Category: Death Curiosities

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Pagan BURIAL RITUALS of ancient Russia

By Georgy Manaev

From ancient times, different peoples living on Russian territory practiced a wide variety of burial rites. There were the Slavic kurgans, the underground house tombs of Altai, the above-the-ground burials of Siberian peoples, and many more.

When Christianity came to the Russian lands in the 10th-11th centuries, it meant changing or outright erasing the Pagan traditions previously active among the many different peoples that inhabited the territory of modern Russia. With the development of the Russian state, Christian Russians conquered and subdued the lands to the East – the Urals, and then Siberia.

Christianization of the newly conquered territories was an inseparable part of the process of conquest. And Christian burial rites slowly replaced indigenous ones. Still, archaeological and historical sources managed to preserve a wealth of information about how the various peoples of Russia buried their dead before Christian burial rituals started prevailing. Let’s take a brief look at the variety of these indigenous burial rites.

Above-the-ground burials

An above-the-ground burial found in a Russian forest
An above-the-ground burial found in a Russian forest

It appears that above-the-ground burials were practiced among the peoples of Russia long before Christianity. Russian folk tales have preserved echoing mentions of such rituals. Baba Yaga, the evil witch, lives in a hut standing on chicken legs deep in the forest. This hut has no windows or doors, and Baba Yaga has a “bone leg” – apparently, here the tales describe an above-the-ground burial, a carcass interred into a wooden casket, placed on wooden pegs.

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A “hut on chicken legs,” in Russian folk tales – the house where Baba Yaga, an old witch, lives. Notice the similarity between the hut and the above-the-ground burial

The Mokshas, a Mordvinian ethnic group living in Central Russia, are known to have practiced burying their shamans this way. Later, during Russia’s christianization, most such gravesites were destroyed, but the burial practice itself remained in use in Siberia for centuries to come, as the Russian state was slow in conquering and controlling Siberia.

The Moksha women in traditional clothes, circa 1900
The Moksha women in traditional clothes, circa 1900

The Nenets people are the largest ethnic group of Siberia. In their view of the afterlife, a human’s soul after death continues the way of life it led during its lifetime. So, it was very important for the Nenets people to bury their dead fast. On the next day after death, the body was transported to the graveyard site using deer.

The Nenets graveyards were usually located on hilltops. After the body was brought there, it was placed inside a wooden casket along with tools, weapons and other things the deceased might need in the afterlife – all these things were bent or broken beforehand so that they could be used in the afterworld. The deer that transported the body were sacrificed at the place of the burial. But it was not a burial in the strict sense, because the Nenets didn’t bury their dead – the frozen northern land did not allow digging deep holes, so the casket was covered with brushwood and left on the site. The villagers didn’t maintain the graves either – the bodies were left to decompose naturally. If infants or children died, their bodies were hanged in sacks on the tree branches, a kind of ‘sky burial.’

Ethnographer V. Vasilyev and a Yakut above-the-ground burial in Yenisey region, Siberia, 1905
Ethnographer V. Vasilyev and a Yakut above-the-ground burial in Yenisey region, Siberia, 1905

The Buryat people, who live in the Baikal region and nearby, also practiced above-the-ground burials. They dressed their dead relatives in their finest clothes, laid them on the ground with weapons, tools and elements of horse harness, and then covered them with earth, stones or brushwood. They tried to place the body where wild animals are found, so that the soul could quickly go to its ancestors.

The Altai house-tombs

The excavation of a Pazyryk burial. Logs of the underground

In the 1990s at the Ukok plateau in the Altai Republic of Russia, vast burial grounds were discovered by Russian archaeologists. The barrow-type burials, or kurgans, as they are called in Russia, belong to so-called Pazyryk culture – the ancient Scythian society that inhabited the territory in the 5th-4th centuries B.C.

The most notable find was the so-called ‘Siberian Ice Maiden’, a tattooed shaman woman buried with six sacrificed horses and a lot of treasures. But it was just one of many burials where the body was astonishingly well preserved because of the waters that inundated the burial sites and then froze, preserving the graves’ contents embedded in ice.

The scheme of Pazyryk burial chamber: the state of the burial when it was discovered (L), the reconstruction of the burial chamber (R).
The scheme of Pazyryk burial chamber: the state of the burial when it was discovered (L), the reconstruction of the burial chamber (R).

The Pazyryk kurgans were indeed houses made for the dead. A full log cabin was placed underground, with a separate room inside for housing the body. Fully dressed, it was placed in a log casket, and around the casket, the belongings needed for the afterlife were placed – horses, harnesses, carpets, weapons, and even carts and chariots. Of course, only noble and wealthy Pazyryk were buried in such an expensive and complicated kind of way.

Slavic kurgans

An ancient kurgan in Teplyi Stan, Moscow
An ancient kurgan in Teplyi Stan, Moscow

A kurgan is a type of tumulus (burial mound) constructed over a grave. Mostly, kurgans were constructed for the wealthy and noble people – warriors, princes and so on, and were usually just small steep hills formed over the gravesite. Kurgans spread into much of Central Asia and Europe during the 3rd millennium BC.

“The funeral feast over Oleg the Prophet,” by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1899. Note the relatives of Prince Oleg mourning on top of the freshly created kurgan, while Oleg’s warriors and friends drink and mourn below.

