Legends have come down to us from ancient times about dead bodies that rise from the grave to terrorize the living. That's where we get the concept of vampires, zombies, and revenants. But fear of the dead goes back much further, to the Neolithic era, as we find more burials that have been engineered to keep a body from rising again. As these finds get older and older, we have to think about why we bury the dead in the first place. Deliberate burials go back at least 100,000 years, although archaeologists still argue about how deliberate some of these graveyards really were. And burial practices of ancient humans are hard to discern. Were stones placed on top of graves to keep animals from digging them up, or to keep the dead from coming back to haunt us?
Different burial sites have vastly different customs, which come from the dominant culture, but some graves even in the same graveyard appear to have extra steps that make this one burial different from those around it. What do these burial customs say about the way that person was regarded? Or were they "pinned down" so that they couldn't rise up and spread the disease that killed them? Read about the research into the long history of our fear of the dead returning at Aeon. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Alissa Mittnik, Chuan-Chao Wang, Jiří Svoboda, Johannes Krause)
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