth. From outside the body, maggots collect around the eyes, mouth, and genitalia and begin to digest subcutaneous fat.
By the end of one week, increased bloating causes the internal organs to rupture. The skin becomes greenish, and in some areas peels off. Maggots, which by then are visible over most of the body, may be joined by beetles, which favor muscle tissue. By the end of two weeks, corpses are said to “basically dissolve; they collapse and sink in upon themselves and eventually seep out onto the ground.” The smell of decaying flesh, noticeable at some distance, “is dense and cloying … halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat”; the smell is said to be “poignant and memorable.” Within two to four weeks, depending on how warm the temperature is, a corpse is reduced to a skeleton. The bones will also decompose, although this may take several years to complete. During this period, the bones and skull sit there, wretched reminders to the living.
British physician and philosopher Raymond Tallis described this period:
Your skull, meanwhile, is as hospitable to these insects as it is to the thoughts you are presently having about them. That is what its dumb hardness, that you feel now, says: your head is not on anyone’s side, least of all yours. It is as indifferent to your sorrows, your fears, your joys as it is to the song of the birds that might one day find it a ready-built shelter, as hospitable to the snake that slithers through your orbital fissure as to the light from which you constructed the image of your beloved. And not one of the creatures that grow, hop or gnaw their way through your rotting head will be the slightest bit curious about your thoughts, however privileged, original or salacious.43
All of this assumes that the body has not been disturbed by scavengers, which must have been an exception in the past. Scavengers, such as hyenas, selectively eat the arms and legs, which contain large muscles and long bones, the marrow of which is especially sought after.
Since these early hominins had observed decomposing bodies, they would have been acutely aware of the fact of death. And when people with whom they were closely associated died, they would have felt sadness and grieved, just as many animals do. The feeling of sadness and empathy may also explain why some Neandertals buried their dead, as a sign of caring or to protect the bodies from predators. Death would have been a fact, like the sun dying at the end of the day and warm weather dying at the end of the summer. Death was something that happened to other people; to understand that it is also going to happen to you, you need to be able to fully project yourself into the future, both theoretically and emotionally, using your accumulated experiences from the past. In short, one needs to have acquired an autobiographical memory.
As modern Homo sapiens slowly developed an autobiographical memory, an awareness of their own death began to take hold. Since they were able to introspectively think about their own thinking, entirely new ideas were born—infinity, eternity, the meaning of life. Once burdened with such ideas, it was no longer possible for one human to pass the decaying corpse of a fellow human without being assailed by unbidden questions. What happened to this man whom I knew? Where did he go? Will this also happen to me? Where will I go? Will I simply rot and dissolve into the ground, like this man? As Hamlet said of Caesar: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, / Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.” Homo sapiens would never again be free to not ask such questions. In the words of Theodosius Dobzhansky: “A being who knows that he will die arose from ancestors who did not know.”44
Therefore, at the same time that the acquisition of autobiographical memory had conferred significant evolutionary advantages, it had also carried with it a massive millstone. Since modern Homo sapiens could both introspectively think about themselves and also project themselves into the future, they became fully aware, for the first time in history, that they were going to die. Thus, modern Homo sapiens became the first hominin to fully understand the implications and meaning of death. According to British archeologist Mike Parker Pearson, this awareness is “a fundamental defining characteristic of what it is to be human, at the very core of our being and self-consciousness.” As theologian Paul Tillich phrased it, “The anxiety of death is the most basic, most universal and inescapable.” Fear of death was the theme of the world’s first recorded story, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which will be discussed in chapter 7, and it has continued to permeate literature to the present. As French poet Charles Baudelaire described it:
Nothing can withstand the Irreparable—
its termites undermine
our soul, pathetic citadel, until
the ruined tower falls
Nothing can withstand the Irreparable!