There are still a lot of Slavic kurgans in Central Russia, but all of them are now just kurgan sites – during the long history of their existence, all visible kurgans have been looted in search of treasures. Still, we know how kurgan burials were performed.

A group of kurgans near the Meglino Lake, Novgorod region, Russia
A group of kurgans near the Meglino Lake, Novgorod region, Russia

A kurgan could be constructed quickly by bringing a mass of earth together and surrounding the foundation with stones or wooden logs. The body of the deceased was dressed in the best clothes, and a funeral feast was held, along with the cremation of the body. The remains were then interred inside the kurgan and covered with earth and stones. Along with the body, weapons, armor, household utensils, money, and other items could be interred. No tombstones or other signs were placed atop Slavic kurgans.

Dolmens

A dolmen near Zhane river, Krasnodar region, Russia
A dolmen near Zhane river, Krasnodar region, Russia

Dolmens, ancient megalithic tombs, are so old that we don’t even know the cultures they originated from. Dolmens date back to 3000-2000 B.C. In Russia, most are located in the North Caucasus.

Created from sandstone and limestone, dolmen tombs usually have four walls and a roof. A hole is cut in one of the walls, most likely for placing the body inside the closed chamber. Stone stoppers would then be used for closing these holes. Dolmens could have been covered with earth kurgans, also.

No traces of kurgans or human remains inside the dolmens were found, because of the very old age of the structures. But we can be sure they were used as tombs: they are astronomically oriented, with some clearly used as family crypts, and others as sanctuaries.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How To Stay Famous After You Die.

AI Scientists Have An Answer

By Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD

If you are a young public figure, and will die an unnatural death, then I have good news for you! You will most likely be remembered for a long time after you die. Conversely, if you are older, are not a public figure, and will die of a natural cause, then the odds that you will be forgotten over time are strong.

Remembering those who have passed on from this life has been an important theme throughout human history. Our ancestors used to remember those who died by sharing their memories with the next generation in the form of stories and ballads. They would sit around a fire and exchange memories and hope they would be passed through generations after them. Later when the printing press was invented, humans began to store, collect and spread information on a massive scale. The printing press made it easier to collect and preserve memories of the deceased because it is easier to store written pieces of information. Today, the developments in communication technologies such as the internet have changed how we create, store and retain memories. The internet also allows us to analyze memory through large-scale data in a quantitative framework.

Being remembered after death has been such an important concern throughout history that civilizations such as the Romans considered damnatio memoriae, or being erased from the public’s memory, as one of the severest punishments imaginable. At some point, many of us might have wondered how we will be remembered after passing on from this life too.

The h-index, the number of research papers with the same number of citations is one of the common ways to evaluate academic performance. It is a very important number in academia. The mean and median H‐index for all peer reviewed papers at the time of promotion to Professor in the JHU School of Medicine is 25 and 23 respectively. In computer science and math, scientists do not cite each other as often as in biomedicine and there are very few young computer scientists with the H-index of 100. So it is natural to follow them on Google Scholar and learn about their research. One of the scholars I follow is Jure Leskovec (h-index = 117) the co-author of the famous node2vec and an authority on graph neural networks (GNNs).

So imagine my surprise, when I saw the paper by Robert West, Jure Leskovec, and Christopher Potts titled “Post-mortem memory of public figures in news and social media” in my Scholar feed. I don’t know any of the authors personally but based on their work, they are extremely credible, and productive. In this paper the authors identified trends and analyzed how people are remembered in news and social media one year before and after death. It technically answers a question how long will your name last in people’s memory after you die. We know what you needed to do in ancient Greece to make it last (hello, Achilles!) but what about today? So, if you ever wondered how you can stay famous after you die, then this paper is for you!

Robert is an assistant professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne where he also leads the data science lab. Jure is an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. He is also an investigator at nonprofit research organization Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Meanwhile, Christopher is professor and chair of the linguistics department at Stanford University.

Despite their varying backgrounds, the trio have a few things in common: they are experts in the field of artificial intelligence and data analytics.

In this short but fascinating paper, the three scientists tracked mentions of 2,362 public figures in English-language online news and social media (Twitter) one year before and after death. The tracked people died between 2009 and 2014. They then looked at the spike and decay of attention after death and modeled the two as the interplay of communicative memory, which is “sustained by the oral transmission of information” and cultural memory, which is “sustained by the physical recording of information.”

In order to track mentions, they combined the Freebase knowledge base with online news and social media compiled through Spinn3r, an online media aggregation service that tracks mentions from a complete set of all 6,608 English-language web domains indexed by Google News as well as media posts from Twitter. For each of the 2,362 people, the scientists tracked the frequency with which they were remembered in the two medias on a daily basis during the year before and the year after death. This allowed them to quantify the spikes and decay of attention that follow the death of public figures. 

The analysis of mention frequencies revealed that for most public figures, a sharp increase of media attention followed immediately after death, whereby mention frequency increased by 9,400% in the news and by 28,000% on Twitter in the median. The average mention frequency then declined around one month after death and eventually decayed slowly to the pre-mortem level. These two stages are consistent with the two components of collective memory: communicative memory, which dominates early on and decays quickly, and cultural memory, which dominates starting around two weeks after death and decays slowly.

