Mortuary practices in the Palaeolithic – reflections of human-environment relations

Mortuary practices in the Palaeolithic have been of special interest to archaeologists reconstructing ritual and burial of Palaeolithic man. Very often expressed and widely accepted is the opinion that Palaeolithic humans buried the entire intact corpses of most of their dead. The results of an anthropological approach to Palaeolithic mortuary practices do not confirm such a conclusion. This approach is based on two main aspects : 1. patterns of skeletal representation for 826 individuals from the European Palaeolithic and 2. human bone modifications of fossil human remains and their interpretation.

The results of this anthropological approach, which will be discussed in detail in the present paper, and the archaeological record of the Palaeolithic human remains clearly demonstrate that mortuary practices in the Palaeolithic were usually celebrated with disarticulated human bones resulting from activities involving human corpses and bones of “favoured” dead. After completed and finished mortuary ceremonies for the deceased the human remains (mainly broken bones) were either thrown away, intentionally deposited or buried.

Only 6.1 % of the Middle Palaeolithic and 15.9 % of the Upper Palaeolithic individuals are represented by complete or nearly complete skeletons resulting from burials/depositions of the entire intact corpse of “highly favoured” dead. Burials of entire intact corpses were first celebrated about 100,000 to 80,000 years ago by anatomically modern humans in Kafzeh and Skhul, but later on in the Middle Palaeolithic of the Near East and Europe exclusively done by populations of archaic Homo sapiens.

Mortuary practices in the Palaeolithic were necessarily closely connected with reflections on life and death and began with late Homo erectus about 500,000 – 300,000 years ago independently in Europe, Africa and Asia. Reflections on life and death also initiated reflections on the world in which humans were living and on the afterworld. The great variety and complexity of mortuary practices and mortuary rites in the Palaeolithic reflect the many unsolved problems and contradictions between life and death, between humans and their natural as well as their socio-cultural environment, which faced the humans daily.