The painted bones

It's fascinating how long into our past we've had rituals surrounding death.

There's decent evidence that our cousins the Neanderthals -- which went extinct on the order of forty thousand years ago -- buried their dead, and used ceremonial pigments like red and yellow ochre to decorate the bodies.  What I'm curious about is if those rituals were performed purely as fond remembrance of the the person who had died, or if it had a more religious significance.  Did they believe in an afterlife?  Was the reverence shown to a dead person's body because of belief that the person's soul still, in some sense, inhabited the remains?  Or some other reason entirely?  

It's all too easy to misinterpret the tangible evidence left behind, even from the relatively recent past.  Take, for example, the practice -- most common in Scotland and England -- of placing sturdy metal cages over grave sites.  The more fanciful-thinking believe it was because of a fear of vampires or zombies -- to protect the living from the dead.

A "mortsafe" in Cluny, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

The real reason -- which we know from the writings of the time -- was that it was actually to protect the dead from the living.  Grave robbing was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only to steal any valuables the person might have been buried with, but to sell the corpse itself to medical or anatomical laboratories for dissection.  (Recall the early nineteenth century Burke and Hare murders, where a pair of enterprising young men decided it was more lucrative to kill people themselves and sell their bodies than to wait for them to die; Hare turned King's evidence in exchange for immunity if he testified against Burke, which he did.  Burke was hanged -- and in a grisly but ironic twist, his body was given to an anatomical laboratory for dissection.)

So it's harder than you'd think to ascertain the motives people had for certain ritual practices in the past.  As far as the decoration of bodies by the Neanderthals, of course, at this point it's impossible to know.  But it's fascinating that our (very) distant ancestors had burial rituals not so very different from our own.

A recent find in Turkey has shown that modern humans have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time as well.  Çatalhöyük, nicknamed the "oldest city in the world," has provided fascinating archaeological finds before; the "Mother Goddess of Çatalhöyük," a six-thousand-year-old ceramic statue probably associated with rituals of fertility (sex being the other thing people have been obsessed with for a long time) is probably the most famous artifact from the site.  (If you're wondering how Çatalhöyük is pronounced -- heaven knows I was -- I'll save you the trouble.  Near as I can get, it's something like "chot-al-hoik.")

[Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Nevit Dilmen, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations 1320259 nevit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

A new find at the site, though, is equally interesting.  A team from the University of Bern has uncovered nine-thousand-year-old bones -- so a full thousand years older than the Mother Goddess figurine -- that show evidence of having been painted.  Not only were they painted, they appear to have been unearthed more than once, and repainted.  Fascinatingly, they used different colors for different genders -- cinnabar/red for males, copper-bearing minerals/blue and green for females.  Not all the bones were so decorated; it may have been a mark of status, or membership in a ruling class or priestly class, but all that is speculation.  (The fact that there have been painted bones of children found suggests that it wasn't mere individual status that was the deciding factor.)

There's also an association between the number of painted burials in a building, and the amount of painted decoration on the walls.  "This means when they buried someone, they also painted on the walls of the house," said study senior author Marco Milella.  "Furthermore, at Çatalhöyük, some individuals stayed in the community: their skeletal elements were retrieved and circulated for some time, before they were buried again.  This second burial of skeletal elements was also accompanied by wall paintings."

I'd like to think that the painted bones were a sign of reverence and not fear of retaliation by an angry spirit, but that too is speculation.  All we have is the artifacts to judge by.  Even so, it's fascinating to get a glimpse into the distant past of our own species.

And you have to wonder what our distant descendants will make of the artifacts left from our own society.  What will they think of the marble and granite monuments we raised over the dead?  It puts me in mind of the eerie, atmospheric rhyme I saw on a gravestone in the cemetery in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania where my great- and great-great grandparents are buried:

Remember, traveler, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

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Memento mori

People have really weird attitudes toward death.