Based on the study, the researchers concluded that artists remain more present in the collective memory because they tend to leave a legacy that can long survive them, whereas leaders, athletes, etc who are noteworthy for the actions they take during their lifetime, are of decreased interest once they cannot replicate their actions anymore. This is most pronounced for leaders. Artists also stand out with respect to cultural memory, while no notability type stands out with respect to communicative memory. Ceteris paribus, an unnatural death, also increased the rank with respect to the short-term mention. The effect of age at death also was significant. For instance, on Twitter, the post-mortem boost was monotonically and negatively associated with age at death. Likewise, the increased short-term boost associated with unnatural deaths was more pronounced in the news than on Twitter.

Separately, the study also revealed that Twitter users pay less attention when an old public figure or leader died. Deaths of these poor souls were boosted more by the news both in the short and long-term. Additionally, the researchers noted that future studies may also add language, tone and attitude towards public figures one year before and after death to see if the study would come to a different conclusion.

To conclude, the researchers found that the largest post-mortem boost in English-language media attention can be described as an anglophone of any gender who was already well-known before death and died a young and unnatural death. So, try and get famous before you die if you want to be remembered for a long time!

And if you are interested in ways to avoid dying prematurely and gaining some time to become famous, consider finding more ways to live longer and attending the 8th Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference organized by University of Copenhagen and Columbia University. I am sure that one way to become famous in late life is to set a longevity record, currently held by Jeanne Calment (122.5).

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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This is what ‘tree burials’ are like in Japan due to lack of space in cemeteries

by

The families place the ashes on the ground, and plant an endemic species, forming forests in memory of the deceased.

Funeral rituals have accompanied human beings since they have notion of self. The earliest recorded burial is in Kenya, dating back 78,000 years. It is one of the oldest indications we have of a transcendence-oriented thinking: to the possibility that there is something beyond our earthly understanding.

With the advance of urbanization, and the apparently irreversible trend of population growth on the planet, the spaces to deposit the organic remains of the people has been compromised. We no longer fit. Given the situation, burials in Japan have had to take a new direction, which affects less the environment and appeals to a contemplative sense of eternal rest.

Rest in the shade of a tree

Natasha Mikles has dedicated her life to exploring the alternatives that exist to face death in the world. With the climate emergency in tow, the expert in philosophy from the University of Texas considers that the appropriation of physical land in favor of funeral practices it is simply no longer an option.

In recent years, Mikles has focused his study on Buddhist funeral rituals and narratives about the afterlife. In these Asian traditions, death is not understood as an end point. Rather, it is one more phase of the wheel of karma, and a step forward in the path to enlightenment.

Many times, however, the author acknowledges that “environmental needs collide with religious beliefs“, As detailed in his most recent publication for The Conversation. Rest perpetually under the shade of a tree in a public green area it could be an option, as is being seen in burials in Japan today.

A new way to face death

burials in Japan

It is not the first time that burials in Japan have been practiced in this way. Since the 1970s, there has been a record of Japanese public officials fearing for the lack of funeral space for the population, particularly in urban areas. The problem deepened in the 1990s, when more serious alternatives began to be implemented throughout the island.

It was then that Jumokusō was thought of, which translates into Spanish as “tree burials.” In these, the families place the ashes on the ground, and plant an endemic species on site to mark its final resting space. In this way, instead of building more cemeteries, entire forests would be planted in memory of the deceased.

This principle leans from the Shinto tradition, which finds value in all the vital manifestations of the universe. For this reason, the spaces dedicated to this type of funeral rites are considered sacred: there is an intrinsic spiritual value in life that ends to make way for a new.

We suggest: Natural organic reduction: this is what ecological burials are like that turn your body into human compost

Do burials in Japan of this type interfere with traditional practices?

burials in Japan

Many of the families that have implemented this strategy of sacred greening of public spaces they don’t even practice Shintoism, or are affiliated with a specific religious tradition. However, the interest in continuing this type of practice denotes a environmental responsibility extended throughout the population.

Despite this, these burials in Japan also obey an ancient Buddhist principle. Like the plants are considered sentient beings, it is a way to continue the reincarnation cycle for the soul that departed. Seeds embody a living component of this path, and therefore, they must protect themselves with the same honor.

The practice has been so well received that various temples and public cemeteries have adopted it as part of their agenda today. The model has been so successful that some Religious spaces promote it as part of the spiritual life of people. Although they do not necessarily align with the ancient practices originally proposed by Buddhism, they do obey the precept of respect for existing forms of life, which sets the standard for all branches of this spiritual tradition.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Coping with death through letters to the dead

The Magenta Horse Last Words altar at Siletz Bay Park awaits letters and offerings from visitors to help them cope with losing a loved one.

By Mathew Brock

Some people may regret not being able to say something to a loved one before they passed, but for the next month, residents and visitors to Lincoln City will have the chance to put those words into one final letter, even if it’s only symbolically.

The Golden Chachkie Last Words altar at sits slightly off the beaten path at Nesika Park.

At parks around Lincoln City, several altars appeared last month as part of the Last Word’s Mailbox Altars Public Art Installation, which gives people who have experienced the death of a loved one a place to grieve and cope by writing them letters.

The project serves another purpose however, as the letters left at the alters will be taken and turned into songs that will be performed at a virtual concert in August and sold as an album to help raise money in support of houseless veterans facing terminal illness through the Do Good Multnomah nonprofit group.

