#1278 Paul Pettitt: Human Mortuary Practices, and Other Animals' Awareness of Death

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lops, and today I'm joined by Doctor Paul Petit. He's professor of Paleolithic archaeology at Durham University. He specializes in Paleolithic art and in the long-term development of the treatment. Of the dead and today we're going to talk about paleoanthropology, evolutionary thanatology, mortuary practices, and Paleolithic cave art. So Doctor Petit, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to everyone.

00:32 Paul Pettitt: Hello Ricardo, thank you very much. Pleasure to be on the dissenter.

00:37 Ricardo Lopes: Great. So, uh, uh, you know, it's funny because I've already had many paleoanthropologists on the show, but it's actually the first time I'm going to ask this question. So, how did paleoanthropology actually start? I mean, tell us a little bit about the history of paleoanthropology and What does it study exactly? Uh, uh, I mean within the field, the broader field of anthropology, what does it, uh, study? Hm.

01:07 Paul Pettitt: Well, paleoanthropology is a relatively new discipline actually. It really only arose in the latter half of the 19th century. Uh, AS science progressed to the notion that the world was very old, its life forms have evolved on it rather than appearing suddenly, and that humans indeed had evolved themselves. So paleoanthropology. As the name old humans suggests, uh, is the study of the evolution er of the human family in all its forms, genetic, biological, anatomical, behavioral and cognitive. So Paleolithic archaeology, the archaeology of the old stone age over which humans evolved, is the study in particular of how those human brains were being used in terms of behavior. And really until the middle of the 19th century, um, most societies, uh, had this notion that the earth was relatively young, uh, that of course creation in the biblical or other senses was really what explained the appearance of animals and so on, and of course the work of Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin. In the middle decades of that century, uh, were instrumental in demonstrating that most likely the, the, the, um, life on Earth as we know it evolved very, very gradually over the course of a very old world as the likes of Charles Lyell, the geologist, have been able to demonstrate. So really, uh, by the 1850s. Charles Darwin and colleagues were predicting that hidden in the nooks and crannies of the world, it's caves and rock shelters and river valleys should be found fossils of humans who are in an evolutionary state more primitive to those of us living today. So the prediction was there and it was actually, From the 1850s that human fossils, as we would now call them, uh, first started emerging, uh, of what we now know to be Neanderthals, a little later, of early members of our own species, Cro-Magnon as they were called at the time, and so on. So really, we only have 1.5 centuries over which paleoanthropology. Was developed and for the first half of that it was really excavations and very, very simple attempts to hang discoveries together in time, with very little notion about what absolute ages we're dealing with. So it's only really when we came through, Into the 20th century, uh, when the old doubts about how old the earth could be were really put to rest, finally, and people began to accept the fact that we're dealing with millions of years, not a handful of thousands, did the professional discipline. Of paleoanthropology appear and really the way we go about it now, the way we formulate hypotheses, the scientific techniques available to us, the excavation methods and so on, um, belong to the last century only, from about the last, um, 60 years or so, from about the 1960s.

04:45 Ricardo Lopes: So was it around that time that people started uh referring to a distinct field of paleoanthropology, uh uh I mean around the 1960s or was it a bit earlier?

04:59 Paul Pettitt: Yeah, around the 1960s, of course anthropology in its broader sense had been around a lot longer and itself had come about as a professional discipline by the early 20th century when of course Westerners were traveling the world, encountering a lot of um people in very different states of organization and so on. Uh, SO if you like, the background for the understanding of how diverse human societies can be, how widespread, and so on, had been in place since the start of the 20th century. And it's really only in the middle part of that 20th century that if you like, the chronological element was added to the to the global anthropology, the understanding that it's not just about space, not just about the fact that there's humans everywhere on Earth and they look very different, but that they have been dispersing across the Earth over millions of years.

06:04 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, uh, since we're going to talk about how humans treat the dead, I mean we're going to focus on humans, but we're also going to talk a little bit about other primates. Uh, I would like to start by asking you, what is evolution? ARY thanatology and is this uh is this uh I mean I, I'm not sure if you would call it a distinct field or not but uh how long, how old is this idea of uh studying thanatology.

06:36 Paul Pettitt: Well, as a specific focus on how humans and other animals respond to death, interact with corpses, deal with the processes of death, evolutionary thanatology is a very new discipline. It's a decade old or thereabouts. I say this because the very term has been coined by. A disparate group of us, archaeologists such as myself, zoologists, primatologists among them, and so on, in an attempt to unify our hitherto disparate attempts to understand what our subjects are, are doing about the dead. So of course archaeologists. Have been very interested in death, dying, and treatment of the dead since the birth of archaeology again in the, in the 19th century. Of course, everything we deal with as as as as archaeologists has been produced by now dead humans. So inevitably the funerary archaeological record is a critical subject of our study and equally, um, some zoologists have focused on what happens around dead animals, be they whales, dolphins, chimpanzees or whatever. But actually in the zoological world that focus on death and dying is relatively new. It's understandable that zoologists, primatologists among them, are primarily interested in the living animal and how the animal adapts to its environment. It's conspecifics and so on. So it's only recently er that they have turned their attentions to death and what that precipitates in er in these social groups. So evolutionary thanatology, thanatology of course being the study of death and dying and so on. Evolutionary thanatology has come about as a collaborative effort for us all to try to start thinking in similar ways, uh, to develop hypotheses, to develop methodologies whereby we might really understand. All of those frankly weird ways us humans deal with the dead have come about in very long term evolutionary perspective. It's very difficult to do. There's a lot of problems with it, of course, uh, but equally it's absolutely fascinating.

