“You have only to look in your compost bin to see” what you’ll become, Mary C. Stiner told an amused crowd at a packed Fox Tucson Theatre on Wednesday.
Stiner is a Regents’ Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona and curator of Zooarchaeology at the Arizona State Museum. She delivered the second of this year’s Downtown Lecture Series on “Immortality.”
Her lecture, “Love and Death in the Stone Age,” explored the emergence of funerary rituals in ancient peoples.
Paths to Immortality
There are two paths to immortality, according to Stiner. First, we achieve immortality by passing along our genetic material to an offspring. Secondly, we achieve a measure of immortality by persisting in the minds of the living.
According to Stiner, burial rituals help achieve this immortality.
Burial traditions emerged in the Stone Age when Neanderthals began to care for their dead in a purposeful manner, she said.
Ancient Burial Rituals
The condition of some ancient human remains indicates a lack of purposeful burial, while the treatment afforded other ancient remains suggests the intentional interment of a loved one.
A number of ancient, purposeful burial sites are found within the life space of settled communities, some even excavated within the boundaries of a home. “They put them right under the floor,” marveled audience member Holli Nebel-Sussman of one of the more unusual ancient burial practices.
“There seems to be some kind of symbolic connection … between keeping the body with the living and a notion of immortality — a lasting connection that extends across the threshold between life and death,” Stiner said before the lecture.
Paleoanthropologists have found a number of sites where ancient human remains appear to have been handled in a ritualized fashion, including Rising Star Cave outside Johannesburg, South Africa, where multiple sets of remains were found recently.
Neanderthal Burial Practices
Some animal species, including chimpanzees and elephants, mourn their dead and handle their bodies with care. However, these behaviors are not as sophisticated as human burial rituals.
According to Stiner, the Neanderthals were the first hominin species for which purposeful burials have been ascertained.
Stiner’s research interests — human evolution including early and pre-modern human behavior — center around Neanderthal economics and the relationship between people and their food: getting it, processing it and sharing it.
There is an important connection between the earliest burial practices and the places where people met and came together to conduct everyday activities such as sharing food, Stiner said.
It’s in or near those communal places where the Neanderthals and other early peoples kept their dead.
“They (Neanderthals) were very interesting people,” said Stiner. “They did things differently than what we’re accustomed to, but in many ways they would have had the keen intelligence that we would expect for a human being today.”
Archaeological evidence shows that communities of Neanderthals and their descendants frequently returned to burial sites, often caves, for thousands of years.
“People were interested in keeping the body in a place where they would return … or even spend time… after the individual had died,” said Stiner. “They’re keeping the dead, in a sense, among the living and in the place of the living.”