“These art installations are part of an interdisciplinary project that’s really a fundraiser,” said Crystal Akins, founder of Activate Arts and the artist responsible for the project. “I knew I could have done a regular fundraiser, like an event where you get wine and do the whole thing, but instead I wanted to do something that would bring the community together around death using their own grief and loss to transform that into a way to support a person in dying a good death.”

The project has been years in the making and was inspired by Akins’ work as a death doula, someone who helps the dying and their friends and family cope with death.

“It’s a long-term project, and I’ve been working on it for about five years so far,” Akins said. “I’ve been researching houseless death and am a death doula. I’ve been working with a lot of people who live in poverty and seeing how they die. I decided now it’s time to help build a community around death and to help veterans in poverty get access to a good death.”

Akins said the project was also inspired by the Telephone in the Wind art project, which first started in Japan with similar installations popping up in the U.S. and other countries since it debuted in 2011. At these installations, visitors can use a secluded phone booth to symbolically have one final conversation with a deceased loved one as a way to help cope with the loss.

“I saw that and the ways people were connecting with it and wanted to bring something similar here to try that would help bring community together,” Akins said. “Some of the letters I’ve been getting so far have taken the time to thank me for providing this space, and that was the purpose of this, to provide a space for people to experience grief and loss, which is especially important during this pandemic with people facing loss every day.”

The alters themselves were made by Akins using a “found art” art style, which takes discarded and recycled items and repurposes them as a medium for artwork. They’re currently located at Josephine Young Memorial Park, Siletz Bay Park and Nesika Park in Lincoln City until July 1, when Akins will collect and store them.

Those wishing to participate in the project can visit any of the altars and leave a letter, and if they like, a small offering as well, such as a flower, photo or rock. Those writing letters are asked to keep their own privacy in mind and to address letters without specific names, such as “Dear Dad,” “Dear Grandmother,” “Dear sister,” or “Dear Pet Companion.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Scientists Discover Oldest Known Human Grave in Africa

The unearthing of a tiny child suggests Africa’s Stone Age humans sometimes practiced funerary rites and had symbolic thoughts about death

A virtual reconstruction of the child’s remains found in Panga ya Saidi cave in Kenya

By Brian Handwerk

Modern humans might share little in common with the Stone Age hunter gatherers who, 78,000 years ago, curled a dead child into the fetal position and buried it in a shallow grave in a Kenyan cave. But the humanity of their grief, and the care they demonstrated for the child, can still be felt by looking at those tiny human remains, arrayed as if still sleeping. Scientists don’t know whether the child’s family or community connected its burial with thoughts of the afterlife. In a way, though, their actions guaranteed the child would have another life. Unimaginably far into their future, the child is not forgotten and it offers a fascinating glimpse into how some past humans coped with death.

The 2-and-a-half to 3-year-old toddler now dubbed Mtoto (‘child’ in Swahili) was found in a specially dug grave now recognized as the oldest known human burial in Africa. The team that discovered and analyzed the child published their findings in this week’s issue of Nature. Extensive forensic and microscopic analysis of the remains and grave suggest that the child was buried soon after death, likely wrapped tightly in a shroud, laid in a fetal position and even provided with some type of pillow. The care humans took in burying this child suggests that they attached some deeper meaning to the event beyond the need to dispose of a lifeless body.

“When we start seeing behaviors where there is real interest in the dead, and they exceed the time and investment of resources needed for practical reasons, that’s when we start to see the symbolic mind,” says María Martinón-Torres, a co-author of the study and director of the National Research Centre on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Burgos, Spain. “That’s what makes this so special. We’re looking [at] a behavior that we consider ourselves so typical of humans—and unique—which is establishing a relationship with the dead.”

Panga ya Saidi cave, in the tropical uplands along the Kenyan coast, is a key site for delving into the lives of ancient humans. In 2013, excavations there revealed the side edge of a small pit, and researchers used a tube to retrieve a sediment sample for dating. The sample immediately revealed the presence of some degraded and unidentified bones. It wasn’t until four years later that scientists began to suspect they’d found more than a few random remains. They dug about ten feet below the cave floor and found a circular, shallow pit tightly filled with an array of bones. But this surprise was shortly followed by another—the bones were in such a state of decomposition that any attempts to touch or move them turned them to dust.

So the team extracted the entire pit, protected it with a plaster encasement and moved it to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, and later to a specialized laboratory at CENIEH.

In the lab, scientists unleashed a toolbox of techniques and technologies to peer inside and analyze the bones and soils of the sediment block. Carefully excavating a bit of the block revealed two teeth whose familiar shape provided the first clue that the remains might represent a hominin burial. As the scientists delved further into the block they encountered more surprises. They found much of the well-preserved skull and face of the child, including some unerupted teeth still found within the mandible. These remains helped to ascertain that the team was exploring the remains of a very young member of our own species—Homo sapiens.

The group employed microtomography, a high-resolution X-ray based technique to determine that more bones were inside the block. But the bones were fragile and powdery; their low density made them very difficult to distinguish in images from the surrounding sediments. To solve this challenge, those cross-section scans were paired with software that sharpened them and eventually reconstructed 3-D images of the bones in the block. The image of a child, seemingly at rest, began to emerge.