09:12 Ricardo Lopes: So when it comes to the study of human treatment of the dead, uh, I mean, what do you study, you yourself, yourself specifically, what do you, what are the topics that interest you the most when it comes to that, uh, area?

09:30 Paul Pettitt: Well, when we think of death, us archaeologists tend to think of burial in cemeteries or big tombs er for rulers and this kind of thing. I'm more interested in the earlier emergence of these kind of activities. So as a Paleolithic archaeologist and one specializing, say on the last 100,000 years of the Pleistocene of the Ice Age, my interest is with Neanderthals and early members of Homo sapiens. In an archaeological sense, we would say, uh, the Middle Paleolithic for Neanderthals, the Upper Paleolithic for Homo sapiens, and the Middle Stone Age, late Stone Age in Africa, same, same kind of thing. So it's this period over which I think we can see a number of indications as to how humans evolved in their treatment of the dead from something more akin to what we see with chimpanzees today. Uh, TO what we recognize in modern human societies, burying, commemoration of the dead, grief, mourning, and this kind of thing. So it's that very long term evolution that I'm particularly interested in and why these things came about and what they say about the brains of those early humans, er, and the societies that they'd organized themselves into.

10:59 Ricardo Lopes: So you mentioned Neanderthals and Homo sapiens there, but uh do we know exactly how old mortuary practices are in human evolution? I mean, were there any earlier species in the homo genus that we have any evidence they might have practiced, they might have they might have had these kinds of practices?

11:24 Paul Pettitt: Yeah, and as archaeologists we are fixated on burials, you know, that's one of the things I'm keen to get away from, that digging a shallow grave and putting a corpse in it and covering it up again is not the be all and end all, you know, it's not the evolutionary crowning achievement of, of funerary behavior, so. Prior to that, we do have a few indications spanning a few million years, um, of human evolution. It's obviously very difficult to obtain any comprehensive evidence of this kind of behavior. With paleoanthropology, we're always just sampling the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we assume has gone on in the past, so, The we we're often discovering new human species. We've only known the little um dwarf species Homo naledi in South Africa for, you know, a decade. We've only known a similarly small species in the Philippines, Homo luzonensis, for a similar period of time. Who knows what's out there that will turn up tomorrow or in 10 years' time or whatever. So of course we're always dealing with a very small amount of data. But these data show that prior to the first emergence of deliberate burials, let's say about around 100,000 years ago with some Neanderthals, some Homo sapiens, we can see that there are some sites in the landscape. Shafts um dropping down into the darkness, caves and fissures, those little envelopes in the, in the well where things can be tucked away, were being used to dispose of the dead. So we can see, for example, around 400,000 years ago in the Sima de los Husos, the pit of the bones uh in at Atapuerca in Spain, that a number of humans that we would call Homo Heidelbergensis, effectively an early. Form of Neanderthals around this time were being deposited around the edge of this mysterious shaft, uh, and they slowly slumped into it. So this is kind of dragging corpses and leaving them, abandoning them at specific places in the landscape. We might see that behavior further back at um the site of um AL 333 um in Ethiopia in the Afar Depression. We have an accumulation of at least 9 Australopithecines, so we're now back around before 3 million years ago, and at least 9 dead Australopithecines have been dragged into tall grasses away from the water hole, away from the area of the landscape. Uh, THAT activity was particularly busy in and tucked away in this. Now I call these processes funerary caching, where bodies have just been tucked away in a landscape that's not been modified, no graves have been dug, no construction has been made. I think this is what has a very long antiquity, but we can count on one hand. The number of sites we have for this over 2 or 3 million years. Prior to that, of course, we have no direct archaeological evidence of this. Then we need to look at modern parallels, so perhaps for our earliest ape ancestors back in the Miocene, looking at how modern primates, modern apes respond to the death will give us some vague. Understanding of what we might expect to have been going on back then, uh, but of course we'll never get any tangible evidence. If all people are doing is things face to face, you know, calls, dragging corpses and so on until they're finally abandoned, this is not going to leave an archaeological trace. So we just have to use logical inference for this.

15:48 Ricardo Lopes: Yes, uh, do we know what are, what are the most common mortuary practices across human societies? I mean, what are, what are the most common things, I, I don't know, rituals and so on that people tend to have when it comes to dealing with the death.

