The Cultural Ecology of Fear

Abstract

Abstract Cognitive archaeology has curiously neglected the evolution of human funerary belief and practice, despite the abundance of evidence for this remarkably diverse aspect of human behavior in the archaeological record. Palaeoanthropologists have taken a somewhat black-and-white approach to the subject, often in terms of whether hominins did or did not practice burial and, therefore, whether they were “cognitively modern” or not. In recent years, the ethological information on animal responses to the dead has improved remarkably and offers strong contextual data from the biological world with which to begin to write an account of evolutionary thanatology. This chapter reviews the psychological and ethological data, establishing a hypothetical (and perhaps falsifiable) evolutionary scheme in which purely chemical responses to the corpse are increasingly supplemented by the emotions, a concept of death and the conception of souls, to the complex and modestly counterintuitive beliefs that can be glimpsed with the dawn of written records in the third millennium B.C. The chapter reviews the archaeological record in this light, suggesting three cognitive phases of evolution of funerary belief took primates from chemistry to culture in the form of widening landscapes of fear.