Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway27448 | Hacker News Reader

Estimating "common" is quite difficult, but given that there are pre-colonial aboriginal australian burial sites, we can estimate that it either can be traced to Africa or is sufficiently common to not be surprising. There is even evidence (not proof) of neanderthal burial rituals, fwiw.

View on HN

I suspect it has to do with our advanced capacity for emotion. The death of a loved one is so difficult to bear, having their body sitting out in the open in a rotting state would be horrific. Burying serves the dual purpose of hiding their decomposition and keeping them close to the community.

I think it's likely associated with desert cultures since vegetation nucleates around burial sites due to access to organic material.

Fun fact: forensic teams locate buried bodies by looking for vegetation that grows above them. There's a lot of fertilizer there.

Also, disposing of corpses means less diseases around. It's possible that communities that carelessly left the dead around unwittingly opted out of the genetic pool.

Unless you're going to eat your loved (or hated) one you need to get rid of the body before it starts rotting, for health reasons.

Burial is the standard way for very good practical reasons. Having somewhere to put a flower is also nice.

> Burial is the standard way

(Assuming you mean the obvious and immediate semantics of digging a hole and placing the corpse within it...)

It may be now, but there are many ways to provide corpse disposal without risking health. Sky and tree burials are clear evidence of other corpse disposal methods. I imagine cremation is pretty obvious to humans too.

Some people even exhume the bodies and perform rituals with it. I find this nauseous but it wouldn't be a thing if societies were being eliminated from its effects.

You're of course right, but note that I said "standard", not "only".

What the "alternate" methods all have in common is they don't leave a rotting corpse around. I imagine populations who did this did not tend to survive :)

I looked it up, and sky burial is/was done in places like Tibet, where the ground is either rock or frozen, so you often physically can't dig a grave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com