On the recommendation of my vaunted National Geographic, I am listening to Cave of Bones by Lee Berger, the paleoanthropologist who is arguably the most prolific and controversial fossil hunter of his generation. I love antiquities and spent a fair amount of time in my youth hunting fossils and artifacts from places like burial mounds. I have a meaningful collection of pre-Colombian art that I dug up in Costa Rica when I was living there in the 1950s before restrictions on removing such artifacts became national historical policy. The volcanic basalt pieces, crafted from the soft and malleable volcanic stone that came from one of Costa Rica’s five active volcanoes, the most prominent of which is called Arenal, but the most adjacent to where I lived being Turrialba, are my favorites and are the most dramatic. They have held up well over time, unlike the clay pottery pieces, which are far more fragile and prone to disintegration. Costa Rica sits in the zone between the great Mesoamerican civilizations (Maya, Aztec) to the north and the Andean civilizations (Inca, Tiwanaku) to the south. Not unlike the great pyramids of Egypt, the burial mound tradition reflects the local tribal chiefdom structure where mounds marked elite status, concentrated wealth, and demonstrated the power of ruling lineages rather than serving state or imperial religious functions. But the basalt artifacts were far more common than the jade or gold grave goods that people most often associate with burial mounds. My best is a ceremonial “metate”, which is a ground stone tool used for processing food, primarily grinding maize, seeds, and other plant materials. It’s form is a slightly concave grinding surface supported on legs, looking a lot like a modern chafing dish. It was part of the “mortuary furniture” placed with high-status burials as a marker of elite status. My other pieces are human sculptures, two standing and two heads, both commonly used in burial mounds as further status symbols. All this personal history makes Cave of Bones an interesting listen for me.
Cave of Bones is a popular account of the Rising Star discoveries (the cave system in South Africa where Lee Berger’s team discovered Homo Naledi – one of the most significant paleoanthropological finds of the 21st century). It’s focused specifically on the most controversial claim to emerge from the Homo Naledi work. Homo Naledi is a small-brained hominin that Berger claims, based on his cave findings, is capable of intentional burial of the dead and symbolic behavior. That would be the oldest known mortuary practice in the fossil record, significantly predating (by millions of years) similar behavior in Neanderthals and early Homo Sapiens. The implications are profound. If Homo Naledi was burying its dead, the capacity for symbolic thought and social ritual is far older, far more widespread, and far less dependent on brain size than the standard model of human cognitive evolution assumes. This is huge and controversial in the narrow realm of paleoanthropology, to be sure. But what really got me going was something that I have never considered before…that the recognition and “celebration” of death and its permanence is considered to be a uniquely human act. That thought causes me to ponder many other things.
This issue is one of the deepest and most actively contested questions in paleoanthropology, comparative cognition, and philosophy all at once. The honest answer is that the assumption of human uniqueness on this question has been significantly eroded in recent decades, though not entirely demolished. The traditional view, which has been dominant through most of the 20th century, held that recognition of death’s permanence required abstract thought. Animals don’t get that. Abstract thought requires large brains and language, and despite recent primate, elephant and cetacean (dolphins and whales) studies, humans still largely own that capability. Therefore mortuary ritual, grief, and death awareness have always been considered uniquely human capacities. The archaeological appearance of deliberate burial (roughly 100,000-300,000 years ago in Homo sapiens and possibly Neanderthals…and perhaps now Homo Naledi) has marked a cognitive threshold separating humans from all other animals. That’s a very big deal with regard to the issues of humanity.
We humans know we will die before we are dying. This anticipatory awareness of personal mortality shapes human behavior, motivation, and culture in pervasive ways…particularly through religion. Humans have built entire civilizations around death. Even beyond religions, there are philosophies, art traditions, legal systems governing inheritance, funerary industries, ancestor veneration practices. The scale and complexity of human cultural response to death has no non-human parallel. Humans don’t merely respond to death, they create meaning around it like narratives about afterlife, concepts of legacy, the idea that how one dies matters morally. What makes this unique position so philosophically rich and interesting is that it sits at the intersection of several of the hardest problems in science and philosophy. And the older we all get, I suspect most of us spend more and more time thinking about some of these issues surrounding death. Even if we are not fixated on our own mortality, seeing others we know and love approach death or die is hard to ignore.
So, if mortality awareness is a sign of humanity, do we become more human as we age and as we spend more of our time thinking about death? I think that’s a genuinely interesting idea. The common assumption is that as death gets closer, people think about it more, fear it more, and are more preoccupied with it. But the research largely contradicts this. What the research actually shows is that death anxiety decreases with age. In fact, this is one of the most robust and replicated findings in the psychology of mortality. Older adults consistently report lower death anxiety than younger adults on standardized measures, across cultures, and across decades of research. The best explanation is that people who achieve a sense that their life had meaning and was lived authentically tend to approach death with acceptance rather than terror. They’ve successfully navigated this developmental task and done the psychological work of confronting mortality and reached a kind of peace with it. This is not denial, it is genuine resolution. Older people with foreshortened futures prioritize emotional meaning, depth of existing relationships, and present-focused experience…or at least we should. Death awareness drives this reorientation but is processed as motivational clarity rather than anxiety. Among the very old, death anxiety often decreases further still, sometimes approaching near-complete equanimity. Research on centenarians consistently finds remarkably low death anxiety since they have typically outlived most of their contemporaries and developed a profound sense of having completed their lives.
Philosophers have argued that confronting death is not pathological but essential to living fully. Thinking about death more, at any age, appears to reduce rather than increase death anxiety, when that thinking leads toward genuine engagement rather than suppression. That brings the question back to where we started… the burial mounds, the cave of bones, the animal grief responses… all of which suggest that the confrontation with mortality, far from being a burden unique to humans, may be one of the oldest and most widespread features of conscious social life on earth. Perhaps death becomes us all.