For tens of thousands of years, humans have developed funeral rites and burial practices that reflected the attitudes of their particular time and place. These traditions of honoring the dead continue to evolve into the 21st century, as people seek “green burials” that are more environmentally friendly than standard coffins.
One of the newest examples comes from Loop, a Dutch biotech company that recently unveiled a biodegradable coffin made of fungus, microbes and plant roots. Called the “Living Cocoon,” the coffin is designed to hasten bodily decomposition while also enriching soil around the plot.
“Normally, what we do as humans is we take something out of nature, we kill it, and we use it,” said Bob Hendrikx, founder of Loop, in a call. “So I thought: what if we humans start moving from working with dead materials toward a world in which we work with living materials?”
“We would not only become less of a parasite, but we could also start exploring super-cool material properties, like living lights, walls that are self-healing, and that kind of stuff,” he added.
Hendrikx was inspired to develop the Living Cocoon while presenting a living home concept at last year’s Dutch Design Week. While houses are obviously for the living, Hendrikx got to thinking about adapting the concept into a coffin powered by mushroom mycelium, which is the filamentary vegetative part of the fungus.
“Mycelium is nature’s biggest recycler,” Hendrikx said. “It is continuously looking for dead organic matter to transform into key nutrients.”
Developed in collaboration with Delft University of Technology and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, the Living Cocoon contains a moss bed packed with mycelium, plant roots, and a lush ecosystem of microorganisms. It is already on the market in the Netherlands, and has been used for a burial at the Hague.
Initial tests of the coffin indicate that it degrades in soil over about 30 to 45 days, and the Loop team estimates that bodies within coffins should be composted after three years. Mushrooms can also remove contaminants from soil, so the researchers have a “bigger vision” to use the coffins to purify dirty environments.
“We have a dream of having super-new natural funeral-based concepts in which we go to different cities and search for the most dirty soil and start cleaning that up,” Hendrikx said.
“We already have this product launched on the market, but what we want to really know is how long does [decomposition] take exactly, what does the decomposition phase look like, and also—this is super-important—what kind of chemicals can it absorb and in what amounts,” he added.
The Living Cocoon is one of many emerging concepts that aim to reduce the environmental tolls of current mortuary norms. Right now, both caskets and cadavers are treated with chemicals that leach into soil over time, potentially contaminating groundwater.
Green burials are exactly not a new phenomenon, as Indigenous cultures around the world have practiced environmentally friendly mortuary practices for thousands of years. For instance, “sky burials” that expose bodies to high altitudes where they can be scavenged by birds and animals, are still practiced in the Himalayas today.
But more novel funeral technologies such as “water cremation,” in which bodies are broken down in water and potassium hydroxide, are attracting the interest of people who want to tread lightly on the planet, even after they no longer live on it.
To that point, the Loop team thinks that the Living Cocoon will help people access the right end-of-life experience for them.
“I think people are ready for this,” Hendrikx said.
The argument about who can or should be responsible for confirmation of death has escalated and evolved over the past few years, alongside changing opinions and legislation regarding CPR and end of life care planning, etc.
And now arise the questions ‘does it have to be a healthcare professional?’; ‘does the healthcare professional have to be there in person?’; and ‘can undertakers confirm death?’
The law has not significantly changed – it still remains that any competent person can confirm death. It‘s only by convention that ‘person’ has been historically replaced (to varying extent by postcode lottery) with ‘healthcare professional’.
Within Dr David Church’s relatively recent blog ‘The stormy night that shaped my views on death verification’, and the following responses, all I see are attempts to justify the status quo based purely on anecdote and modern medical cultural convention. We all want to believe that the days of healthcare policy being based on anecdote are gone, but in reality this is all based on personal bias, hearsay, and myth.
Let’s stop trying to insist that ‘confirmation of death’ is some kind of healthcare copyright issue
So, in the discussions and comments, out come the historical tales of live burials – should we then advocate having a bell system installed in all graves again, as in the 19th Century? And the hypothermic resurrections from the dead – should then every cold body be warmed up, as in the Resus Council hypothermia guidelines (not dead until warm and dead)? Good luck convincing all the hospitals and mortuaries to warm all bodies to normal temperatures before confirming death – they’d be stinking fly pits!
