To understand our own mortality is one of the biggest markers of being human. To seek to control it, even more so.

True, we're not sure whether the anticipation and understanding of death is uniquely human, and there are certainly plenty of arguments to suggest that some animals understand death too, but it might be that the concept of a soul that couples with the idea of death is entirely a human construct. In this way, humans would truly be unique.

In his book 'The Buried Soul', the archaeologist Timothy Taylor takes a close look into when it was that humans first started to create the concept of a soul and started to try to define and control their own mortality -and by extension - immortality.

One of the greatest problems with pre-history and early history is the difficulty in source materials and, by extension, the difficulty in stepping into the minds of those in the past. "The past is a foreign country" a wise man once said, and we are often scant-informed tourists. As an archaeologist Taylor is well aware of these problems and how these have led to what he believes are misinterpretations of the cultural data of mortality in the past, often due to anachronisms created when historians put their own modern cultural perspective onto the remnants of history. Too often we either assume that our ancestors thought and acted exactly like us (and therefore we reject the more distasteful parts of their cultures as false), or we view them as barbarians and so don't bother to properly unpick the layers of why their actions were important and unique to them. While Taylor runs through a whole host of different death cultures, it was his treatment of the above issue that I found the most valuable and interesting in the book.

For example, Taylor centres the majority of his book around unpicking an understanding the funeral of a Rus (Viking) chieftain, returning to the vividly described scene as each of his arguments shed more light on it and the mindsets of those involved. In this funeral we have a rare written account provided by an arab ambassador about how the chieftain was interred in the ground while a huge ship and scaffold were created, ready for his cremation. When complete he was disinterred and laid on a great bed on the ship. Of his slave girls, his favourite apparently volunteered and took part in a seemingly strange and brutal ceremony. She was given the rings of engagement, as if she was betrothed to the chieftain, and, heady on ritualistic wine, went to each tent of his closest men and slept with them. Afterwards she was lifted up above three houses, announcing that she could see her parents and others waiting for her in the afterlife. When she went to the great building of the ship she reportedly found herself hesitating and was encouraged inside. The rings were removed, she lay on the bed next to their chieftain and, with a noose tightening around her neck by the old women dubbed the 'Angel of Death', she was brutally raped by seven men as the crown outside drummed their shields to drown out her screams. 

Timothy Taylor

Why did this sequence of events occur?

How reliable is the account?

What purpose did the brutality serve and what was the slave girl's investment in it?

Why on earth do some historians reject the brutal realities and simply sign off with dismissive statements like: "The happy girl thus went to Valhallah?"

What does this ritual tell us about the purpose of death culture, and the potential danger that the chieftain's soul posed to the mortal living?

Taylor answers all of these questions and more with care and convincing evidence. In doing so he also looks into another brutal and controversial element of history: cannibalism. Since the 1970s it has been fashionable for historians to reject cannibalism altogether, finding it more comforting to assert that it never actually happened and was instead a racist accusation or a misinterpretation of evidence, to the point where I assumed this was likely. But Taylor challenges this in a very convincing manner, taking the stance that cannibalism was - and is - commonplace, but served very different purposes for different cultures, all of which features importantly in how these culture interacted with death and funerary rites. Cannibalism isn't something that belongs in a horror movie, but instead can be a legitimate, useful expression of grief that should not be ignored simply because it is distasteful to western historians. I must admit, after the reading the book, I'm pretty darn convinced he's on the right lines.

In the end, I know that in this blog I tend to trot our reviews of books that I like, leaving those less interesting neighbours by the wayside. But out of my pick of excellent books, this really is one worth paying attention to and picking up for yourself. Taylor's combination of engaging narrative writing as well as the exciting (and potentially controversial) views he has of the pre-history and history he knows so well, makes this a book that is both entertaining as well as being genuinely academically important for any interested in the subject. It certainly convinced me to re-evaluate how I looked at various elements of cultural history, which I think is worth it's weight in gold.

What's more, I couldn't put it down. For a non-fiction book is very high praise indeed. 



More Great Books and Media on Mortality and the Human Imagination:
- Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind - By Yuval Noah Harrari
- The Self Illusion - by Bruce Hood
- Paranormality - By Richard Wiseman
- Gunther Von Hagen's Autopsy Series

 Death is hard. As a human, it is perhaps the hardest thing that we can face, and yet you never really understand it until it happens to you. 

Often, the remarkable thing is that - no matter how long you anticipate it - it happens suddenly. There is sick lurch of loss and yet, at the same time, your mind is left reeling and scattered. It's a strange contradiction to be confronted with death. That person - the person you know - is gone and what is left is some sort of husk that bears no resemblance at all to what they are. Yet, as you try to process grief, the most confusing (and yet most comforting) part is that what that person is hasn't left at all. They still feel real and present and there. It's just that you no longer have the opportunity to interact with them any more, and it is that gut-wrenching homesickness that takes the greatest toil
Lemony Snickett perhaps describes it best:

“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”

It is clear that death is an incredibly strong and complex emotion so, when we look into whether animals too can feel the same emotions, it is an important place to start.


 The Elephant is perhaps one of the most intelligent and emotive animals that we know of.

It's commonly regarded that elephants can show joy, anger, grief, compassion and love. Bonding into close matriarchal societies, they are knitted together -rather like humans - by how long their children take to grow into adults. They are often compassionate: for example herds have been observed to slow down their entire pace to match the weakest member. There has been an instance where an elephant physically put her life in danger to try to save a Rhino calf that was stuck in the mud, despite her being attacked by the aggressive mother who misread her actions.