According to Vladimir Nabokov: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” And T. S. Eliot captured it in a single line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”45
Edward Tylor theorized that “primitive” people, faced with an understanding of death, would have reasoned that something had been lost in the transition from being alive to being dead. That something, said Tylor, was a soul or spirit. And “if the concept of a soul explains the movements, activities, and changes in a human person, why should it not also be applied more widely to explain the rest of the natural world?” Tylor believed that a belief in souls or spirits was the essence of religious thought and called his theory animism, from anima, the Latin word for “spirit.” Tylor even defined religion simply as a “belief in spiritual beings.”46
There are suggestions in child development that a mature understanding of death is a relatively late acquisition in human evolution. Most children younger than six have no understanding of death. In his evocative memoir of childhood, Vladimir Nabokov reflected this: “A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.” Young children believe that death is reversible, like going to sleep, and that people who die may return. In a study of 378 young children, many were said to believe that dead people continue to eat, drink, and experience thoughts and emotions. Between the ages of six and nine, a child’s concept of death becomes more personified and frightening; death is described as being like a skeleton, but it is still neither permanent nor personal.47
A mature understanding of death does not begin to develop until the age of nine or later and involves four concepts: that death is universal; that it is irreversible; that all bodily functions cease; and that it has physical causes. A 10-year-old girl, for example, described death as “the passing of the body … like the withering of flowers.” Even some adolescents, however, do not appear to fully understand death, as measured by their risk-taking behaviors. Thus, a mature understanding of death appears to be one of the last milestones in the cognitive development and evolution of the human brain.48
It is also of interest that no animal except modern Homo sapiens appears to fully understand death, suggesting that such understanding requires the development of autobiographical memory. Some animals may display evidence of bereavement, such as a dog may do when i
ts master dies. Elephants have also been described showing signs of what appears to be bereavement, such as running their trunks over the bodies of dead family members and even throwing dirt on them. But grieving another’s death is not the same as understanding that you too will die.49
Even among chimpanzees, the primates most closely related to humans, there is no indication that they understand death. Jane Goodall recorded 66 chimpanzee deaths in Tanzania and saw the bodies of 24 of them. In most cases, the dead animal was simply ignored and left to decay. In one case, when an adult male died after falling from a tree and breaking its neck, “group members showed intense excitement and anxiety, displayed around the body, and threw stones at it.” Three other chimpanzee deaths occurred when adults killed infants and ate them. Cannibalism of dead members of their species has also been observed among gorillas, baboons, and other primates. Since an understanding of death appears to be unique to humans, it has even been suggested that “the knowledge of death is a much more decisive break between human modality and animal existence than tool-production, brain, or language.”50
Many observers over the years have viewed an awareness of death as an impetus to religious thought. In ancient Rome, Gaius Petronius said: “It is fear [that] first created gods in the world.” More recently, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted in Leviathan that religion is found “in man only” and reasoned that “the seed of Religion” must consist of “some peculiar quality … not to be found in other Living creatures.” That “peculiar quality,” said Hobbes, is the ability of man “which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by feare of death … the Gods were at first created by humane feare.” Thus, the modern hominin who emerged beginning about 40,000 years ago was significantly different from all hominins that had previously lived. He was, in the words of Erich Fromm, “an anomaly, the freak of the universe … part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends nature.” An awareness of death was an inevitable by-product of our introspective and temporal selves, which, in themselves, conveyed enormous evolutionary advantages. To be fully human and to be aware of death are one and the same thing. In the words of William Butler Yeats: “He knows death to the bone— / Man has created death.”51
To say that an awareness of death was the original impetus to religious ideas 40,000 years ago, however, is not to say that a fear of death dominates the thinking of modern Homo sapiens. This later position has been proposed by some social psychologists, based on Ernest Becker’s contention in 1972 that a fear of death “is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for men.” As phrased more recently: “All human activities are framed by death anxiety and colored by our collective and individual efforts to resolve the inescapable and intractable existential given.”52
The social psychologists who have developed this theory call it Terror Management Theory and suggest that we use self-esteem and our cultural worldview to buffer our anxiety about death. Supporters of this theory have argued that it can be scientifically tested by reminding people of their own death (called “mortality salience”) and then measuring the effect of this reminder on their thinking. A summary of 277 such experiments claimed that evidence to support Terror Management Theory “is robust and produces moderate to large effects across a wide variety of MS [mortality salience] manipulations.”53
Other researchers have criticized Terror Management Theory. They contend that a person’s self-esteem and cultural worldview are shaped by many factors other than death anxiety. They also criticize the “mortality salience” experiments for the methods used to assess death anxiety. Most important, it is questionable whether contemporary Terror Management Theory, based on a cultural worldview in which virtually everyone as a group accepts the existence of an afterlife, has much relevance for Homo sapiens who lived 40,000 years ago and were becoming aware of their own death for the first time.
THE EMERGENCE OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 2: THE MEANING OF DREAMS
The belief that all humans have a soul or spirit, and that this soul leaves the body at the time of death, was merely the first part of Edward Tylor’s theory regarding the origin of religious thought. The second part of his theory was “the belief in the soul’s continued existence in a Life after Death.” Tylor contended that “primitive people arrived at this conclusion based upon their experience with dreams.”54
What do we know about dreams? We know that they are associated with rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, and that all mammals have periods of REM sleep. Dogs, cats, monkeys, and elephants are said to dream, and perhaps all mammals do. The purpose of REM sleep and dreams is still unknown; theories have included functions associated with memory storage, problem solving, and threat simulation. Some researchers have theorized that REM sleep and dreams are evolutionary epiphenomena that perhaps played some useful role in our distant past.