16:09 Paul Pettitt: I think there's two ways to answer that. I think the most universal human characteristic of dealing with the dead is that we have introduced a spatial element to it, or to put it another way, we've incorporated the landscape in the sense of separating out parts of the landscape which we've come to associate with the dead. So on the one hand, er, we can collect together the dead in those points of the landscape. So if we have enough burials in an area where people aren't necessarily living, it's not an area for the living, it's purely for the dead. We might call these cemeteries or we might build large structures for them, particularly if they're of social importance, call these tombs, necropolises and so on. So this collecting together of the dead at specific places in the landscape is one extreme of two ways of dealing with these. The second, of course, is to fragment, uh, the bodies of the dead up. They can be left exposed to the elements, to be eaten by vultures or slowly decay, and then at some point their bones are collected up and deposited. In a grave, a tomb, er, you know, any kind of area like this, you know, really, sometimes those remains can be processed, so instead of allowing the body to decay, They can be cut up, dismembered, defleshed, and so on, uh, and indeed can be part consumed as well, so fragmentation and. Sometimes cannibalism er is the other extreme of this process, so from collectiveness to fragmentation as well. So really in the broadest sense, these are the things that humans have taken over the course of their long-term evolution which distinguish them as far as we can see anyway, er from their from their ape ancestors and from all other animals.

18:17 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, BUT are mortuary practices, uh, human universal? I mean, among all the societies that we've been able to study, are mortuary practices present, uh, everywhere?

18:32 Paul Pettitt: To a degree, yes, um, we can see, so that I at least reserve the term mortuary practice to refer in the most broadest sense to anything. Involving responses to and interactions with a dead body, a corpse, um, so, in that broadest sense, we can see that ants and termites and other insects indulge in mortuary activities because they will remove a dead body from their nests, or they'll cover it up with sediment, one way or another, they will, um, Isolate that corpse er from the living conspecifics. Now of course, none of us will be thinking that those ants and termites are busy thinking about the implications of the dead and even grieving over them and so on. It is of course a purely chemical reaction er to not wanting to keep something decaying. Uh, Around the world of the living and so on, so it's a homeostatic, um, reaction, you know, they're, they're just as a chemical indicator to keep, um, to keep the group healthy. That forms a very, very good basis er for what comes er thereafter. So in that very broadest of sense, we find mortuary behavior present among all mammal all mammalian groups and even insect groups er and this kind of thing as we would expect. But in the more sophisticated sense that you or I would associate with this, we can start seeing more interesting things happening among various mammals, among birds for that matter, er and mammals, whether in the sea, such as whales and dolphins or on land, um, er such as monkeys er as well as apes er too. Now what they seem to show. Uh, IS social responses, er, to death, and it's no surprise that mammals in particular can maintain, build and maintain, uh, quite complex social groups, and if one member of that group has suddenly been removed by death, obviously there's a lot of social negotiation. Association, expression of emotions and this sort of thing, uh, that occurs and, and that's what we, we think we can see, first of all, the expression of confusion, why is this individual no longer moving, no longer responsive to my calls or whatever, um, what's happening, can I try to understand it? Is there. A danger, um, what do we need to do, uh, as a group, and, uh, many of the activities we see occurring at the point a death has occurred or shortly thereafter relate to that, you know, working things out, what's going on, you know, let's, uh, let's ensure that, um, this isn't gonna happen to the rest of us and so on. And that we might say is a typical mammalian characteristic, well, an avian mammalian uh characteristic. After that, uh, we can see the injection of some emotions into this. If social organization has increased to the point of people, um, developing emotional attachments to other individuals, then obviously what you and I would regard today as grief. Um, AND mourning, er, begins, er, to emerge as well, and perhaps we can see that among primates, particularly, er, among apes, er, as well. So if you like, we're starting now at this stage, higher mammals if you like, to see something that's looking a bit more humanlike, if you like, sadness. Uh, Emotion, mourning, uh, and so on, but the real difference, the real thing that distinguishes human mortuary activity from, as far as we can tell, any other, um, animal, uh, mortuary activity is the fact that we question the notion. That when an individual's body is no longer moving, then that individual has ceased to exist. So really our final universal among all humans now is that most have or have had a belief that something else survives of us after death, er and therefore goes somewhere else after death to continue in existence, that really is. In my opinion, the most fascinating aspect of the archaeological study er of funerary behavior, all the weird and wonderful beliefs we have to deny the fact that we are annihilated and simply cease to exist anymore after death.

23:47 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, SO as far as we know it across all human societies, there's some form of a belief in the afterlife or life after death, is that it?

