How Animals Grieve

by Barbara J. King

  Alone of all species, we may pour our lamentations into art, as grief-memoir writers do. With the exception of the embodied grief that may be expressed in dance, though, it may be when we still our unique creativity that we feel closest to other animals who grieve. We grieve with human words but animal bodies and animal gestures and animal movements.

  15

  THE PREHISTORY OF GRIEF

  When they died, the boy was no older than twelve or thirteen, the girl no older than ten. The boy apparently had developed normally, but the girl showed signs of a bilateral deformity of the femurs, meaning that her legs were short and curved; she walked with a bowed gait. The children lived in a settlement we now call Sunghir, along a riverbank in Russia about two hundred kilometers east of today’s Moscow. Sunghir’s permafrost attests to a challenging climate. When it came time to dig through the cold earth to lay the children’s bodies to rest, the Sunghir community drew together. Through a collective eye for beauty and many hours of skilled labor, these people ensured that the children would leave this world by way of a spectacular burial ritual.

  We have no eyewitness reports to the ceremony, because the children died twenty-four thousand years ago. This period of the Paleolithic predates not only writing but also settled village life and the domestication of crops or most animals. This isn’t to say that the Sunghir people, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, led simple lives. Gorgeously rendered animal images, alive with color and painted on walls at caves like Chauvet in France starting around thirty-five thousand years ago, reveal the cultural complexity of our Homo sapiens ancestors.

  Archaeologists’ descriptions invite us to imagine that long-ago day when the Sunghir community convened at the grave. Vincenzo Formicola and Alexandra Buzhilova write:

  The two children were buried head to head in supine position in a long, narrow, and shallow grave dug into the permafrost. The skeletons were covered with red ocher and accompanied by extraordinarily rich and unique grave goods. Thousands of ivory beads, probably sewn onto clothes, long spears of straightened mammoth tusks (one of which is 240 cm long), ivory daggers, hundreds of perforated arctic fox canines, pierced antler rods, bracelets, ivory animal carvings, ivory pins, and disc-shaped pendants were part of the ornamentation of the burial.

  In the world of anthropology, this description of Sunghir’s double-child burial is famous. It was a rare practice to bury children so long ago, at least judging from the graves that archaeologists have to this point uncovered. Even rarer was the girl’s deformity, but it strengthens scientists’ suspicion that prehistoric burial for this age range occurred more often when the child’s anatomy deviated from the normal. Still, only one of the Sunghir children fits into this category, and all indicators are that she died for reasons unrelated to the bowing of her legs. Archaeologists feel certain the two deaths happened close enough in time for the children’s burials to be simultaneous. Perhaps an accident befell the boy and the girl when they were foraging or carrying out some other activity on behalf of the community, or maybe they fell victim to disease.

  The compelling nature of the bones and artifacts from this site explains part of Sunghir’s notoriety, but I think there’s more to it. Can we fail to feel a connection to these people, so distant in time, when we learn of the actions they took in the face of death? The detail that catches in my throat comes from the archaeologists’ report: thousands of ivory beads, probably sewn onto the children’s clothes. Faced with unrelenting challenges to their very survival in this cold climate, these hunter-gatherers took the time to decorate the young bodies before burial. For me, the sewn beads are the Sunghir people’s grief made material.

  Of course, it’s possible that I am wrong and that the hard work of the Sunghir burial preparations went on in the absence of mourning. But here is where the stories in this book may aid in attempts to reconstruct our past. A variety of highly social birds and mammals show the capacity for grief—including corvids, geese, dolphins, whales, elephants, gorillas, and chimpanzees. If I’m right, and individual animals from these species mourn because they’ve felt love for another creature, can it be such a stretch to suggest that love and grief were expressed by some individuals of our own species twenty-four thousand years ago? Wouldn’t these emotions be a likely by-product of close community living in a smart, social, and self-aware primate?

