Death… It's A Living

That’s one of the questions I ask my undergraduates to ponder when I introduce the topic of death in my Lifespan Development course. Although there are many courses solely about death and the study of death (e.g., thanatology) across the world, both within and outside of the behavioral sciences, I’ve always thought of the topic as being particularly relevant in my own subfield, developmental psychology. Although most developmental students (at least the ones who work with me) hope to find jobs working with and advocating for children, human development is bigger than just child psychology. In fact, although human development is a subfield of behavioral science, it’s also a hub science that must take into account all other fields that affect physical and social life (e.g., biology, chemistry, economics, sociology… the list goes on).

When I taught my first developmental course—as a graduate student at the University of Texas—I thought of the scholarly topic of death as as no more than the final unit: that thing that comes at the end of any developmental course. I was still in my 20s then. Maybe my relative youth—I could still pass as a high school student, let alone one of my university students—had something to do with my thought process–or lack thereof.

As I’ve improved as a professor—and, coincidentally, older—I’ve changed how I view the role that death should play in my courses. I now—in my mid 40s—discuss death on the first day of the course. After all, no matter how any of us lives our lives, no matter the number or types of successes and failures we might have, we all end the same way. We die. Conception is the only life event possibly more important in the story of life; if that didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have anything to talk about. But for anyone who has tried (or tried NOT) to get pregnant before, conception is far from predictable or guaranteed. Death on the other hand… although the timing is often a mystery, it’s inevitability is not.

So where does death come from? What does that question even mean?

To begin, I think it becomes important to consider death as the defining moment in the lives of all humans since the dawn of our species (and probably before the dawn of our species… but hold that thought). Although it is one thing to view death as an unavoidable end, it is wholly another to view it as part of one’s life. When it comes to death, most of us tend to view it as separate from life. In fact, they are antonyms: life and death. This itself is strange. We tend not to view the end of stories as separate from their beginnings and middles. Cinderella lives happily ever after but not before she survives the trials and tribulations of her stepsisters. Her story’s end provides her story with meaning. Perhaps the same is true of our own deaths. Rarely, however, do people from a modern, developed society view death as an important and defining aspect of life.

Once upon a time, things might have been otherwise.

Anthropological and archaeological evidence suggests that some of our earliest rituals revolved around death. For example, the oldest surviving cave paintings in Europe at Chauvet-Pont d’Arc, located about 2.5 hours northwest of Marseilles in southeastern France, may depict examples of funerary behavior: something akin to instructions regarding how to ensure that a corpse is correctly disposed of so its soul can pass to the next world. These paintings are very old, thought to have been produced around 36,000 BCE. To emphasize the age of these painting and their place in the timeline of human history, it should be noted that they predate the discoveries of animal husbandry and agriculture (the advances that enabled the establishment of non-nomadic settlements, i.e., civilization) by at least 23,000 years. Furthermore, anatomically modern homo sapiens were not thought to be common until 40,000 BCE (about the same time the neanderthals were dying out). Taken together, these findings suggest that human beings have had knowledge of care of the dead for most, if not all, of our species’ existence, whereas we have only known how to reliably raise our own meat and veg for less than half of our time on the planet. Thus, knowledge of death has been with our species at least since its beginning. But let’s go back even further.

Cave-Person Times

The most important geological era for evolutionary behavioral scientists is referred to as the Pleistocene—the time period that most laypeople call the last Ice Age. It was during this time, beginning about 2.5 million years ago and ending with the Anthropocene (i.e., the joint discoveries of animal husbandry and agriculture around 12,500 BCE) that the primate genus Australopithecus (famously including Lucy, the 3.5-ft tall “mother of humanity”, “missing link”, or whatever silly over-the-top, not-quite-accurate nomenclature you prefer) disappeared and our own genus Homo appeared. In other words, it was during the Pleistocene that the brains of humans developed, only most recently in the bodies of homo sapiens. Although it’s not quite accurate, it’s easier to picture if we refer to the Pleistocene as “cave-person times”.

Cave-People and Death

Our early ancestors must have been surrounded by death. Think about how easy it would have been to die during cave-person times. Only the most ancient—and probably revered—cave people would have been able to die of something as mundane as heart disease or cancer. Putting myself in their, uh, hairy feet (shoes might have only appeared 10,000 years ago), I would not have had to worry about watching my weight, cholesterol, or alcohol consumption. Rather, I might worry about being hunted by a pack of wolves or gored during a hunt. Unfortunately and anticlimactically, my death would more likely be due to a change in the weather that caught me unprepared. Or maybe I would have broken an ankle walking across some uneven rocks, which would have led to infection—a necessarily untreated infection—and to sepsis. The point is that cave-man me was much more likely to die of something that modern-man me would just reluctantly go to urgent care for stitches.

For a potentially more dramatic example, my oldest son was born via an emergency c-section. In short, the sizes of his noggin and my wife’s pelvis were not a good match. Modern medicine enabled him to be born as a healthy baby boy. During cave-person times, a baby who was too big for their mother would have died. So would have the mother. Childbirth, while not completely without danger today, came with significant risk during cave-person times, given it lack of prenatal care, advanced obstetrics knowledge, and basic antiseptics.

Putting this together, death was associated with life from the beginning. Death was not foreign or separate from life, it was a crucial and expected part of life. For many early and traditional societies (that is to say, extant peoples who continue to live in technologically primitive communities that anthropologists refer to as the Stone Age—think the tribal communities of New Guinea or the Amazon), one of the purposes of the living—perhaps the purpose—was to ensure that one’s clan members made the successful journey from this world, the world of the living, to the next. Life was merely a way station on the journey from whatever came before birth to whatever comes after death. Despite its saliency, or indeed because of it, death was not feared to the degree it is today. The death of a loved one was likely still tragic, but perhaps more easily accepted.

And then, something tragic happened to our species: Civilization.

Now to be sure, I will not make the argument that things were better during cave-person times than they are today. Unfortunately, I find it necessary to state that because there is a strange anti-intellectual idea floating out there on the internet that BECAUSE IT WAS HOW WE EVOLVED IT IS GOOD. There is practically no evidence that the so-called Paleo diet or eating nothing but raw foods is good for you because that’s what our cave-person ancestors did. Although it’s true we should all be wary of eating and drinking things that were created in a lab or factory, our cave-person ancestors ate the way they did because they had no choice. Things are a lot better today than they were then. We are living far longer and healthier lives. As a caveperson in my mid-40s, I likely would have been one of the oldest of the elders of my clan. As a modern person in my mid-40s, I’m just some rando with a dad bod struggling to find the right brand of salsa. Although in the former scenario I might be more esteemed, it’s also likely that all of my childhood friends are dead. The real-life rando that I am gets to keep his friends, his family, and maybe even his dog for decades more.

However, with civilization came the ability to, if not avoid death, postpone it. To hide it. To separate ourselves from it. To make matter of life and death the expertise of only the healthcare workers and religious clergy.  

Civilization helped us remove death as central to life. And the chief culprit in this unhealthy removal, was the human invention of religion.

-The Plague Doctor