23:58 Paul Pettitt: Absolutely, of course, it's a relatively modern post-Enlightenment idea that there isn't anything, those. Of us who believe that that, you know, there is no creation, no spiritual world, etc. AND we do simply, um, disappear uh at death, but as a more broader characteristic, setting aside modern Western intellectual society or whatever, then most uh most human societies can be characterized in several ways. First, they all believe that death is inevitable. You know, nobody escapes it, you know, there's no, you know, special pleading or anything like that, um, it occurs to everyone and it involves the cessation of biological function, you stop breathing, your blood stops pumping oxygen around your body, etc. ETC. AND also that it is irreversible, you can't come back, at least. Not in this former anyway, but finally, er to overcome that, and this may be due to our cognitive evolution. Uh, WE have this notion that we are not just a sack of bones and fluids, uh, but that there is something else, the me and the you in here, uh, which in some way or another can exist independently of this sack of fluids and bones and so on and so forth. In other words, our very theory of mind, our cognitive ability to think that there is a me in here. And that there is a you in you and er and so on, yet leads us to this belief that well, this can't be it, you know, me can't just be this sack of fluid and bone, er you know there's something else and maybe that flies off er and so on, and this is what is, you know, really universal, er about human beliefs, and we can characterize them a little further, even that um not only do people, Across the world and over time have their own beliefs in the ways that they deny this final annihilation, er but they all typically have the notion that, um there is a journey that the soul, the mind, the me, whatever. Um, GOES on in order to reach its final destination, up there, down there, or wherever, uh, it is, you know, and that's fraught, um, with danger, the journey to the afterlife, and that, that typically corresponds to the period over which the corpse is decaying, so obviously an unpleasant process. So that's almost mirrored. In the spiritual realm by the trials and tribulations, say of an ancient Egyptian soul, on its way to the afterlife and the, and the, the troubles it has, the tests it faces and this sort of thing.

27:12 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, DO all human societies, uh, treat death in a negative way? That is, for example, if someone dies, do all people everywhere tend to, uh, go through grief and express sadness, or, uh, uh, is there. Any variation, I mean, could there be any societies out there where people are actually have a positive reaction to death or

27:42 Paul Pettitt: or not? The beautiful characteristics of all of our human beliefs in death and afterlives is that they beautifully combine the two. It's inevitable that death is going to be sad. Um, YOU know, for any individuals who have maintained close relationships, certainly husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, children, etc. OBVIOUSLY there is always going to be predominantly an aspect of sadness. But what all of our religious systems do, our belief systems, is give us a way not to eliminate that sadness, but to mitigate it, to soften it, er, if you like. So it's quite interesting that when most people across the world talk about death, They don't talk about it in such harsh terms, you know, my mum has just died, you know, they typically talk about it as if the person has just gone out of the room to make a cup of tea in the kitchen. You know, they, they've passed on, they've moved on, and so on, so. These belief systems allow us to maintain the notion that sure, they've gone for now, they've just gone on a long holiday, but we will be reunited up there, down there, wherever er wherever it is, so that's why a lot of our belief systems, er instill this feeling, if not of joy, but of happiness that well it's inevitable, They're at rest, they can enjoy their reward up there in the clouds or, you know, wherever it is, um, and although we're obviously sad that they're no longer around for the rest of our lives, we know we're going on, uh, to meet them there, to be reunited and so on. So it is a beautiful combination of two extremes really, sadness, grief, and hope on the other hand.

29:43 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I, I would like to ask you specifically about funerals. I mean, do we know when funerals first appeared and what kinds of social roles, uh, do funerals, uh, serve?

30:00 Paul Pettitt: Well, I think Speaking primatologically, we can see now examples of how chimpanzees respond to a sudden death, and by sudden I mean say a chimpanzee has fallen out of a tree and died or has been ambushed by a leopard and died, and we can see that there's a lot of social activity. Um, THERE'S a lot of confusion, there's a lot of prodding the dead body. What's happened, lifting its arm and letting it drop, looking in its eyes, you know, basically what I would call morbidity, an interest in why this body has stopped moving and talking and so on. So, uh, we also see, if you like, um, a reenactment of all the social activities chimpanzees do as well. It's making them in their confusion. Um, IT'S an alarm making them renegotiate their activities, um, here, so we see a lot of, um, social, um, displaying, adult males walking up and down, you know, doing this, calling, odd calls, expressing their disquiet and so on, and this can actually go on for some time. And we can see at some moments almost an aggression, a hitting of corpses too, wake up, get up. This, this is enough. You've done this enough now, it's no longer funny, you know, and on the other hand, the grief, the sadness, the sitting still contemplation as us humans would call it. And it's interesting to me, and this is the reason why I begin by discussing primates here, chimpanzees, because these are all the aspects that one day we will see and call wakes and mourning behaviors in the modern world. So certainly speaking say from the modern West, once we have observed a period in which the body is being prepared for burial or cremation. Uh, THE, the solemnities are then observed, er, the body disposed of, so to speak, but after that we have this wake or celebration of the, the life of this individual. And that's what really serves in a very human way er to er to try to put the best message on it. They've just moved on, let's celebrate them, you know, we'll have a lot of alcohol and tell good stories and all this sort of thing, and these are all obvious characteristics er of, you know, starting. The process er of overcoming the sad loss of these individuals, reinforcing the beliefs of what is to come, that their their soul is gonna be OK, we'll see them again and so on and so forth, and then begins to a final human characteristic which is commemoration. So commemoration can be anything er from a gravestone saying here lies Paul Pettit, archaeologist, you know, blah blah blah um to to stories, um memorial services, you know, stories about funny episodes in their lives and most importantly visiting the site of their disposal, their tomb, their grave, where their ashes are or the scattering of their ashes. But importantly, this is the point at which space certain parts of the landscape become important and almost that person becomes associated with them. Whether it's a cemetery you go to tap the grave, tend it, leave some flowers. Excuse me, or whether it's the forest or sea over which you scattered their ashes and so on, and that's a very important thing because the dead are dead friends and relatives don't just exist up here, but we have a visible reference in the landscape to really strongly remind us of them.