An Elephant Graveyard in The Lion King

When it comes to how deaths are handled within elephant herds, there are many observational tales that circulate  - academically and otherwise - to the point where they become almost urban myths. One of the most popular concepts is the idea of a elephant graveyard, where ageing and sick elephants willingly go to die. This myth has since been debunked - instead 'graveyards' were shown to simply be sites where famine or poisoning had caused the death of a group of elephants all at once. However stories of grieving elephants are still passed around.

Mother Elephants have been observed staying with their dead babies and showing signs of distress. One mother tried to lift up the dead body and move it with her feet, staying with it for around an hour in what might be described as a state of sadness or shock. Some elephants have stayed with dead friends for up to three days at a time, refusing to move from them. Old dying elephants have been cared for by the whole herd when they fall, as the herd try to heave them up with their tusks and tenderly provide food and water for the ill animal, before watching it die. In a case such as this, when the rest of the herd moved on, a mother and her calf remained with the body for a whole day. In other examples, elephants have displayed what Charlie Mahew tentatively be called 'burying behaviour', where they toss dirt and leaves over the carcass of a dead elephant. In another anecdote from the 1940s, George Anderson reported that he shot a bull elephant that would repeatedly break into the government gardens of Kenya. The meat of the elephant was carved and given to the tribes-people and afterwards he dragged the carcass half a mile away. To his surprise, that night other elephants found the body, took a shoulder blade and a leg bone, and returned the bones to the exact place where the elephant was killed. Some people believe that elephants can recognise their own herd members' bones and will ritualistically visit them repeatedly, or will at least pick the bones up and even carry them in an effort to recognise them or pay homage to them.
Surely all of these behaviours show us that elephants can mourn?


Well so far, so much conjecture.

Picture by Sarah Skinner

No matter how many stories circulate about these apparent mourning behaviours, comparatively little scientific studies have been conducted to back them up. For example, we don't know whether elephants actually know what death is as an abstract and inevitable consequence of life. Is their grief one that has this understanding, or is it only a recognition of loss? Does it matter? And how true are any of these stories?


Karen MCComb, Lucy Beker and Cynthia Moss attempted to answer this question, creating a study of how several herds of African elephants interacted with the ivory and skulls of their own species, including some of their own matriarchs that had died within 1-5 years, as compared to wood and other dead animal skulls. All exhibits were washed to prevent any scent or human interaction lingering, and all elements were mixed and presented as per usual fair scientific practice. Primarily, they wanted to eitehr confirm or debunk the myth that elephants could recognise their own dead relatives, and that elephants took special interest in elephant bones above all else.
These assumed traits are important in identfying whether elephants recognise death, or even mourn, more than many other animals. Chimpanzees, for example, do have a complex interaction with deceased members of their own species, but seem to completely lose interest when those members decompose. Elephants however, it was suggested, carry this emotional recognition of death even to the skeltal stage. 
By using controlled experiments, they were able to prove that elephants take a special interest in the bones of their own kind which cannot simply be explained by bones being a 'novelty'.

An Elephant Skull

Elephants displayed a marked preference for investigating and interacting with the skulls and ivory of other elephants in preference to skulls from other animals or natural objects. The ivory gained the most preference and was even investigated with marked preference over the skulls. They suggested that 'the interest in ivory may be enhanced because of its connection with living elephants, individuals sometimes touching the ivory of others with their trunks during social behaviour'. This is especially interesting because the ivory was smallest in size and simplest in shape. If the elephants had been drawn to investigating the largest and most complex structures, they would have surely chosen skulls, and if they were drawn to the rarest structure, it would surely have been the Rhinoceros skull.

Importantly, the experience seemed to debunk the myth that elephants selectively recognise and revisit the bones of their relatives. There was no strong preference for investigating the Matriarch's skull over the other elephant skulls present. So, while they may not specifically select the skulls of their own relatives for investigation, the strong interest in ivory and the skulls of their own species mean that they would be highly likely to visit the bones of relatives who died within their home range. In this case, I would even say that it would be true of humans. If you're presented with the bones of a stranger or a dead relative, it is an unusual individual who can recognise them out of nowhere after all, yet the presence of a human skeleton is a natural cause of sadness and unease. However, while a human might perform some form of ritual for the body - such as reburying it or leaving a token on it - it is still unknown how far elephant behaviour is simply a sensible evolutionary curiosity or more of a genuinely emotional and respectful response. To further complicate things, this behaviour isn't unique to every elephant: in the end it is a very personal display.


In the end, a lot more study has to be done on this subject. And Elephants aren't alone in potentially mourning, of course.

Throughout the world, many intelligent animals display the behaviours of grief - whether this means a true 'mouning' and recognition of death, or simply a depression following the loss of a close companion. Even some less intelligent animals, such as ducks, have been shown to miss a departed companion so much that they never fully recover. 

To this day I still remember by own experience of viewing animal mourning behaviour.
I was 12, on my first ever holiday abroad to Tenerife where we took a catamaran to go view the dolphins (hopefully!) playing in the sun and sea. While no dolphins showed themselves that day, we experienced something far rarer and more poignant. Emerging from the sea, a whole pod of medium-sized sleeping whales swam around and under our boat. They were all black but for one striking small bleached-white figure: a dead baby being carried on its mother's back. The guide told us that when the calf died it would be carried in this way for some weeks before finally being let go to drift to the bottom of the ocean.

It's very difficult indeed to know what thoughts or emotions pass through these animals when they display such behaviour, but the effect is always haunting. At the very least, it reminds us what it means to be human.



Sources
- African Elephants Show High Interest in the Skulls of Their Own Species: From Biology Letters (McComb, Baker, Moss)
- Echo: An Elephant to Remember - Elephant Emotions (PBS)
-Of Mournful Elephants and sorrowful chimpanzees (How Animals Grieve by Barbara J King)
- Animal Grief: How Animals Mourn by David Alderton
-Elephants Really Grieve Like Us (The Daily Mail)