Note that I am not just referring to religious concepts of the afterlife, here, although as an atheist I am bound to think that some of those sound pretty bizarre, too.  I've heard everything from your traditional harps-and-haloes idea, to being more or less melted down and fused with god, to fields of flowers and babbling brooks, to spending all of eternity with your dead relatives (and it may sound petty of me, but considering a few of my relatives, this last one sounds more like a version of hell to me).  Then, of course, you have the much-discussed Islamic 72-virgins concept of heaven, which brings up the inevitable question of what the virgins' opinions about all of this might be.  All of these strike me as equal parts absurdity and wishful thinking, given that (honestly) believers have come to these conclusions based on exactly zero evidence.

But today, I'm more considering the rituals and traditions surrounding death itself, aside from all of the ponderings of what (if anything) might happen to us afterwards.  I was first struck by how oddly death is handled, even here in relatively secular America, when my mom died seven years ago.  My wife and I were doing the wrenching, painful, but necessary choosing of a coffin, and we were told by the salesman that there was a model that had a little drawer inside in which "photographs, letters, and other mementos can be placed."  There was, we were told, a battery-powered light inside the drawer, presumably because it's dark down there in the ground.

Carol and I looked at each other, and despite the circumstances, we both laughed.  Did this guy really think that my mom was going to be down there in the cemetery, and would periodically get bored and need some reading material?

Lest you think that this is just some sort of weird sales gimmick, an aberration, just yesterday I ran into an article that describes an invention by Swedish music and video equipment salesman Fredrik Hjelmquist.  Hjelmquist has one-upped the coffin with the bookshelf and reading light; his coffins have surround-sound, and the music storage device inside the coffin can be updated to "provide solace for grieving friends and relatives by making it possible for them to alter the deceased's playlist online."

The whole thing comes with a price tag of 199,000 kroner (US$30,700), which you would think would put it out of the price range of nearly everyone -- but there have been thousands of inquiries, mostly from the United States and Canada, but also from as far away as China and Taiwan.

Now, I understand that many of the rituals surrounding death are for the comfort of the living; the flowers, the wakes, the songs at funerals, and so on.  But this one is a little hard to explain based solely on that, I think.  Is there really anyone out there who would be comforted by the fact that Grandma is down there in Shady Grove Memorial Park, rockin' out to Metallica?  I would think that if you would go for something like this, especially considering the cost, you would have to believe on some level that the Dearly Departed really is listening.  Which, to me, is kind of creepy, because it implies that the person you just buried is somehow still down there.  Conscious and aware.  In that cold, dark box underground.

To me, this is the opposite of comforting.  This is Poe's "The Premature Burial."

The whole thing brings to mind the Egyptians' practice of placing food, gifts, mummified pets, and so on in the tombs of departed rich people, so they'll have what they need on their trip into the afterlife.  But unlike the Egyptians, who had a whole intricate mythology built up around death, we just have bits and pieces, no coherent whole that would make sense of it.  (And again, that's with the exception of religious explanations of the afterlife.)  As a culture, we're distinctly uneasy about the idea of dying, but we can't quite bring ourselves to jump to the conclusion, "he's just gone, and we don't understand it."

I was always struck by the Klingons' approach to death in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  As a comrade-in-arms is dying, you howl, signifying that the folks in the afterlife better watch out, because a seriously badass warrior is on the way.  But afterwards -- do what you want with the body, because the person who inhabited it is gone.  "It is just a dead shell," they say.  "Dispose of it as you see fit."

Me, I like the Viking approach.  When I die, I'd appreciate it if my family and friends would stick me on a raft, set it on fire, and launch it out into the ocean.  That's probably all kinds of illegal, but it seems like a fitting farewell, given that I've always thought that Thor and Odin and Loki and the rest of the gang were a great deal more appealing than any other religion I've ever run across.  But if that turns out to be impractical, just "dispose of me as you see fit."  And fer cryin' in the sink, I am quite sure that I won't need a reading light or surround-sound.