Yes, errors do happen, but extremely rarely. Healthcare-only verification of death is a modern phenomena, driven by persisting attempts to use medical ‘knowledge’ to run away from the inevitable. It’s time to grow up and stop using rare ‘errors’ in verification to cling to current imperfect, unsustainable and inhumane dogmatic ‘rules’ governing ownership of death. How will western society finally grow some cultural wisdom and accept that death is a normal part of life? That death is not failure, not an error, but is an absolute fact of existence, with a 100% lifetime prevalence?
It won’t, as long as the medical/healthcare world continues to grasp at and peddle the concept that death is a medical diagnosis, and can only be confirmed by someone with a five-year degree and however-many years’ apprenticeship. As long as the Grand Guild of Medical Magicians continues to promote the myths that life and death are under our mysterious control, people will continue to live in the shadows of mortal fear, beholden to us to rescue them, and so keep expressing the very same unrealistic expectations that GP mages complain about every day.
My opinion on confirmation of death… the bodies of those who have died will all be dealt with by either an undertaker (mostly), or a pathology morgue. Undertakers are the experts in management of death – handling, dressing, caring for and disposing of the bodies of the deceased. Surely then, they are best placed to be trained in recognition and confirmation of death in the community, as a standard part of their normal procedures?
Death is not a medical ‘condition’ or ‘diagnosis’ to warrant its control by medical/healthcare workers, any more than birth or taxes. Hand back normality to the people. Then, we may find other unrealistic expectations ‘imposed’ on us from our patients start to dissolve away too, because we‘ve been the ones clinging to their ‘need’ for us all the time.
Let’s stop trying to insist that ‘confirmation of death’ is some kind of healthcare copyright issue.
A 16th-century drawing by Hand Baldung Grien depicts a German mercenary speaking with Death. As pandemics swept Europe, stories of hungry and vengeful undead grew in German-speaking lands and may be reflected in burial practices.
By Andrew Curry
In 2014, Swiss anthropologist Amelie Alterauge was just a few days into her new job at Bern University’s Institute of Forensic Medicine in Switzerland when she was called to investigate an odd burial in a centuries-old cemetery that was being excavated ahead of a construction project. Of some 340 burials in the cemetery, one stood out: a middle-aged man, interred face-down in a neglected corner of the churchyard. “I had never seen such a burial in real life before,” says Alterauge.
Excavators found an iron knife and purse full of coins in the crook of his arm, positioned as though they had once been concealed under his clothes. The coins helped archaeologists date the body to between 1630 and 1650, around the time a series of plagues swept through that region of Switzerland. “It was like the family or the undertaker didn’t want to search the body,” Alterauge says. “Maybe he was already badly decomposed when he was buried—or maybe he had an infectious disease and nobody wanted to get too close.”
The discovery set Alterauge off on a search for more examples of face-down, or prone, burials in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. Though extremely rare, such burials have been documented elsewhere—particularly in Slavic areas of Eastern Europe. They are often compared to other practices, such as mutilation or weighing bodies down with stones, that were believed to thwart vampires and the undead by preventing them from escaping their graves. But Alterauge says no one had looked systematically at the phenomenon of prone burials in medieval German-speaking areas that now constitute modern Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.
Now, in a new study published in the journal PLOS One, Alterauge’s research team reveals their analysis of nearly 100 prone burials over the course of 900 years that have been documented by archaeologists in German-speaking Europe. The data suggest a major shift in burial practices that the researchers link to deaths from plagues and a belief among survivors that victims might come back to haunt the living.
A medieval burial in a Berlin churchyard reveals a man buried face down. Prone burials increased in the later Middle Ages and may be a reaction to deaths resulting from the plague.
During the early and high Middle Ages in Europe (ca 950 to 1300), the few bodies that were buried face-down in regional graveyards were often placed at the center of church cemeteries, or even inside the holy structures. Some of them were buried with jewelry, fine clothes and writing implements, suggesting that high-ranking nobles and priests may have chosen to be buried that way as a display of humility before God. One historical example is Pepin the Short, Charlemagne’s father, who reportedly asked to be buried face-down in front of a cathedral in 768 as penance for his father’s sins.