  While the expression of grief spans both time and species, the practice of community burial isn’t known from nonhuman animals and is rare even in our own lineage. From the time our ancestors first stood upright over four million years ago, through their first crafting stone tools around two and a half million years ago and the onset of big-game hunting somewhere between two million and one-half million years ago, no sign survives of the burial or cremation of the dead. This fact carries fascinating implications when we consider the large numbers of individual involved. A demographic research group estimates that 107 billion people have lived and died between about fifty thousand years ago and the present. I’m suspicious of endorsing any precise figure, because calculations of this nature involve messy assumptions and rough guesses about population numbers in our past. As a thought experiment, though, this exercise makes a point. Correcting for the fact that our lineage began not fifty thousand but around six million years ago, we see that a vast number of humans (and human ancestors) have been born, lived, and died. What happened to their bodies? Did anyone mourn the dead? When did a social, ceremonial response of mourning for the death of the individual originate?

  Sunghir gives us a fixed point in time by which hunter-gatherers (at least some hunter-gatherers) carried out burial ceremonies, probably with attendant emotion. Using Sunghir as a starting point and working backward, is it possible to uncover archaeologically the origins of grief in the human lineage?

  In Israel, two prehistoric cave sites offer treasure troves of information about how Homo sapiens lived around a hundred thousand years ago. At Qafzeh in the lower Galilee region, and at Skhul at Mount Carmel, early modern people carried out the earliest known intentional burials. (The Qafzeh burials date to about 92,000 years ago; the Skhul dates could be anywhere from 80,000 to 120,000 years ago). Nowhere near as elaborate as those at Sunghir, the burials at Qafzeh and Skhul show unmistakable signs of deliberate care for the dead amid a thriving culture. Archaeologist Daniella E. Bar-Yosef Mayer and her colleagues describe the Qafzeh culture as consisting of people who decorated their (living) bodies with red ocher, collected shells during trips to the seashore (about forty-five kilometers away), and applied red ocher to some of the shells in what may be an early example of a sort of artistic manipulation. Both children and adults were buried at the cave site; in one case, an adolescent was interred with an antler on the chest. At Skhul, an individual was buried with a boar’s jaw; shells were intentionally perforated and included in some of the graves.

  These Israeli sites offer an evolutionary foundation for humans’ careful treatment of their dead, and hint at what we know came afterward. Sometimes, scholars of the origins of religion force a link between the presence of special goods in the grave and a cultural belief in the afterlife, but there’s no reliable way to correlate the two. Grave goods could just as easily be an indication of respect and love for the dead as of community-held beliefs about what happens after death. (You’ll notice I have made no argument for belief in the afterlife, or the presence of religious ritual, at Sunghir.) I think Tyler Volk is right, though, to link human death rituals with individuals’ reflections on their own mortality. When people come together around a body, Volk writes in What Is Death?, it “forces them to face death. . . . Death serves to awaken the consciousness of the living.”

  As Homo sapiens flourished and some people began to farm, humans’ patterns of meaning-making around death changed. A man-and-lamb double burial beneath a house floor at Çatalhöyük, Turkey, around eight thousand years ago suggests an emotional relationship between humans and the animals they domesticated. The grand-scale tombs of ancient Egy
pt were filled, a few thousand years later, with food intended for people to eat in the afterlife. A chronology of prehistoric practices shows that the human imagination became increasingly attuned to matters of death, and life after death.

  Even early on, though, Homo sapiens’ death practices were concerned with the symbolic, not just the functional. At Qafzeh and Skhul, red ocher became a tool of cultural expression, as it did for prehistoric peoples elsewhere. Rich in iron, deep red in color, ocher played a major role at Blombos Cave in South Africa, a “go-to” site for understanding the lives of early Homo sapiens. Coastal residents, the Blombos people made good use of marine resources. They speared fish, hunted seals and dolphins, and gathered periwinkles. The old idea that a “revolution” in modern human behavior occurred only thirty-five thousand years ago in Europe can still be found in some textbooks, but remarkable discoveries at Blombos have firmly falsified this view.

