Elaborate 28,000-year-old burials show death awareness predates complex civilization

Evidence

The remnants of multiple elaborate burials were also found there, including those of two young people and a sixty-year-old man. Each body was decorated with pendants, bracelets, and shell necklaces, and dressed in clothing embellished with more than four thousand ivory beads; it would have taken an artisan an hour to make a single bead. The youths were buried head to head and flanked by two mammoth tusks. By devoting such inordinate amounts of time and effort to generate these elaborate burial constructions, the inhabitants of Sungir seemed to show that the symbolic supernatural world they created took priority over more mundane, here-and-now practicalities. Moreover, the grave sites indicate a belief in an afterlife; after all, why bother getting dressed up for a journey to the void? — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 295

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ADDENDUM article ‘On Sacrifice’ — grave goods as investments in an afterlife parallel the Royal Tombs of Ur.
• FICTION: The image of an artisan spending an hour on a single ivory bead for a burial suggests a story about the economics of grief — who paid, who worked, what the bead-maker thought.

Related

• Göbekli Tepe served ritual burial purposes, not habitation or farming (similarity 0.80)
• Death-related religious monuments predated and may have stimulated agriculture (similarity 0.79)