Archaeologists begin to see an increase in face-down burials in Europe by the early 1300s, however, including some on the outskirts of consecrated Christian burial grounds. This shift coincided with devastating plagues that swept across Europe beginning in 1347, killing millions across the continent.
“Something changes,” says Alterauge, who is also a doctoral student at the University of Heidelberg.
As diseases killed people faster than communities could cope, the sight and sound of decomposing bodies became a familiar, unsettling presence. Corpses would bloat and shift, and gas-filled intestines of the dead made disturbing, unexpected noises. Flesh decayed and desiccated in inexplicable ways, making hair and nails seem to grow as the flesh around them shriveled.
Decaying “bodies move, they make smacking sounds. It might seem as if they’re eating themselves and their burial shrouds,” Alterauge says.
A 14th-century drawing depicts the burial of plague victims. German tales tell of nachzehrer (loosely translated as corpse devourers), and wiedergänger (“those who walk again”), which may have been inspired by mass deaths resulting from the plague.
As medieval Europeans tried to explain what they were seeing and hearing, they might have seized on ideas about the undead already circulating in Slavic communities of Eastern Europe: “We don’t have [the concept of] vampires in Germany,” Alterauge says, “but there’s this idea of corpses which move around” that is imported into western Europe from Slavic areas to the east not long after the first plague outbreaks take place in the mid-1300s.
A logic behind the undead
Before the 1300s, medieval stories in German-speaking Europe described helpful ghosts returning to warn or help their loved ones. But in an age of epidemics they took on a different shape: revenants, or the walking dead.
“This shift to evil spirits takes place around 1300 or 1400,” says Matthias Toplak, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany who was not involved with the study.
Turning to medieval folklore for clues, Alterauge and her co-authors found tales of nachzehrer, loosely translated as corpse devourers:restless, hungry corpses that consumed themselves and their burial shrouds, and drained the life force from their surviving relatives in the process.
“Historical sources say nachzehrer resulted from unusual or unexpected death,” Alterauge says. “There was a theory someone became a nachzehrer if he was the first of the community to die during an epidemic.”
In pandemic-era Europe, the legend had a compelling logic: As the victim’s close relatives began developing symptoms and collapsing within days of the funeral, it must have seemed as if they were being cursed from the grave.
“The background of all these supernatural beliefs must be the sudden deaths of several individuals from one society,” says Toplak. “It makes sense that people blamed supernatural spirits and took measures to prevent the dead from returning.”
Equally feared at the time were wiedergänger, or “those who walk again”—corpses capable of emerging from the grave to stalk their communities. “When you did something wrong, couldn’t finish your business in life because of an unexpected death, or have to atone or avenge something you might become a wiedergänger,” Alterauge explains.
The new study reveals an increase in the number of bodies placed face-down on the edges of Christian cemeteries between the 14th and 17th centuries. The researchers argue that, in this part of Europe at least, burying people face-down was the preferred way to prevent malevolent corpses from returning to do harm.
Other archaeologists say there could be other explanations. In a world ravaged by deadly pandemics, burying the community’s first victim face-down might have been symbolic, a desperate attempt to ward off further calamity.
“If someone got really sick, it must have seemed like a punishment from God,” says Petar Parvanov, an archaeologist at Central European University in Budapest who was not involved in the study. “Prone burials were a way to point out something to the people at the funeral—somehow the society allowed too much sin, so they want to show penance.”
The next step, says archaeologist Sandra Lösch, co-author of the paper and head of the department of physical anthropology at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Bern University, would be to look at the face-down burials to find if there are clearer links with disease outbreaks. By analyzing the ancient DNA of individuals in prone burials, for example, it might be possible to sequence specific plague microbes, while isotopic analysis of victims’ bones and teeth “might show traces of a diet or geographic origin different from the rest of the population,” offering another explanation for their out-of-the-ordinary burials.
Because local excavation records are often unpublished, Alterauge hopes more evidence will emerge in the years to come as archaeologists re-examine old evidence or look at unusual medieval burials with a fresh perspective. “I definitely think there are more examples out there,” she says.