34:16 Ricardo Lopes: There are also people who leave food right like the Japanese do. I, I, I think that some of them leave the food, the, the diseased person's favorite food or something like that.

34:30 Paul Pettitt: Yeah, dining with the dead is a very characteristic phenomenon in many human societies, past and present, uh, in other words, those times of the year. When the dead are felt to be closer, All Hallows's Eve or Halloween, being an obvious Western one, where, you know, the obvious thing to do is to go to sit with them, feed them, uh, and so on, and you know, feeding the dead, maintaining them in their graves and tombs again is a very. Universal characteristic and this brings up actually a fascinating aspect I think of any belief system, be it with the dead or or with the spiritual world, is the the oddly contradictory elements uh of these that don't seem to bother us. So for example, Say with the ancient Romans, we might have a tomb saying, you know, oh traveler, passing by my tomb, why don't you stop here just for a while and remember me. Paulus Pettitus, you know, I've died now, I'm lying, you know, sleeping in this grave, but remember, pour some wine and olive oil, you know, down onto my grave so I can eat and drink, um, you know, remember I was once flesh and so on, but here I am, I'm bones lying in a grave, everybody knows that, but I'm telling you or my. Funerary stone is telling you, well no actually I'll I'd appreciate a glass of wine please, you know, we don't ever have a problem with that, we don't ever have a problem thinking the dead might be watching over our, our shoulders, uh, you know, and this kind of thing, our logical brain tells us, well, that's ridiculous, but actually our emotional brain and our theory of mind, The way our brain creates all these things in our imaginations overrides that because it feels good, you know, it, it feels good to think, yeah, alright, you know, somebody might be providing me with a glass of wine when I'm lying in my grave one day. Or or this kind of thing, or I'll be able to look over my descendants' shoulders and tell them not to do things and this sort of thing, you know.

36:44 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, uh, so earlier you've talked about some, uh, practices that we can see across other primates and even mammals more generally. Um, DO you think that at this point there's good enough evidence for us to be able to tell whether. Other primates and even possibly other mammals are aware of death, and of course, uh, I mean, uh, I guess that we have to be a bit careful here with how we approach the question because sometimes we see those, uh, very fascinating videos on the internet where, for example, chimpanzees are, uh, interacting with, um, With the corpse, with the, with the dead body of one of their conspecifics in specific ways and we have to be careful both when it comes to an anthropomorphizing them, but also, I mean, I guess that when there's good enough evidence for us to Uh, perhaps say that, uh, there's the poss at least the possibility that other animals are aware of that we should also perhaps not be too insisting on, uh, uh, I mean, being attached to the idea that there's, this is a uniquely human or exclusively human, uh, experience, so, uh, uh, what do you think about that?

38:18 Paul Pettitt: Yeah, so certainly you know in the broadest theoretical realm, I'm fascinated by this. I'm, I'm a gradualist, I love the idea of you, you being a very long-term gradual emergence of all the stuff that we see culminating in humans, if you like, over the animal world, but it's obviously remarkably difficult to get inside the minds of those animals, however explicit their behavior is, so, Chimpanzees, I'd say, really are probably the only non-human species at present that we could say probably are aware of death. In other words, aware that death has occurred and that some profound. CHANGE has occurred in what was once living, animate, a, an individual if you like, um, and is no longer. And until recently, I'd have been happy with the notion that that's because they have a a theory of mind. And they were thinking, hang on, Ricardo is no longer, you know, moving, he must have passed on, he must be dead. But I think primatologists are now questioning whether we really can say that chimpanzees have a theory of mind in that sense. Certainly are are aware of their own selves, so I think they'd certainly be aware I am Paul if you like, you know, and that I may not call Ricardo, but he's not Paul, you know, and now not Paul has stopped existing. Um, BUT beyond that, it really is remarkably different. Hypothetically, chimpanzees could have a wonderful set of beliefs about the afterlife and think, ah, Ricardo has gone on to the Mongongo nut forest in the in the afterlife and he's happy now. How do we know? I mean, of course we tend to think, what would be the use of that in a chimpanzee brain, you know, but it's impossible to distinguish. But in monkeys we can see. Similar activities to chimpanzees, so if you like a slightly lower grade of primates we can see are aware that something is happening or has happened but probably doesn't translate to, you know, the actual belief that this is death. In modern humans, um, the understanding of death can come about at a relatively early age. You know, um, the understanding of what death is and that it entails cessation of biological function comes out from the age of 4 or 5, depending on where you are. If you live in a rural society. You know, with a more um explicit experience of death than say somebody like me in a modern city where deaths occur at a hospital and you know, at a distance, that understanding comes out later. So over the course of human evolution. And obviously animal evolution, we can assume that there was an early emergence of an understanding that death has occurred and, you know, is represented by the heart stopping beating and this sort of thing. But beyond that, in terms of beliefs, we really can't get at it ethologically by watching. Non-communicative, non-speaking er animals if you like, and even in the archaeological record, in my opinion, it's only with Homo sapiens societies in the Ice Age, Upper Paleolithic and late Stone Age groups that we can see the behaviors associated with disposing of the dead er seem to er, Be obeying some kind of belief, some kind of grammar if you like, about how things should be done, and only from that can we start inferring that there is a belief system underpinning these, ah, this person's now dead, this is what we have to do. Whether or not that comes from beliefs about a spiritual world and so on, you know, is a more debatable point, but I think that by about 30,000 years ago, the middle part of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe, say, we have enough indications that only certain, Dead individuals are buried, very different to what we think of in the modern world, and that these behaviors, the burial and so on, seem to be associated with wider behaviors that seem to have some kind of ritual relevance. So I think from that point we can assume that there are belief systems in place and those belief systems probably, uh, include a supernatural one, spirits, uh, and this kind of thing. And that at that point the burials if you like are ways to deal with odd deaths in this case, they're not, they're not a universal thing, just for odd periods. So in an odd way, in my opinion, what we think of as a very natural thing to bury the dead, to cremate the dead and disperse their remains originates not in, You know, love and belief and commemoration, but in very odd circumstances and trying to mitigate the possible ramifications of those.

