What We Can Learn About Death and the Afterlife From the Earliest Humans

The Greek historian Herodotus tells us that when the Persian king Xerxes was about to cross the Hellespont prior to invading Greece in 481 BC, he conducted a review of his army and fleet. He then ordered a marble throne to be placed on a hill to afford him a panoramic view of the dazzling spectacle. His ships were so closely packed that he couldn’t see any water, while his soldiers covered all the land as far as the horizon. As Xerxes was taking in this impressive scene, he counted himself the most fortunate man alive. A second later, however, he suddenly burst into tears. His uncle Artabanus, observing his distress, asked him what was the matter.

“I’m overwhelmed with sadness at the brevity of human life,” Xerxes mused. “Each of these men is in their prime but not a single one will be alive in a hundred years’ time.”

Herodotus no doubt invented the anecdote. After all, who would have told him? Even so, it is very moving, all the more so since Xerxes is far from sympathetically portrayed elsewhere in his History. Even the most arrogant people on earth are humbled—at least momentarily—by the consciousness of the inevitability of death. You’ll die too, great king, Herodotus is saying. Act accordingly. But, of course, Xerxes didn’t. He went on to invade Greece and suffered a catastrophic defeat.

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Humans have been wandering the earth for at least 5 million years. Back in the day, death was almost always premature, striking down people in the fullness of life, assuming that they made it to what we would call the fullness of life. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that homo erectus, say, might have concluded she could go on living forever, so long as luck was on her side. If so, the belief that life was infinitely extendable may have been implanted in the human brain in the proverbial mists of time. In fact, some paleoanthropologists have controversially claimed that the fossil remains of 28 hominins found in a deposit called Sima de los Huesos (“Pit of Bones”) in north-central Spain is evidence for collective burial in the Middle Paleolithic Period as early as 430,000 BC. However, it is equally possible that the group fell into the pit from a higher chamber as the result of a mudflow (or series of mudflows) and simply got trapped.

The earliest unambiguous evidence of intentional burial comes from a site felicitously named Skhul, south of Haifa in Israel, dated 120,000 to 80,000 BC, where the skeletons of more than ten individuals, some of them children and belonging to homo sapiens, were discovered. In Skhul V, the mandible of a wild boar had been laid across a boy’s chest. Very likely this was a personal item, which the boy had used as a weapon. We may recall Samson’s boast in the Book of Judges, “With the jawbone of an ass, I slew 10,000 men.” But why place it in the grave? Were the boy’s relatives commemorating his prowess in the hunt? Or were they equipping him to meet similar opportunities in the life to come?

Another early example of deliberate burial by homo sapiens comes from the Qafzeh Cave, south of Nazareth, where fifteen skeletons and eight partial skeletons were discovered. Dated 100,000 to 90,000 BC, they are the largest group of burials from a Middle Paleolithic layer. In Qafzeh 11, a twelve- or thirteen-year-old adolescent boy or girl—only the top half of the body is preserved so we do not know the gender—was buried in a pit dug into the bedrock. Laid across the chest was the partial skull of a large deer.

Neanderthals were also deliberately burying their dead. In the Shanidar Cave in the Zagros Mountains, Iraqi Kurdistan, ten skeletons have come to light dated 45,000–35,000 BC. The dead were placed in pits before being deliberately covered with earth. Particularly interesting is Shanidar 4, which came to be styled “the flower burial,” because clumps of ancient pollen grains, thought to be pollen sacs from whole-cut flowers, were initially explained as evidence of “bouquets” that Neanderthals had placed beside the body in an act of reverence, though it is now suspected that the pollen grains might have been introduced by bees or rodents.

Another intriguing skeleton from the same cave is Shanidar 1, known informally as “Nandy” (short for “Neanderthal”), who had sustained a crushing blow to the head. This had damaged the right side of his brain, causing his right arm to wither and his right leg to become crippled. Nandy must have been cared for, since his injuries healed over time and he lived to the ripe old age of 35–40. It is tempting to associate compassion for the living and care for the dead as linked phenomena that evolved simultaneously, but perhaps that is being sentimental.

Does deliberate burial indicate that hominins living in the Middle Paleolithic Period believed there was something to look forward to, or perhaps to dread, once they had expired? We cannot answer that question conclusively because we don’t have written records, in the absence of which everything pertaining to belief is speculative. There are, moreover, a number of reasons why they might have buried their dead that have nothing to do with a belief in the afterlife. One is that they didn’t want to see their friends and relatives torn apart by scavengers. Another is that they didn’t want to be constantly traumatized by their decomposing remains. A third reason was to keep away predators. And yet a fourth is that even an uneducated hominin would have recognized that a rotting corpse is something to avoid.