This devotion that arose in the center of the country has already reached the borders (north and south) and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean, since in European countries all the iconography of Santa Muerte is retaken as an element of kitsch art.
The cult of the skeletal image, as it is practiced today, emerged in the middle of the 20th century, but has its antecedents in the viceregal period, according to the anthropologist Katia Perdigón.
According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the cult of Santa Muerte is known today for their prayers and the veneration of the skeletal image, which you might think was adopted into Mexican culture. However, it has a long history in Mexico.
In an interview that the INAH conducted with the anthropologist Katia Perdigón, she says that Santa Muerte has its antecedents from colonial times. Although for many the word «death» is a taboo that when mentioning it produces silence, admiration and fear.
The doctor in Social Anthropology, and a pioneer in studies on Santa Muerte, mentioned that this “icon comes from macabre dances and some Greco-Latin designs, hence the presence of the scythe, the mantle and the balance, to mention a few elements ”.
By the 19th century, the followers managed to separate their ideologies and there were some who decided to continue preparing for the “good to die” and continued to worship the image of death.
Since the Colony, it was sought to evangelize devotees and converts so that they had a «good death». Reason why at that time you could see large sculptures with the skeletal image that went out in procession on Good Friday. Of these great sculptures, at least three are preserved in the country: the Holy Death of Yanhuitlán, which is visited in the former Dominican convent of that Oaxacan town; and known as San Bernardo and San Pascual Bailón, in Tepatepec, Hidalgo, and Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, respectively, said Katia.
«In colonial times, the Catholic Church saw this veneration as heresy towards the skeletal image of death. According to inquisitorial documents from the 17th and 18th centuries that I was able to consult, retaliation was not directed at the people involved, but at the action itselfEven in 1797 a chapel was razed to the ground in the town of San Luis de la Paz, where this cult was practiced, ”said Perdigón Castañeda.
By the 19th century, the followers managed to separate their ideologies and there were some who decided to continue preparing for the «Good to die» and they continued to worship the image of death.
“Thus a totally different iconography emerged, for example, the macabre dances and the representation of the Triumph of Death turned into something else, in such a way that they are retaken to carry out political mockery, this was started by the cartoonist Gabriel Vicente Gahona (‘Picheta’) in the southeast, and years later José Guadalupe Posada did it, with the image of La Catrina ”.
According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the cult of Santa Muerte is known today for its prayers and veneration of the skeletal image, which one might think was adopted into Mexican culture.
«The same,» the anthropologist continued. (Santa Muerte) housewives approach her, that doctors or policemen; However, at the end of the nineties, yellow fever has linked its cult to outlaw groups or people who live or work in the streets, after it was reported that the kidnapper Daniel Arizmendi, alias “El Mochaorejas”, captured in that decade, He was devoted to the image.
The researcher concluded that this devotion that arose in the center of the country has already reached the borders (north and south) and even crossed the Atlantic Ocean, since in European countries all the iconography of Santa Muerte is retaken as an element of art kitsch.
Why the celebration of Santa Muerte on the Day of the Dead
Consider that this mixture of beliefs related to more current religions, found a place on November 2 and that the idea of this day celebrating the dead is already ingrained in the collective consciousness.
Endoveliko, who is a follower of Santa Muerte, says that in Ecatepec Santa Muerte is celebrated because it was on those dates, 17 years ago, that the Congregation that began to organize in the area. Each altar celebrates its anniversary on a different date, and they wanted to take advantage of the Mexican celebration to combine it with their foundation.
He believes that both parties are related: remembering the deceased and venerating Santa Muerte are ideas that have always been combined, Endoveliko considers. “Our celebration is eminently from here because since prehistory so much of Europe and here in America, peoples have always worshiped death with different names, different languagesHere, death was worshiped from the Olmecs, Teotihuacán, the Mexica ”, he explained.
But believe that for a while it went out and tried to silence this cult. Although with the freedom of ideologies in the Mexican Constitution, these beliefs reappeared.
Consider that this mixture of beliefs related to more current religions, found a place on November 2 and that in the collective consciousness The idea of this day celebrating the dead is already ingrained.
A skeleton without arms watches over the side door of one of the most beautiful baroque temples in Mexico.