43:50 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, OK, but, but, uh, do you think that it is, or it would be plausi scientifically plausible for people to claim that at least some other non, uh, human animal species are aware of death even if it doesn't include, uh, I don't know, transcendental spiritual stuff and other more symbolic things like that.

44:18 Paul Pettitt: Yeah, I, I think certainly in terms of human evolution, us archaeologists tend to underestimate. Uh, THE cognitive achievements, the cognitive levels of pre-modern humans, so we, we're always being surprised when we find that such and such, oh, Neanderthals did a bit of art, you know, wow, and this kind of thing, and from my understanding of ethology, uh, I'm sure we can say the same thing about animals. So yes, hypothetically, of course, I think certainly when we're dealing with large brained mammals, you know, mammals. Who are maintaining metabolically paying for brains a little larger than one might expect just to power their bodies if you like, um, then it's entirely plausible of course that they are aware of death. It is after all, um, alongside reproduction, the most profoundly encountered universal. It's ubiquitous everywhere, everybody lives, eats, reproduces and dies, so I think it would be, um, odd to think that there wasn't some kind of cognitive way that at least higher mammals could er engage with this. So I think I have no problem um that. Many animals, certainly primates, would understand something different has happened, and they no longer need to feed. Ricardo the parrot or Paul the dolphin, you know, because they're no longer gonna eat and they're not gonna complain about it and this kind of thing. Partially, um, we can see that the bond that develops, particularly between a mother and their offspring, um, takes a long time to sever. This is. Probably why chimpanzees, monkeys, and even dolphins have been observed carrying around their dead offspring. You know, we don't need to infer much in that. There's just a bond and, you know, they don't understand why this thing is no longer moving and so on, and it takes some time for them to. To say goodbye if you like, you know, um, but it could well be that there is a slightly more complex belief system er about those as well.

46:40 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So I would like to ask you now about Paleolithic cave art, but just before we get into the topic or this specific topic, do we know when symbolism first evolved in the human species?