Mtoto’s bones were articulated in nearly the same positions they would have been in life, anatomically connected at some points, with only small settling movements corresponding to those commonly seen as a body decomposes and flesh and muscle disappear. While the right ribs, on which the child was lying, are flattened, the spine and even rib cage curvature remain amazingly intact. This and other aspects of the skeleton’s condition provide a compelling line of evidence that the child had been buried soon after death, rapidly covered by soil and left to decompose peacefully in the grave. It stood in stark contrast to various animal bones of the same age found nearby—they had been broken, battered and scattered as a result of being left in the open.

The pit’s mix of sediment also differed in color and texture from surrounding sediments, revealing that it was dug and later filled in. And the dirt yielded still more clues. Geochemcial analysis of the soil showed elevated levels of calcium oxide and manganese oxide, chemical signals consistent with those expected to be produced by the purification of a body.

The child was lying on its right side, with knees drawn to its chest. The right clavicle (part of the shoulder) and the first and second ribs were rotated about 90 degrees, a state consistent with the upper body being wrapped or shrouded. The child may have been prepared and tightly wrapped with a shroud of large leaves or animal skins—an act that would make little sense for a body regarded as simply a lifeless corpse.

Finally, the position of the head suggests a tender touch. The first three cervical vertebrae, still attached to the base of the skull, were collapsed and rotated to a degree that suggests that the child was laid to rest with a pillow of biodegradable material under its head. When this pillow later decomposed, it appears that the head and vertebrae tilted accordingly.

Mtoto Drawing
An artist’s interpretation of Mtoto’s burial

Durham University archaeologist Paul Pettitt, an expert in Paleolithic funerary practices not involved with the research, called the study an exemplary exercise in modern forensic excavation and analysis. The totality of evidence seems to show that some person or persons cared for the child even after death. But what thoughts the ancient humans had about the dead is an intriguing question that may never be answered.

“The point at which behaviors towards the dead becomes symbolic is when those actions convey a meaning to a wider audience, that would be recognized by other members of the community and may reflect a shared set of beliefs,” says Louise Humphrey, an archaeologist at the Centre for Human Evolution Research at the Natural History Museum, London. “It’s not clear whether that’s the case here, of course, because we don’t know who attended the burial, whether it was the action of a single grief-stricken parent or an event for the larger community,” adds Humphrey, who wasn’t involved in the research.

Mtoto’s community was becoming increasingly more sophisticated. Surrounding soils in the cave from the same age as the grave are replete with an array of stone tools. The array of implements found suggests that Homo sapiens may have performed this burial during an era when they were gradually developing and using more advanced tool technologies.

Interestingly, the child wasn’t buried in some out of the way locale. It was buried at home. Panga ya Saidi cave is a key site inhabited by humans for some 78,000 years, until as recently as 500 years ago, and it also houses other, much younger burials. It remains a place of reverence for local humans to the present day, archaeologist Emmanuel K Ndiema of the National Museums in Kenya told reporters in a press conference unveiling the find.

The body was also found in a part of the cave that was frequently occupied by living humans. Martinón-Torres says this suggests a kind of relation between the dead and living, rather than the practical act of simply disposing of a corpse.

The bones were securely dated to 78,000 years ago. Though the date places Mtoto as the oldest human burial known in Africa, the child is not the oldest burial in the archaeological record. Burials of Homo sapiens at Qafzeh Cave, Israel, some 100,000 years ago, included pieces of red ocher, which was used to stain tools and may have been employed in some type of burial ritual. Iraq’s famed Shanidar Cave, which saw burials by Neanderthals, suggests another way in which Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have been more similar than scientists once believed.

But evidence for funerary practices among Paleolithic humans and Neanderthals alike remains thin on the ground. That’s especially true in Africa, where it may be that scientists simply haven’t looked enough, as much of the continent has yet to be investigated. Climate works against African preservation as well, and different humans in different regions may have practiced different types of mortuary rituals as indeed they still do today.

Pettitt notes that the majority of humans who lived in Pleistocene—from 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago—Africa or Eurasia are archaeologically invisible. “They could have been tucked away in vegetation, floated off down rivers, placed on hills and high places…or simply left behind when the group moved on,” he notes.

If burial wasn’t standard Pleistocene practice, it begs the question why humans sometimes went to greater lengths to inter contemporaries like Mtoto. Pettitt leans towards the idea that such deaths were outside the norm.

The death of a child may have tended to spur humans to undergo the rigors and ritual of burial. A high ratio of child graves exist among the few Pleistocene sites that survive, including both of the earliest African burials, Panga ya Saidi and South Africa’s Border Cave, and many sites of Europe and Asia. Pettitt adds that among some hunter-gatherer societies the death of infants or children is viewed as unnatural and disturbingly out of the norm. “I wonder if these reflect the distinct treatment of dead infants that reflects societies emerging horror at such abnormalities?”

If Mtoto’s death caused exceptional grief, the child’s careful burial and the grave’s unlikely survival to the present day somehow create an equally exceptional connection between modern and ancient humans. In the physical world, ancient humans had to confront death too, and might such burials suggest that they also had symbolic thought about those that died?

“Somehow these types of funerary rites and burials are a way humans have to still connect with the dead,” says María Martinón-Torres. “Although they have died, they are still someone for the living.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What a Hospice Physician Who Interviewed 1,400 Patients Can Tell Us About Dying

Visions and vivid dreams are end-of-life experiences that are seldom talked about. They often include reunions with deceased loved ones — and can provide dying patients with profound comfort.