  The Blombos people created paint pigments by using hammerstones and grinding stones in smart ways. We know this because archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood and his team discovered an artist’s studio at Blombos dated to a hundred thousand years ago (the same time period as Qafzeh and Skhul farther north). The Blombos hunter-gatherers ground hard ocher into powder, sometimes mixing it with charcoal and with oil from seal bones. Abalone shells became dual-purpose tools, serving both as mixing bowls and as containers for the resulting pigments. Henshilwood’s detective work takes us right to the verge of an exciting view of the ancient artists’ lives, but the artifacts remain silent as to how our ancestors used the pigments they created. Did they color their tools? Paint images on walls? Did they apply pigments to their own bodies, as the Qafzeh and Skhul people did around the same time?

  Blombos was home to early Homo sapiens for many thousands of years. Around seventy-five thousand years ago, its residents incised blocks of red ocher with patterned marks. While this isn’t writing, such patterns can only be generated by a mind that thinks abstractly and breaks free of an exclusive focus on day-to-day survival skills. Jewelry-making requires this ability as well; the Blombos people pierced the shells of small mollusks in precise ways that, together with wear patterns on the shells, shows they were worn in self-ornamentation. It’s tempting to conclude that the dead must have been buried at Blombos as they were at the two Israel sites, but no burials have so far been uncovered there.

  The emerging picture of life for early Homo sapiens in Africa and the Middle East is one of creative self-expression by people who thought about their lives—and felt their lives. A picture that is similar in certain ways is emerging for our close cousins the Neandertals. At around thirty thousand years ago, populations of the big-brained, robust-bodied Neandertals went extinct, except in the sense that elements of the Neandertals’ genetic lineage do live on in some modern populations. For thousands of years before that point, Neandertals had coexisted with anatomically modern humans, and at certain times and places (though never in Africa, where they did not reside), they directly met up with our species.

  It would be a serious mistake to view these people through the old “caveman” stereotype that portrayed them as shambling, club-carrying creatures. With spear-wielding skills, Neandertals hunted dangerous big game like mammoth. Some Neandertals modified teeth of bear, wolf, and deer to wear as pendants, or adorned the molar of a mammoth with red ocher, smoothing and polishing the tooth as a kind of symbolic keepsake. And some buried their dead. At the site of La Ferrassie in France, Neandertals covered the body of a group member with a limestone slab; at Teshik-Tash in Uzbekistan, they encircled the body of a child with goat horns.

  Careful burials of the dead are not known from prior evolutionary periods, but one site may be telegraphing clues to archaeologists about treatment of the dead by earlier ancestors. At Spain’s “Pit of the Bones” (La Sima de los Huesos), the remains of thirty-two individuals cluster together at the bottom of a forty-five-foot shaft. The date? Three hundred thousand years ago. Could the Sima people have deposited the bodies in the shaft as an act of respect or veneration? Or were the bodies sent tumbling down by an act of aggression or malice? Perhaps there was no deliberate act at all, and the bodies somehow fell into the shaft accidentally. The site yields no answers. Further back in time than this, the material evidence gives no clues at all about the death practices of our ancestors.

  For many people, “Lucy,” who lived three million years ago in the Rift Valley, is a touchstone for understanding the human family tree. Famously discovered by Don Johanson in Ethiopia almost forty years ago, Lucy and her kind (Australopithecus afarensis) strode upright through a woodland ecosystem teeming with other mammals and birds. Lucy died at about the age of twenty. Gradually, her body skeletonized—reduced to bone—in the spot where she died, just as happens with wild animals today (unless their carcasses are consumed or transported away by other animals).