46:59 Paul Pettitt: Us archaeologists are terrible at our use of the word symbolism, you know, you find er one scratched mark on a piece of bone and say there's a symbolic action going on there, you know, so symbolism, um, obviously using something to refer to something else, um, is something that we can certainly identify er when we see pieces of art, say something's being represented. We can assume that that's symbolic or when we can hear people talking, the very things we're doing now between you and I are symbolic, everything we do and say, um, but of course, uh, it's quite difficult to identify in a very specific way. In the artistic record, in the in the Paleolithic er record, what we need to do is understand that there are different levels of symbolism, you know, that what I'm talking to you about and what you're asking me are are at the top end er of symbolism. At the other end could be, you know, the simple ones, me painting my face red cos I think it makes me look more impressive than, you know, it might be symbolism, um, or me wearing a football top, you know, a red top for Liverpool Football Club. You know, um, fine, you can interpret a message from it, but it's hardly a sophisticated message. It's hardly the words of Shakespeare or anything like that. So, you know, when we find a scratch on a bone or a repeated set of marks on a bone. Sure it may be symbolic, but it may not be symbolic in the sense of, you know, reflecting the first few bars of a Brahms concerto or whatever, it could be very, very simple. Now with that caution er in mind. From about half a million years ago, so for very archaic members of the Homo genus, we have unique items, one here, one there, of that kind of thing. We have a shell, a marine shell from Trinil in Java made by Homo erectus that has a zigzag design simply engraved on it. It's unique, it may be symbolism, we can hardly say it's sophisticated. And we have a few other examples like that, so say from 300,000 years ago, one in Israel, one in Morocco, we have natural cobbles of stone, which just vaguely resemble in their natural form a human body. And some individual has modified by scraping er part of that natural cobble just to bring out that resemblance to the human body a little bit more. Again, um, this is some, it's presumably saying you look like a human or I think you look like a human or hello, I'm human, but that's possibly it and they're hardly common, these now. Herein I think is where symbolism as we know it has its very early origins. Of course we can say that a chimpanzee's call, a play face, you know, um, is symbolic, it's saying I wanna play, I'm in a good mood, you know, and so this kind of thing is probably where what ultimately will become the wonderful symbolism we know. Originates, er I think these individual examples, the Shell in Java, the, The humanlike figures er elsewhere er are just individuals. They, they come out of habits, the way some people like to talk to themselves or hum to themselves or are always singing or tapping their fingers on their desks and this sort of thing, and occasionally it winds up in a tangible piece of graffiti, if you like. And that's important I think because out of those habits at some point people are gonna recognize this. So for example, I'm sitting here talking to you and as I'm sure you've noticed, I'm constantly moving my hands and the way I move my hands tends to synchronize. With my vowels and you know this kind of thing, and then you start doing it, you notice it and whether deliberately or not, when you're asking me questions, you start Ricardo doing this, and now we've got some kind of agreement going on, you know, and whether we build on it deliberately or not. We have the shared origins of something very simply symbolic. It may well be that the next time we talk, I'm wearing that red football top and you think, oh, I kind of like that, I'll start wearing a red top when I'm talking to Paul, you know, and we've got a visual system, and we can see what I call concurrence like this from 100,000 years ago. And this is interesting. Because we can see evidence for this, a shared visual culture emerging in Homo sapiens in Africa and in the Neanderthals er in the north, in in er in Western Eurasia, and this is the use of pigments. In Blombos Cave in South Africa from 100,000 years ago, we can see that red ochre lumps were being used to make a powder, to make a red pigment, but also repeated designs were being engraved on these. So clearly there was a little vocabulary, if you like, of signs that were being used. And with Neanderthals, broadly contemporary er in in er Western Europe, Central Europe, we can see that. They were using pigments to express parts of their bodies on cave walls. They only survive in deep caves, of course, so they may well have been doing it on their own bodies and elsewhere, but we can see them making hand stencils by spitting. Pigment around a hand placed on a surface, we can see them rubbing red ochre into surfaces, we can see them covering their fingertips with pigment and pressing them onto surfaces to to make a shape. This is quite interesting er because it seems to me that the earliest symbolic activity in this sense is actually extending the body to the natural landscape, leaving a sign of it in no different a way as writing a graffiti, Ricardo. Here, you know, for whatever reason er they're doing it, and this is presumably recognized in a simple way, there's a hand, whether or not it's that's Paul's hand or that's Ricardo's hand, it's still recognized as a symbol, perhaps for a human er or whatever. And we seem to have a very long period. Of this non-figurative art stemming from the body, the social body, um, among Neanderthals, among early Homo sapiens, and it's only after the Neanderthals have disappeared, And in Europe really only we see the earliest evidence, and in the other extreme of Eurasia, in Indonesia and probably on uh on Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, although it's more difficult to date out there, it's only in this period from 50,000 to 40,000 years ago that figurative art emerges and we're on far more secure ground when we're talking about symbolism. And that's when people are depicting typically animals, prey animals that they are crucially dependent upon for survival. That becomes a very different thing, and I think this is the point at which we are dealing with quite a sophisticated symbolic system deriving from beliefs about these animals and so on. So prior to that I think it's more like social dynamics that are being symbolized, so they're more akin to that football fan's shirt, you know, than they are about the words of Shakespeare or something like that.

55:19 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so, uh, but when it comes to cave art specifically, of course, people in general tend to be very fascinated by cave art, but, uh, when it comes to a more scientific approach to it and, uh, uh, thinking about fields like cognitive archaeology, I mean, what is it about Human cognition that we can infer from studying cave art. I mean, are there specific aspects of, uh, the cognition of the people who produce that kind of art that we can say, OK, so this, uh, uh, for sure this would have been a part of their cognition. I mean. What, what, what can, what can we tell exactly?