By Alex Orlando

When hospice physician Christopher Kerr first started moonlighting at Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo in 1999, hearing about the powerful dreams and visions that dying patients often had made him uneasy. But it didn’t take long for Kerr to realize that these inner experiences could be profoundly therapeutic — not just for the patients, but for their families, too. “They were undeniable,” says Kerr, now CEO of Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo. “They couldn’t be ignored, and they had worth.”

To better understand these end-of-life experiences, or ELEs, Kerr has interviewed more than 1,400 dying patients. The stories he collected at their bedsides are featured in his 2020 book, Death Is But a Dream. They also informed seven published studies, tackling topics like post-traumatic growth and the ways that ELEs can help bereaved loved ones process their loss. In the days, weeks and even months leading to their deaths, Kerr and his team found that patients had visions of reunions with deceased relatives, dreams about travel and vivid memories of past experiences. More than 60 percent of the patients found them to be comforting.

Kerr hopped on a call with Discover to talk about the paradox of dying, how ELEs evolve as patients near the end of their lives and the ways that research like this can influence how we approach death as a society. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: What kinds of attitudes and perspectives do you see among patients who are nearing the end of their lives?

There’s a significant amount of misinterpretation from the outside. We have this natural, visceral response to the dying process, which is understandable, and actually critical to survival. And I think when we project ourselves onto that space, we think of the news of finding out that you have a terminal illness — that almost always comes as a true shock.

But what happens to people who are truly dying, after a protracted illness, is an entirely different level of acceptance. It comes from a number of things. Physically dying — being sick — is hard work; it’s exhausting. So there is this willingness to give into that process. And it tends to look after itself in ways that people don’t imagine. Our fear of pain, for example, is grossly overestimated. And the majority of people do find comfort and meaning in death.

Dying is this paradox where you’re physically declining, but spiritually, you’re very much alive. People who are having end-of-life experiences, who are the majority of people, are actually showing positive signs of growth, gaining insight and adapting right to the end. The point is that we view dying as this medical phenomenon when it’s ultimately just this human experience that is very rich. It’s more than organ failure. We’ve medicalized it and sterilized it to the point that it’s been dehumanized. There’s a much broader story.

Q: How do you define end-of-life experiences?

It’s really those subjective experiences at the end of life. Those inner experiences. The nomenclature gets really tricky because the only reference point we have is to call them dreams. But what’s interesting is that the patients themselves will say, “No, no, I don’t normally dream.” So they’re described as more unlike than like dreams, but that’s what we call them. We use the term visions in our studies because people say that they’re awake. But it’s not like we walk in and people are seeing things around the room. I think what’s happening is that they’re probably lucid dreaming.

There’s two commonalities to the dying process — you eat less and your sleep architecture has changed. So you’re in and out of sleep states. It may be that they’re lucid dreaming.

Q: Are patients lucid when they’re having these experiences?

First of all, these are IRB [International Review Board], university-approved studies and the consent process is pretty intense. There has to be a witness and you have to be aware of risk, ramifications, all those things. It’s a heavy document. The other thing is that we used this method called the CAM [Confusion Assessment Method], which is a clinical tool to rule out delirium. In the early piloting studies, we did labs, we looked at meds lists and we filmed a lot of people, so you could see that they were functional.

A very important distinction is that vantage point is everything; we’re not talking about the moments and hours before death, where you’re literally talking about a deoxygenated brain and altered states are more common. We’re talking about screening by days, weeks and even months before death. Some of these people are driving, doing their taxes and living alone. These people don’t have compromised neurologic functions. You can’t attribute it to neurotransmitter flux or anything like that. These are people who are highly functional.

What was really important was that we did this daily. Because we knew that there was a detectable change as people got closer to death. So what happened to the frequency? And what happened to the content? And the end story is that nearly 90 percent of people, within the days and weeks before death, have at least one of these events that are defined by being extraordinarily real and profoundly meaningful. They increase in frequency as people get nearer to death.

What’s interesting is that the subject changes; the content changes. The closer you get to death, the more likely you are to see people who are deceased and who you loved.

Q: Tell me more about these dreams and visions.

What seems to happen is that there’s this progression where people almost have an affirmation of having lived, and it lessens the fear of death. The stories are just remarkable. Even the negative ones are probably the most transformational or meaningful. Somebody, for example, had PTSD, in his end-of-life dreams he was comforted by seeing soldiers that he felt survivors’ guilt from. And then he could sleep. He found peace.

What was also fascinating was who was in the dreams. And, far and away, it was the people who loved or secured us best; who loved us unconditionally. You could be 95 years old, but it could be your mother’s voice from when you were five that you’re hearing. It’s really quite profound.

Q: What differences did you find from patient to patient? People tended to die as they lived. If you had tortured, distressed, tragic elements to your life, these processes didn’t deny that. And they don’t deny death; they almost transcend it.

I’ll give you an example: A mother who had a child who had addiction issues and ended up in prison. Her identity as a mother was questioned by herself. In her end-of-life experience, her parents came to her and told her she was a good mother. And a guy who lost his arm in childhood was wondering how he was going to be and live autonomously. He ends up working and people who he worked with came to him during his end-of-life experience and told him that he was the best at what he did.

There’s variance in as much as it’s individualized to that person. There’s certainly no one-size-fits-all.