However, if hominins had been dreaming for several million years, why did dreams become more important about 40,000 years ago? The reason is that hominins could not assign meaning to their dreams until they had cognitively matured. Specifically, they needed to have acquired an awareness of self, awareness of others, introspection, and an ability to place the experience of their dream within the context of their past experiences and future hopes.
Anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell referred to the necessity of cognitive maturation in interpreting the dreams of Ojibwa Indians: “Dreaming may have occurred in the early hominids, but, without the psychological potentialities fully released only with the expansion of the hominid brain, it would not have been possible for the content of dreams or the products of imaginative processes to have been communicated to others.”55 Edward Tylor theorized that the “primitive” people’s experience with dreams led them to the idea that the soul or spirit that leaves the body at death continues to live in some kind of spirit world or land of the dead. He cited two kinds of dreams as having been especially important in fostering the idea of an afterlife. The first was dreams in which “human souls come from without to visit the sleeper who sees them as dreams.” Tylor cited as examples the Zulu of South Africa, who “may be visited in a dream by the shade of an ancestor,” and people in Guinea in West Africa, whose “dreams are construed into visits from the spirits of their deceased friends.” The other kind of dream described by Tylor was that in which a person’s soul leaves their body during sleep and travels to other places, including the land of the dead. Thus Tylor cited the Maoris of New Zealand, whose dreaming souls could “leave the body and return, even traveling to the region of the dead to hold converse with its friends.” Given such evidence from their dreams, Tylor argued that it was “rational enough from the savage point of view” to conclude that there is “an independent existence of the personal soul after the death of the body, in a Future Life.”56
The importance of dreams in shaping religious ideas has been widely noted. For example, Boston University neurologist and researcher Patrick McNamara cited “the importance of the dream as a primary source for religious ideas and practices of traditional peoples.”
Both ancestral and nonancestral supernatural agents appear in dreams and are reverenced in daily life. The spirit beings that appear in dreams can be either positively or negatively disposed toward the dreamers—that is, both evil and good supernatural beings appear in dreams.… Dream characters, therefore, have a prima facie case to be considered as the cognitive source for supernatural beings. People in traditional societies treat them as such, and it is likely that ancestral populations also treated them as such.
Therefore, “there can be little doubt that dream experiences have been thoroughly intertwined with the religious beliefs, practices, and experiences of people all over the world, throughout history.”57
A review of ideas about dreams in contemporary anthropological accounts supports McNamara’s conclusion.
Among 295 cultures described in the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University, 71 of them are economically categorized as being primarily or largely dependent on hunting, gathering, and fishing for their livelihood. In the available ethnographic accounts of these cultures, the importance of dreams is mentioned in all but two cultures. Sometimes the dreams are mentioned as predicting the future; at other times the dreams include visitations by deceased relatives or visits by the dreamer to the land of the dead. For example, among the Nootkan Indians of Western Canada: “People frequently see the dead in dreams and this is regarded as good evidence for the nature of the life of the dead.” And among the Mataco Indians of Bolivia: “Very often in dreams one sees dead relatives. The soul has gone to the underworld and paid them a visit.” Appendix B lists 25 accounts of dreams taken from hunter-gatherer cultures from all over the world as described in the HRAF files.58
The nature of the spirit world or land of the dead, as envisioned by different cultures, varies widely. For example, Native American Pawnee believed that “the soul of the deceased ascended to heaven to become a star.” The souls of the Yakut in Siberia were said to “travel skyward to a lush greenery-filled heaven.” The spirits of dead Yanomama in Brazil went to the sky, which “resembles earth except the hunting is better, the food tastier, and the spirits of the people are young and beautiful.” The souls of Aboriginal Australians were said to go to “a beautiful country above the clouds abounding with kangaroos and other game.” In a few cultures, the afterlife was located underground. For example, in Samoa, the entrance to the afterworld was through an active volcano, and among the Chukchee in Siberia, the dead lived underground, where “the reindeer herds are numerous.”59
Thus, about 40,000 years ago, an idea slowly took hold that human spirits continue to live after the human body dies. The development of this idea occurred over thousands of years as brains evolved an introspective and temporal self and modern Homo sapiens became increasingly uneasy at the prospect of their own death. This was not merely a semantic denial of death, as when we say “passing on” rather than “dying.” This was a basic conceptual denial of the fact that death is the termination of our existence. In place of an embrace by maggots and betrothal to dust, we discovered an afterlife in which we continue to exist in other forms, as a spirit or soul in an afterworld, or are reincarnated in another body or form. Humans became, for the first time, immortal.
Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods Page 13