Santa Prisca, Taxco, Mexico
The temple of Santa Prisca, erected in 1758, is considered one of the most magnificent Churrigueresque churches in Mexico. Built in just seven years, the rose-colored church boasts two towering belfries, a nave, a chapel, and a small ossuary. To guard it, a sculpture of a skeleton brandishing a scythe was placed over the side door.
This part of the church is believed to have been used during the processions of the Cofradía de la Buena Muerte (Brotherhood of the Good Death), a religious group that prayed for souls stuck in purgatory and financed religious death and dying rites and ceremonies.
The street from which the skeleton can be seen was once called “Calle de la Muerte,” or the street of death. Local lore has it that, in 1914, a revolutionary set fire to the shop of a wealthy businessman. While making his escape, he allegedly tripped and landed on his gun, which accidentally fired and killed him instantly. Since then, the street and the skeleton have become even stronger emblems of mortality, inspiring fear in those who cross them.
According to legend, a commuter who had to pass beneath the skeleton each night on his way home from work was so afraid that this eerie representation of death would pursue him that he removed the arms from the skeleton. Since then, the skeleton has remained without a scythe, nor arms to hold one.
When the street was remodeled in the 1960s, a stone skeleton was added to the cobblestone street near the church’s side entrance. Today the two skeletons are mostly ignored by the crowds of people who pass above and beneath them, unaware of the storied pair looming close by.
Archaeologists found the charred bones of a young adult in the ancient Israeli village of Beisamoun
The charred shoulder blade of a young adult who was cremated in northern Israel some 9,000 years ago. The bone contains the embedded point of a flint projectile.
Some 9,000 years ago, a young adult in what is now Israel survived a spear or arrow to the back, recovering from the injury only to die under unknown circumstances some months or years later. Shortly after the individual’s death, their body was arranged into a sitting position and burned in a pit at Beisamoun in Israel’s northern Jordan Valley.
Now, reports Ruth Schuster for Haaretz, archaeologists have identified traces of this ancient funerary rite as the Near East’s earliest evidence of cremation. The researchers’ analysis of the remains, which date to between 7031 and 6700 B.C., are published in the journal PLOS One.
Burying the deceased underground was the dominant funerary practice for millennia, says Fanny Bocquentin, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, to Michael Marshall of New Scientist. Prior research suggests Neanderthals buried their dead as early as 70,000 years ago.
The advent of cremation may have signaled a shift away from ancestor worship, which encouraged the living to care for “the dead for a long time,” according to Bocquentin, and house their remains nearby. Comparatively, cremation was a faster, less involved process.
“This is a redefinition of the place of the dead in the village and in society,” says the archaeologist in a statement.
Bocquentin and her colleagues excavated the U-shaped burial pit, which measures 32 inches across and 24 inches deep, in 2013. They unearthed 355 bone fragments, the majority of which were charred, reports Laura Geggel for Live Science. Per the team’s analysis, the cremation reached temperatures of around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit.
The shards of scorched bone all appeared to come from a young adult whose sex and cause of death could not be determined. A half-inch-long sliver of flint, likely the point of a spear or projectile, was embedded in the skeleton’s left shoulder blade. It would have caused “severe pain but not necessarily impaired function,” according to the study.
The researchers found ash from the wood that fueled the funeral pyre but couldn’t ascertain whether the body had been placed beneath, on top of or inside the stack of wood, per New Scientist.
As Bocquentin tells Brooks Hays of United Press International (UPI), the emergence of cremation in Beisamoun is indicative of a cultural shift.
“In the periods prior to our discovery, funeral practices are often spread out over time, the deceased is buried, waited to decompose and then the grave is reopened, the bones are reorganized, the skull is removed, sometimes a face is plastered with lime on the dry skull, then the skull is re-buried in another grave with other people,” she explains.
Cremation, on the other hand, is quite efficient. “You don’t even wait for the decay process,” Bocquentin tells New Scientist. Reducing the time invested in interring the dead “could reveal a new relationship of the living with their dead, [and] of the living with mourning, too,” she says to UPI.