  Fascinating as these glimpses of the origins of human mortuary practices may be, no site excavation, grave-good inventory, or bone analysis can reveal what emotion was felt by the family or community of someone who died thousands of years ago. Yet, as I have already argued, the weight of animal-grief stories collected in this book supports the likelihood of grief in our own prehistory. What the artifacts and bones don’t tell us, and what scientists of the past may be reluctant to speculate about, comes clearer for us in comparative context. Twenty-four thousand years ago at Sunghir, even a hundred thousand years ago at Qafzeh, Skhul, and Blombos, our ancestors had the cognitive and emotional resources to feel grief and the community structure to support its expression. It is only emotional capacity that this comparative context illuminates, though, and we would do well to keep in mind that the capacity to experience an emotion doesn’t always result in the expression of that emotion.

  For some of us today, death is finality: life ends at the moment we cease breathing. For others of us who have a transcendent belief in the soul and its timeless continuity, the death of a fleshly body doesn’t equal the death of the person. Believers in a sacred afterlife or in reincarnation may regard death as the passage to an existence that is far more fulfilling. When death is not viewed as the end of meaningful existence, mourning may be tinged with a hint of celebration.

  Human meaning-making around the body, death, and mourning in the modern world is infinitely complex, and meaning-making about the body, death, and mourning in the past remains elusive. Anthropology can bring us no closer to a prehistory of grief than to document the elaborate care with which some bodies were buried, and to strongly suggest, based on examples from nonhuman animals, that such acts of care reverberated with feelings of loss.

  In chapter 14, I hammered away at the “uniquely human” perspective on grieving, making the point that only our species turns mourning into art. In this chapter, I’ve outlined prehistoric human rituals of burial that are unequalled in their elaborate nature by the actions of any other animal. At the same time, I’m appealing here to the emotional capacities of other animals to argue that, in at least some places at some periods of the past, our extinct ancestors carried out those elaborate rituals in a state of felt grief. In this way, I’ve returned to that balancing act I mentioned in the prologue—the need I feel as an anthropologist to acknowledge how our species differs from others in grief behavior even while I put most of my effort into highlighting the points of cognitive and emotional similarity with other creatures.

  On a recent visit to Berlin, I felt the full force of the uniquely human response to death. To walk among the 2,711 concrete slabs at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is a disordering experience. One block from the Brandenburg Gate, on an open-air site that may be visited around the clock, the stelae line up in parallel rows of varied height. Moving up and down the rows, glimpsing another person here and there at some intersection on the path, I felt exactly as I imagine the architect intended I should: surrounded by indifferent sameness, thrown back on myself, overwhelmed by silence and that sense of disorientation. How
those concrete slabs made me feel that way I am at a loss to articulate, but they did. Beneath the slabs, in an underground exhibit, are the names of every Jew known to have been murdered during the Holocaust, along with many photographs and text passages. The images and words are haunting, but in that space—arranged as in a conventional museum—my experience was ordered, familiar, and thus much different in nature from what I felt wandering among the stelae.

  At the Berlin memorial, it’s concrete slabs. In Oklahoma City, it’s 168 chairs laid out in neat rows. In Lower Manhattan, it’s two open spaces, surrounded by trees and cascading water, that mark the empty footprints of the World Trade Centers’ Twin Towers. In Hiroshima, it’s the statues, bridges, open areas, and beautiful clock tower of the Peace Memorial Park. In Kigali, Rwanda, it’s 250,000 bodies interred on the grounds of the Genocide Memorial Center. In the aftermath of a blinding flash, a catastrophic day, or war’s grinding attrition, our mourning becomes global in a way never before possible in our history or prehistory.

  At this scale, grief spreads across space and time like waves across the sea. After the writer Francisco Goldman’s young wife, Aura, was killed by a wave while swimming at a Mexican beach, Goldman felt compelled to explore the behavior of waves. Waves, he later wrote,

  travel across the ocean in sets, or trains, and it’s never just one train that arrives at a beach, because along the way wave-trains meet or converge or overtake one another and mix, older waves with somewhat younger ones. But even a moderate wave, I’ve since learned, breaks and surges toward the shore with the innate force of a small automobile going at full throttle.