56:10 Paul Pettitt: Yes, certainly. So, uh, I think we can make two, well, we can make inferences in two broad ways. First, the, the subject matter of figurative art, well, of non-figurative but particularly figurative art, uh, and secondly on the, the visual psychological. Processes that seem to have been behind er some of the earliest art. I mean in terms of what is depicted, of course, the earliest art, cave art, rock art in general is overwhelmingly dominated by the depiction of animals and only very rarely by the depiction of humans themselves. And this is not surprising. The art was produced of course by hunter gatherers who are dependent entirely on hunting and gathering wild resources, and in northern latitudes such as Eurasia, most of the available nutrients critical for survival are on the hoof. You know, they are there in the landscape in animal form, so inevitably. Hunting those animals becomes critically important, so perhaps it's no surprise that in many respects, rock art is a great celebration of these critically important prey animals in, you know, in the Western European Paleolithic, um, bison. The extinct cattle or rocks and deer, red deer, reindeer, horse, and to a lesser extent ibex mammoth and other er other animals. So that tells us a lot of course about the mindset er of our ice age er hunter gatherers and presumably reflects, um, some kind of celebration about these animals. Now if we look at the anthropology of hunting. Gatherers over the last 2 or 3 centuries, we can see they tend to to um, share the same characteristic belief systems. They believe that they are they are part of the whole that is the world, the cosmos, um, you know, and in fact that there are no fixed boundaries between different elements of that cosmos. In other words, you can't say I am human. And there is a boundary around me and that is a reindeer, and there is a boundary around that, there is a lot of blurring. And what this actually means is when they kill an animal to consume it, they're actually borrowing that animal from the wider cosmological world and typically their rituals tend to revolve around um placating the animal spirits, thanking them er for this, and most notably ensuring that another animal spirit will emerge in the world, you know, sort of one in one out kind of er kind of thing, um, so. We can certainly see from a belief system, a lot of the rock art as being involved, being part of ritual behaviors designed to appease spirits, to bring, to ensure that everything stays the same. We can see this in fury beliefs, by the way, um, you know, the whole thing with with ancient Egypt. WAS about preserving art, the, the natural state of things at the point the world was created. So, you know, everybody likes to have these rituals, whether they be rock art or funerary or whatever, uh, that keeps everything the way it should be, uh, and so on. So that, that gives us a key into, uh, to this and maybe caves. Which are universally across the world thought of as places where this world meets the other world. Perhaps these are the places where these animals are coming into existence and you know what the human rituals are doing are helping them. It's like midwifery, as we would say, they're like being midwives helping the birth of these animals. But equally we can see a number of other characteristics involved which have a more hardcore scientific er basis and one thing I I like doing is collaborating with our professor of visual psychology at Durham, Bob Kentridge, who er. Uh, AND we together use modern, uh, visual psychological research methods to investigate cave art and, and other aspects of Paleolithic art. One thing us humans have in our wonderfully imaginative brains is this process of paraolia. So if you imagine our brains have obviously evolved as small primates originally on a dangerous African savannah, and clearly they have evolved a fairly hair trigger way to to keep us out of danger. So in other words, as as we're sitting here, if you or I see something move out of the corner of our eyes. As an Australopithecine, 3.5 ft tall, unarmed, and so on, it makes far more sense for our brains just to assume that's a leopard coming to kill us, uh, as opposed to a rock or a tree. So the brain shouts leopard, leopard, and you run and you know, thankfully you're just embarrassed when you do finally look around to see that it was just a tree after all. That seems to be what our brains do, it, you know, it doesn't make sense to look around, is that a leopard coming for me? Maybe it's just a tree, I'll have a look, that's not gonna make sense. And that's left us er an evolutionary legacy in the fact that our brains are terrific at routinely and automatically trying to make sense of totally random things. It's why when we look up at the clouds, we see a little poodle dog or we see, we slice open a tomato and see the face of the Virgin Mary, er in it or something, that's our brains saying that's what it is and probably ghosts, we can. Um, YOU know, spirits and so on we can ascribe to Paidolia too, and the relevance of this to the earliest figurative art is that in caves and rock shelters in the Paleolithic, we can see that lumps and bumps of cave walls that vaguely resemble, say, the back of a horse, the head of a bison or whatever, have been recognized in the Paleolithic, and the images have been created to incorporate. Those aspects, we can test this scientifically, we can put eye tracking goggles on people, we can get them looking around virtual caves that we've actually put art in and so on, and we can see where their eyes fall, etc. AND we can see. Time and time again that certain lumps and bumps will attract people of diverse backgrounds and so on, you know, so clearly the fact that our brains evolved to have this ability to imagine and that our visual brains evolved to to make a snappy decision using that imagination has translated into the earliest figurative art, and it's tempting. Difficult to prove but tempting to think that of course, the fact that the brains are really seeing a bison or a mammoth in that cave wall, gives rise to the belief systems that that's because the mammoth and the bison really are there. In the cave wall and are trying to come out again into the world. It's a rather nice way to put, you know, the hard science of visual psychology uh together with our, you know, uh admittedly more speculative um ideas about belief systems.

1:03:50 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so, uh, look, I, I'm getting really mindful of your time. Maybe, uh, I guess it would be better for us to leave, uh, the, uh, because I have another question about whether art is an evolved adaptation, but I'm afraid that probably that would take a while to address because it's a very multifaceted question. So do you think we should probably leave it for uh Another potential,

1:04:17 Paul Pettitt: I think that's a great point to pick up on and as you say we can probably do a whole podcast session on that, but yeah, uh, I think it probably is, uh, adaptive, but we'll leave it at that and next time we'll chat, I can explain to you why. Yeah,

1:04:33 Ricardo Lopes: of course, so, uh, would you like just to tell people where they can find you and your work on the internet?

1:04:40 Paul Pettitt: Certainly, yeah, so um you can just email er just Google search for Paul Pettit at at Durham or Paul Pettit Durham, er you'll see I have a website on Durham University's archaeology department, that's probably the best uh place to find me.

1:04:58 Ricardo Lopes: Great, so Doctor Petit, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a very fascinating conversation and I'm looking forward to our next one.

1:05:09 Paul Pettitt: My pleasure, Ricardo, anytime and I look forward to that too.

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