The archaeologists plan on continuing excavations at Beisamoun in hopes of better understanding this cultural evolution. To date, they have found 33 additional burials at the site. According to Live Science, some of the graves predate the remains detailed in the current paper. They showcase an array of interment styles, including single and double burials and “secondary” cremations that occurred after the corpse was dried out. Comparatively, the cremated young adult was burned before their body had begun to desiccate and decompose.
Beisamoun is the oldest known instance of cremation in the Near East, but evidence of the practice predates the newly cataloged site by some 2,500 years. In 2014, researchers detailed an ancient cremation in Alaska, where a dead child was lit aflame around 11,500 years ago.
After your heart beats one last time, but before your body begins to decay, your life will come to an end. Strange as it seems, physicians around the world can’t agree on the exact moment death finally occurs.
A project aiming to find consensus on human mortality has now published its recommendations on what should constitute minimum clinical standards qualifying an individual as officially deceased.
Given the sheer diversity of legal, religious, and moral values different cultures use to frame perspectives on death, it’s unlikely that any single report will unite conflicting opinions.
It’s not the first time researchers have sought a universal definition of death founded in medical science, either.
But the World Brain Death Project’s senior author, University of Southern California medical director Gene Sung, argues the contents of his team’s report are a good place to start.
“This is an important, complex subject. Reaching this kind of consensus across so many organisations is a first,” says Sung.
“With this paper and its 17 supplements – virtually a textbook – it’s a foundation that we hope will minimise diagnostic errors and build trust.”
The recommendations aren’t so much a single column of boxes to step through, or a concise definition, but rather a way for medical communities from diverse backgrounds to find clear lines of agreement.
Through a mix of flow charts, check lists, and decision trees, the report categorises the observations necessary in weighing up whether a patient’s condition is potentially reversible.
Many of these are recognisable to most medical professionals, and include looking for an absence of facial reactions to uncomfortable stimulations, fixed pupils, no gag reflexes, and no spontaneous breaths when blood acidity drops far enough.
There are also some sensible suggestions, such as checking for existing conditions that could mask or mimic brain death – say, the neurological disease Guillain-Barré syndrome, or drugs or treatments that might confuse a diagnosis.
Children, the paper advises, should receive a second neurological exam, given their young brains can recover from some conditions differently to adults.
The paper also takes resource availability into account, as well as the legal and cultural differences various medical communities will be subjected to.
As an expert on brain death and a physician intimately familiar with the impact traumatic brain injuries can have on his patients and their loved ones, Sung understands too well the importance of having clear guidelines on when to call it final.
“That’s why I started this project – we still have some difficulty in dealing with and understanding these problems,” says Sung.
In days long gone, death was the long, eerie silence of a still chest. Unable to feel a pulse or witness a breath, a doctor could gamble that an unconscious body was ready for the grave.
Of course, mistakes happened. And still do happen. A lot. More often than we might want to admit. So the search has continued for criteria that could prevent the nightmarish error of sending a living person to the morgue.
What’s more, with the advent of ventilators and improved methods for resuscitation helping us bring ‘the recently dead’ back to life, the medical world was desperate for a better way to distinguish a point of no return.
By the 1960s French neurophysiologists expanded on definitions of comas to include what would come to be seen as brain death. The first official criteria for diagnosing a relative lack of neurological function were published in 1968, commonly known as the Harvard Brain Death Criteria.
Medical communities around the world have since prioritised their own subtle differences in involuntary movements, blood flow, brain wave patterns and locations of residual electrical activity, leading to a number of very different sets of brain death criteria.
Religious sensitivities on how long to wait for mortuary preparations weigh in on decisions around the world. Legal precedents also make a difference in the rights of the dead and dying.
Trust in the medical system is paramount, with complex views on the timing and prioritisation of organ donation affecting how we see a doctor’s decisions around diagnosing an end to a life.
With so many variables to take into consideration, Sung and his team saw they needed to rely on more than medical literature and clinical experiments for finding a consensus.
Taking into account the advice of medical experts across disciplines and from different cultures around the world, their report has been endorsed by dozens of eminent medical societies.
Not without a hint of irony, a universal definition on death needs to be embedded in a living document, one that evolves not just with advances in scientific knowledge, but with an awareness of the communities who need to put their trust in it.