At the same time, we cannot rule out the possibility that any or all of these reasons might have been accompanied by the belief that some action should be taken on behalf of the dead to assist their welfare in whatever lay beyond. What remains incontrovertible is that tens of millennia ago our ancestors were demonstrating “the oldest concern for human dignity.” In the words of the Roman jurist Ulpian, burial is the negotium humanitatis, the “business of humankind.”

Only a fraction of the Middle Paleolithic population was given burial, of whom a much smaller fraction was provided with grave gifts. We might suppose that elite members of the community would be specially favored, but this was not invariably the case. In 34,000 BC, at Sungir, near Moscow, the skeletons of a homo sapiens boy and girl were laid beside each other, adorned with 5,000 ivory beads, as well as bracelets and pendants. Mammoth-tusk spears and an adult femur filled with red pigment were laid beside them. Both children had debilitating conditions. It has been suggested that they might have been ritually sacrificed to accompany a tribal leader to the afterlife since they were buried simultaneously, viz an early example of what is called retainer sacrifice. If so, were they deemed special or expendable?

Working out what people think about death even when there is abundant information is no easy undertaking. A lot of people hold inconsistent and even contradictory ideas about the afterlife, and probably that has been true from time immemorial. In particular, many have believed that the dead exist both in the vicinity of the grave and in a world of their imagining far beyond the grave.

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Not much can be said for a meaningless prolongation of life. All it amounts to is an endless round of doing the same thing over and over—and, worst of all, getting older all the time. The Greeks understood this well, as is proven by the myth of Tithonus, the beloved of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal so that they could enjoy lovemaking forever. Zeus complied, but Eos forgot to include eternal youth in her request. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells us what happened next:

When loathsome old age pressed hard upon Tithonus with all its might and he could no longer move his limbs or lift them up…she decided that the best thing to do was to put him inside her chamber and close its shining doors. From there he babbles endlessly—his babbling never seems to end—and he no longer has the strength he once had in his supple limbs.

In other words, Eos packed her beloved off to the equivalent of an old people’s home, where he continues babbling to this day, though later versions of the myth have him transformed into a cicada. Had Tithonus been able to read Egyptian, he might have consulted the (now) 3,600-year-old Book for the Transformation of an Old Man into a Youth of 20, though all it offers is a formula for a face cream to make the skin tighter.

No people have invested as much energy, inventiveness, and resources in attaining the afterlife as the Egyptians. Already by ca. 4000 BC, they were depositing large storage jars containing grain and beer at the feet of the body, smaller jars with oils and unguents at the chest, and eye-paint and palettes beside the face. In other words, they had already worked out the two principal needs of the dead: first, to be properly fed, and second, to be looking their best.

Why did the Egyptians become so fixated upon the afterlife? The most likely explanation is the scorching desert sand, which, by quickly absorbing all the water in the human body that is placed in contact with it, prevents bacteria from developing, thereby preserving it indefinitely. The natural preservation of the body is demonstrated by six mummified bodies buried in stone-lined graves found near Gebelein in Upper Egypt, dated ca. 3400 BC. One, aged eighteen to twenty-one, who was initially nicknamed Ginger, was the first mummy to be exhibited in the British Museum in 1901.

Technically, Ginger isn’t actually a mummy because his body, wrapped only in a piece of matting, was dried by the sun as it heated up the earth around him. He has tufts of ginger hair— hence his nickname—and figural tattoos on his right arm. His mouth is slightly open, and he has a good set of teeth. He is lying in a fetal or contracted position on his left side, like a child inside a womb. It is possible that his relatives laid him thus because they believed this would assist his rebirth. Beside him in the reconstruction are stone and pottery vessels, a mudstone palette, beads, and flint knives. A few years ago, the British Museum decided to stop calling him Ginger because of “ethical consideration relating to human remains.” He’s now become plain old EA 32751. Such is life.

Around the same time as EA 32751 died, however, the first attempts were being made at Hierakonpolis in Upper Egypt to preserve bodies artificially by using resins and linen wrappings. Here beginneth, in other words, the long history of mummification. Then in the early Fourth Dynasty (ca. 2575 BC onward), those preparing bodies for burial realized they had to remove the vital organs—viz intestines, liver, lungs, and stomach—since these were the first parts to decompose. They inserted linen, straw, and sawdust into the mummy to compensate for the loss of body tissue.

There is a bitter irony to this. If the Egyptians had continued interring bodies directly in the hot, dry sand, their dead would have been much better preserved, since mummification is a far less effective way of keeping the body intact. In short, it was a huge waste of effort and expense that did no one any good except of course the embalmers, who made a killing.

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From What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland. Copyright © 2025. Available from Princeton University Press.