Q: You published a study on ELEs and post-traumatic growth. What does trauma look like for people who are dying?

It’s based on the presupposition that dying is an adverse event. And even if you are accepting of dying, there is adversity, obviously, in the form of loss and anticipatory grief and pain. I don’t think the analogy is wrong to talk about it traumatically. But then the question is whether there’s value in something that is, by definition, negative.

We sorted people who were having end-of-life experiences from people who were not. And the people who were having these experiences showed statistically significant gains in overall growth, particularly in insight and adaptation.

It really inverts our idea of dying, which is this idea of a lessening. Which is clearly what we experience as observers — we’re seeing physical decline and change. But what we don’t see is the experiential piece, which is going in the other direction. The fact that we were able to show that these experiences led to growth, right up until the last days of life, I think is just really remarkable.

Q: Wow. For me, that’s really a new way to think about death — that you’re growing, spiritually, while you’re physically declining.

It’s funny. Other cultures don’t look at it that way. I was contacted by a colleague, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker, and she’s working with indigenous people in the Amazon. And we’ve heard of this, anthropologically, but she said, ‘What you’re describing, these people have a whole language for.’ It’s a very common way for cultures and societies throughout history to maintain their ancestral ties. They experience death differently; they’re sad, but they’re not feeling like there’s this loss. It’s interesting. Q: How do these experiences impact caregivers and loved ones?

We have published two studies based on surveys and interviews with 750 bereaved family members. We looked at scales of grief, and it showed that what was good for the patient was good for their loved ones. People who had witnessed these very positive experiences absolutely transitioned through grief and loss differently. They had better remembrance of the event.

It makes sense. How we experience and visualize somebody leaving us absolutely impacts our ability to process that loss.

Q: Does this research change your perspective on how people can better care for — and relate to — loved ones who are dying?

Dying is inherently isolating. And we’ve dehumanized it in so many ways. Yet this serves as one mechanism by which we can humanize what is a very human experience. What this research does, I hope, is take dying from being viewed as organ failure to the closing of a life. We are so much more than failing parts. I think what’s important, on the caregiving side, is giving hospice patients the permission for these experiences to be expressed. And the bereaved are typically a part of that story, so it feels like people are brought together.

Q: Can knowing about these experiences help people who are in hospice prepare for death?

Yeah. And we’re seeing that. It’s interesting. People who live to their eighth decade have often observed this. So they go into the dying process with hopes of reunion. It’s remarkable. It really depends on their life experiences, but it absolutely informs how people face the end of their life.

Q: How can this kind of research inform how we approach death, culturally?

I think we need to reclaim it. I don’t think the solution is a medical one. Dying, generations ago, was a shared experience between a family or a town. That’s a healthier approach. And I think we’re seeing that in the baby boomer generation — we’ve really gone from death aversion to people wanting to have a say. You see death doulas; you see death cafes; and books on death sell.

As people are looking at their own mortality, and we are a consumer culture, people want ownership of it. They don’t want to be medicalized by the doctor. They want to have a say in their story.

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Writing of death is private art and public therapy

Eulogy, newspaper article, novel, poem… the obituary epitomises communal mourning, another aspect of being human that has been wrenched from society by Covid-19 restrictions.

By: Percy Mabandu

At the heart of every culture’s funerary ceremonies lie rites meant to guide ritual accounting of the meaning, in death, of the deceased. The obituary and its cousin, the eulogy, is a literary document clearly conceived to be read out loud. It is often the central aspect of rituals of reckoning for gathering communities of bereaved audiences. The performance that is the reading of an obituary sets the tone for how shared memories of the dead unfold.

The onslaught wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic has occasioned death on a historic scale for humanity. Beyond the massive corporeal loss of life, the coronavirus is marking myriad cultural losses for mankind. This season of industrious dying is ironically denied much of the ritual usually associated with death. The funeral, central in every culture as a ceremony for communal mourning, and perhaps the commencement of a shared acceptance of healing, has been cancelled or at best curtailed by policies meant to curb the virus’ outbreak.

As a result, many families lose out on the chance to gather and remember their loved and departed members, barred as they are from sharing the crucial ritual of reminiscences.

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The obituary is a form of portrait, the reading of it performance art denied its customary audience by Covid-19 funeral restrictions. Those with means have found a way to connect with physically distanced mourners over social media platforms. The result is a new content regime in which private quarrels generated by grief become larger public spectacles as a result of streaming. In an earlier time, these would have been the preserve of gathered friends and family, at worst gossip fodder for the immediate community.

At the height of the initial strict lockdown, social media gave us an example of this kind of contentious occasion. The Rakgadi meme exploded on to our smartphones after Semati Moedi contradicted decorum at the memorial service for her brother, the tombstone king Lebohang Khitsane. Driven by grief, Rakgadi, the eldest aunt of the family, attacked his widow with accusations of infidelity. The farce and fervour that followed pried open age-old debates about decorum, trauma and the limits of righteous indignation. Close behind were questions about why obituaries always read like sanitised versions of the dead, deviant in life now made darlings after death.

The obituary as newspaper feature

Beyond the funeral gatherings that make theatre of tributes, the obituary exists as a cherished newspaper feature. In this mode, it becomes a potentially polemical memorial. A public letter occasioned by the death of a notable figure to contest crucial social issues.

