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The Dead

In thus providing for the posthumous needs of the dead, the survivors seem, however, to have acted less from disinterested affection than from self-interest. Their care seems to have been to encourage the deceased’s favorable disposition towards themselves, to soften his possible hostility or to put him physically in a position where he could do no harm. Generally speaking, primitive people believe that death, like sickness, is the result of magic operation. They attribute deaths to which we assign natural causes to an evil spell, the author of which, whether unconscious or malevolent, they attempt to dis­cover by various means.

This being so, it can be understood that the dead were thought to harbor vengeance against their presumed murderers and, in consequence of the idea of collective responsibility, against all those who survived them. At the very least they would entertain sentiments of envy to­wards those who still enjoyed the earthly life of which they themselves had been deprived. It seems, then, that the basic attitude towards the dead was one of fear, and that burial rites were originally measures of protection against the deceased. Thus Paleolithic trenches and tombs may have been intended less to shelter the dead than to imprison them. The statuette of Brno, very prob­ably masculine and buried with a masculine corpse, could have played the role of a ‘double’, meant to keep the dead one in his tomb and prevent him from ‘returning’ to torment the living. This would account for the statuette’s being made with neither legs nor right arm.

Particularly remarkable is the trussed-up position in which many of these bodies were found. A typical exam­ple from the Magdalenian period is the old man of Chan­celade in the Dordogne, covered with red ochre, with arms and legs folded and the vertical column bent to such a degree that the skeleton only occupies a space little more than two feet long and sixteen inches wide. In the grotto ‘des Enfants’, which is Aurignacian, the negroid young man’s legs were completely drawn up to his thighs. The old woman’s thighs were raised as far as possible so that her knees reached the level of her shoulders. The legs were sharply folded under the thighs and the feet nearly touched the pelvis. The forearms were bent upwards so that the left hand was just beneath the shoulder blade.

In the Mousterian period the woman of La Ferrassie had her legs doubled up; the bent right forearm rested along the thigh, the hand on a knee. This arm and the legs formed a letter ‘N’, the knee reaching a distance of only six inches from the shoulder. The legs of the skeleton of La Chapelle-aux-Saints were folded and raised so that the kneecaps were more or less on a level with the chest.

This contracted condition that has been observed in so many skeletons from the Mousterian until those who buried it could of course, only have imposed the Magda­lenian period on the body. In addition, it means that the body must have been tied up at the moment of death: for rigor mortis would later have prevented its being forced into such a position. It seems, then, that among Paleolithic as among other primitive peoples who share similar burial customs, the doubled-up posture of the body was only a result of the trussing-up and bind­ing — this being the essential operation, intended to prevent the dead from coming back to torment the living. This also explains the diversity of positions in which Paleolithic bodies are found: provided that they were securely bound and could not leave their graves, the actual position of the body was of secondary importance and could be left to individual initiative.

Although fear of the dead seems to have been the dominant sentiment it does not follow that in some cases at least there was not also a belief that the dead could be helpful and beneficent, especially when funeral rites de­vised to assure their maximum well being in the after-life had been performed. This seems to account for certain practices which differed from burial in the strict sense, in that they tended not to set the dead apart from the living but, on the contrary, to preserve their remains and keep them, as it were, to hand. Such, notably, was the practice of stripping the flesh from the body before burial. This was done by various means, especially by natural putrefaction in a provisional grave. The object was to conserve the skeleton or its bones, which were sometimes worn by the survivors as amulets. The practice seems to have existed from Paleolithic times. A Lower Magda­lenian example is found in the grotto of Le Placard in the Charente. An entire skull of a woman, complete with lower jawbone, was placed on a rock and surrounded by a hundred and seventy shells of different sorts, some pierced, some not. Skulls in the same cave, belonging to Lower Magdalenian and Upper Solutrian periods, show clear traces of deliberate flesh stripping and have undoubtedly been cut and altered. In the Aurignacian cave of Le Cavillon at Grimaldi three such bones were found: the broken radius of a child and two bones from a man’s foot, colored a vivid red. Scattered nearby was a set of pierced and unpierced shells. A tomb at Pfed­mosti contained only a few bone-remains that had been scraped; the head was missing but must once have been there, for two teeth still remained. A Mousterian skeleton, found in a trench at La Ferrassie, had its skull, deprived of face and jawbone, placed nearly four feet away from the body. At Le Pech de l’Aze the skull of a five or six years old child was surrounded by deliberately broken animal bones, by teeth and by a quantity of implements. Finally, we must take into account many finds of isolated human bones from all periods, generally skulls or jawbones.

 Sinanthropus. — The deposits of Fu-Ku-Tien near Peking permit us to go back to the earliest Pleistocene times. They have yielded — together with abundant vestiges of fire, and work in bone and stone the remains of a dozen human beings, halfway between Pithecanthro­pus man of Java and Neanderthal man of Mousterian Europe. For the moment these remains are confined to skull and lower jaw, without traces of cervical vertebrae, while bones represent the animals on which these men fed from all parts of the body. There can thus be no question of cannibalism or of the heads being cut from corpses immediately after death. To all appearances these skulls must have been preserved after the bodies had been stripped of flesh.

Hence from the remotest times when, on the evidence of the skull which is all we have of his body, man was still closely related to the ape, it would seem that there are proofs of his industry and that, at least in the form of a cult of the dead, he revealed traces of religion.

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