When larger-than-life American star Little Richard died in May last year, the world went into overdrive with debates about the Black roots of rock and roll, its appropriation by white America and the neglect of the real progenitors of the multibillion-dollar art form, Richard among them. Centrepieces of the debate were defined by the proliferation of newspaper obituaries published globally in the wake of his death.

In Mzansi, Bongani Madondo led the charge against culture vultures. “Richard died last Saturday at the age of 87 and the world lost its marbles. Lord ha’ mercy, what we gonna do? For one, we can all claim we loved him madly. That he was our darling queer avatar,” wrote Madondo, taking issue with the public’s propensity to posture fake care for the dead who suffer neglect in life. At once, the obituary campaigned against pop culture’s social hypocrisies, and dared to settle historic racial scores for the credit of Black creative genius.

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Following the death in 1964 of Sophiatown’s beer-beaten golden boy of letters, Can Temba, his friend and fellow writer Lewis Nkosi sat down to write his obituary. The article was headlined “The will to die” after one of Temba’s short stories. It opens with an epigraph composed of a statement Temba made at an unnamed friend’s funeral: “This son of bitch had no business to die… [sic].” What followed is a study of the horrible state of life in apartheid South Africa. Nkosi highlights the devastation borne by the suicides of creative people such as Nat Nakasa and Ingrid Jonker to understand the death of his friend Temba.

In less lofty instances, the newspaper obituary has been seen as an inconsequential space filler. This point was made by former Sunday Times newspaper editor Ken Owen in a brutal albeit memorable put-down of journalist Chris Barron. The pair were part of a larger media brawl with biographer Ronald Suresh Roberts.

Responding to what was then Barron’s latest op-ed attack against Roberts, Owen took his famous shot: “In his eagerness to smear Ronald Roberts, Barron has misquoted me … He should stick to writing obituaries – the subjects will not complain.”

In this way, Owen shored up the form’s propensity to be inconsequential content. To be balanced, though, Barron’s LinkedIn profile professes that “he turned what was a moribund and largely ignored obituaries section into one of the most eagerly read pages in the newspaper”.

A form and genre

There have been grand moments of glory for the form. The New York Times celebrated the newspaper obit as a genre in 2016 by sharing highlights from its archive. The editors noted proudly that since 1851, more than 200 000 people had been the subjects of obituaries in the paper.

Arguably the most notable was a piece announcing the death of Christopher McCandless. The account of McCandless’ fate stands as a monument to the power of the newspaper obit. McCandless died in the Alaskan wilderness during an ill-fated journey to sever ties with all he had known.

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The first paragraph cloaked him in mystery and tragedy, turning him into a folkloric figure: “No one is yet certain who he was. But his diary and two notes found at the camp tell a wrenching story of his desperate and progressively futile efforts to survive.” It was a short newspaper obituary. But it unleashed an industrious mining for meaning into the life and death of McCandless that would yield further feature articles internationally, at least two bestselling books and a Hollywood biopic called Into the Wild. The film starred Emile Hirsch and Kristen Stewart, with Sean Penn as the director. It was nominated for best editing and best supporting actor awards at the Oscars.

It is doubtful McCandless would have gained this posthumous fame and glory were it not for that compelling newspaper obituary. It launched him as a symbol of youthful renunciation of modernity in search of a lost, liberated, prehistoric purity of man.

The obituary in literature

American novelist Ann Hood published an aptly titled piece of historical fiction, The Obituary Writer, in 2013. Its plot zeroes in on the cathartic benefits of writing obituaries. In part, the book tells the story of Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, who by telling the stories of the dead not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the ravages of her own losses.

The Obituary Writer shores up Hood as a discerning novelist who manages to magnify the underlying feature of the obit as a cultural artefact. It converges the needs of the individual with the requirements of community for mutual healing during times of death.

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There are few poets who’ve had to contend with the meaning of death and personal loss like Ted Hughes. His first wife and fellow poet Sylvia Plath killed herself after Hughes left her for another woman, Assia Wevill, who also killed herself along with their four-year-old daughter Shura. The tragedy of Plath’s death, for which Hughes was blamed, would become the subject of one of his most memorable poems. This in part because of the legend that surrounds its discovery more than a decade after he died.

Titled Last Letter, the poem is an account of the night Plath died. The various versions of the previously unknown poem were published in the New Statesman magazine, in part to report and register the historically unacknowledged torment Hughes lived with following the death of Plath and also to bear witness to his repeated attempts to perfect his poetic account of the night she died. 

In the poem, which was read live on BBC Channel 4 News by actor Jonathan Pryce, Hughes recalls the night of Plath’s suicide, even the phone call that delivered the dark news: 

What happened that Sunday night?
Your last night? Over what I remember of it… 
Then a voice like a selected weapon
or a carefully measured injection
coolly delivered its four words deep into my ear
your wife is dead.

In this way, the writing of the poem as a private obituary, along with the promise of a probable audience in some future, allowed Hughes to live productively with grief in a way that writing about dead loved ones makes possible. 

It is the singular power of the obituary, the making into artful verse the painful episodes in our personal universes. We write obituaries, read them out loud to gathered friends, to make certain that we are not alone in our hour of need. The legislated dearth of community in dealing with death during the Covid-19 pandemic denies us this connection. The omission of audiences for obituaries is central to the larger loss of our time.

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