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「文化」是「人類為了解決和應付生存及現實的問題，而設計出來的生活方式、典章制度，以及根據這兩者而來的文學、藝術、知識、和行為規範及模式等等」(該文第1.2節)；它有種種面向和表現形式自然不足為奇。
「馬格德林人被『取代』」是一種文明、文雅、或文謅謅的說法(請見本欄第二篇文章)。直白的說就是：「馬格德林人被滅絕」。即使在15,000年前，「吃屍首」應該算是一種比較「落後」的文化，她/他們被「滅絕」在當時大概是理所當然。
此外，我想「吃屍首」應該也是一種「不健康」的行為；即使死者不是病死的，但當時處理屍首的過程未必符合「衛生標準」，這也可能是導致馬格德林人被「滅絕」的因素之一。
本文於 修改第 2 次
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人類何時開始喪葬 -- Patrick Pester
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When did humans start burying their dead?
Patrick Pester, (lifes-little-mysteries), 10/24/23
Ancient caves mark the beginning of recorded burial rituals, but there's still so much we don't know about the history of human graves.
Many cultures around the world choose to honor deceased loved ones through burial. The ceremonies that accompany this ritual are steeped in history and tradition and can vary from culture to culture. But when was the first human burial?
There's no definitive answer because not all burial sites are preserved, let alone discovered and studied. But the earliest evidence so far points to the Middle Paleolithic (around 300,000 to 30,000 years ago).
"By at least 120,000 years ago we have what we believe are deliberately buried human bodies," Mary Stiner, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, told Live Science.
Stiner doesn't rule out the potential for older burials to exist but said the most convincing early examples for modern humans (Homo sapiens) burying their dead come from the Middle Paleolithic. Some controversial research has suggested that extinct human relatives buried their dead around 300,000 years ago in what is now South Africa, but this is disputed in the scientific community.
The earliest known anatomically modern human burials from 120,000 years ago are in caves such as Qafzeh Cave in what is now Israel. There's also evidence of Neanderthal burials in the same caves dating to 115,000 years ago, according to The Australian Museum. Stiner noted that people used caves a lot during the Middle Paleolithic — living, eating and socializing in them.
Researchers like Stiner are confident that these early cave burials were a deliberate human act — not an act of nature like a cave collapse — because the bones are positioned in death postures such as the fetal position, together with human objects, and in some cases it's evident that older deposits of sediment were disturbed for a burial to take place.
"Someone has actually dug a hole and then infilled it with a jumble of cultural material," Stiner said. "We also find that these kinds of phenomena occur in clusters quite often in caves, so people were thinking, 'Okay, we're going to do this again with another body.'"
The origins of burial are not fully understood, but ancient humans would have had plenty of reasons to dispose of their dead both inside and outside of caves. Humans and many other animals have an "inherent aversion" to decay, Trish Biers, curator of the Duckworth Laboratory in the Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science.
"When you have death and decay, you know that something's wrong, and it's actually a really unpleasant process" to witness, Biers said.
Humans would have needed a way to deal with corpses as they decomposed, started to smell and exposed the living to flies, pathogens and scavengers. Initially, burials or other forms of body disposal may have dealt only with these practical aspects of death, becoming more sophisticated later on.
The move toward increasingly complex burials wasn't necessarily linear. A study published in "The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Death and Burial" (Oxford University Press, 2013) found that elaborate burials in Eurasia came and went in the Upper Paleolithic (45,000 to 10,000 years ago), and burials were mostly pretty plain, containing objects used in daily life.
The authors of the Eurasian study also wrote that it was difficult to draw firm conclusions about the nature and meaning behind Upper Paleolithic burials because relatively few have been found. Furthermore, ancient burials varied by region.
According to Biers, the way people buried their dead would have depended on a range of factors, including the environment and what materials people had available. Cremation burials didn't occur until much later, with the oldest one on record, known as Mungo Lady, dating to about 40,000 years ago in Australia.
"That's one of the things I love most about teaching on death and researching death practices is that they're so highly variable," she said.
Patrick Pester, Live Science Contributor
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吃屍葬 -- Josh Davis
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Oldest evidence of human cannibalism as a funerary practice
Josh Davis, Natural History Museum, 10/04/23
The remains of human bones with cutmarks, breaks and human chewing marks found across northern Europe show that some human groups living around 15,000 years ago were eating their dead not out of necessity, but as part of their culture.
While in the modern day most people will either bury or cremate their dead, some of our ancestors did things a little differently.
Gough’s Cave is a well-known palaeolithic site in south-eastern England. Nestled in the Cheddar Gorge, the cave is perhaps best known for the discovery of 15,000 years old human skulls shaped into what are believed to have been cups and bones that had been gnawed by other humans.
But were the people living in Gough’s Cave a gruesome outlier, or where they actually part of a wider cannibalistic culture of northern Europe? A new paper now suggests that they were not alone. Human remains dating to the same time period from across northern and western Europe and attributed to the same culture, known as the Magdalenian, also show evidence that they were cannibalised. This suggests that the eating of the dead was a shared behaviour during the late Upper Palaeolithic.
Dr Silvia Bello is an expert on the evolution of human behaviour working at the Natural History Museum and was part of this latest study published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
‘Instead of burying their dead, these people were eating them,’ explains Silvia. ‘We interpret the evidence that cannibalism was practiced on multiple occasions across north-western Europe over a short period of time, as this practice was part of a diffuse funerary behaviour among Magdalenian groups.’
‘That in itself is interesting, because it is the oldest evidence of cannibalism as a funerary practice.’
This cannibalistic behaviour was seemingly fairly common amongst Magdalenian people of north-western Europe, but it didn’t last particularly long. There was a shift towards people burying their dead, a behaviour seen widely across south central Europe and attributed to a second distinct culture, known as the Epigravettian.
This then raises the question of whether the eventual relative ubiquity of burial culture towards the end of the Palaeolithic was the result of Magdalenian people adopting primary burial as a funerary behaviour, or if their population was replaced.
Cannibalism as funerary behaviour
During the late Upper Palaeolithic, between around 23,000 and 14,000 years ago, there were two dominate cultures in western Europe, largely distinguished by the stone and bone tools they crafted.
The Epigravettian culture was mainly found living in south and eastern Europe, and buried their dead with graves goods in a way that we would perhaps consider more usual by modern standards. The Magdalenian culture from the north-west of Europe, however, were doing things differently. They were processing the bodies of their dead, removing the flesh from the corpse, eating it, and in some cases modifying the remaining bones to create new objects.
One of the main questions was whether or not this cannibalism was driven by necessity, when perhaps food was scarce or the winter long and so the people responsible were in survival mode, or whether it was a cultural behaviour.
Evidence from Gough’s Cave already suggests that the eating of the bodies there was of a more ritualistic form. This is because there is ample evidence that the people responsible were hunting and eating lots of other animals, such as deer and horses, while the careful preparation of some of the human remains like the skull cup and an engraved bone show that some thought was being put into the cannibalism.
Dr William Marsh is a researcher at the Natural History Museum who has been studying the human remains that have been found in Gough’s Cave for his PhD.
‘To contextualise Gough’s Cave better, I reviewed of all the archaeological sites attributed to the Magdalenian and Epigravettian Upper Palaeolithic culture,’ explains William. He was able to find 59 sites across Europe from this time which had human remains, of which 13 showed evidence of cannibalism, 10 of burial and two that showed combined evidence of burial and cannibalism. What he realised was that the practice of eating the dead was fairly localised, being found at sites across western and central Europe and up into the UK.
‘The fact that we find cannibalism being practiced often on multiple occasions in over a short period of time, in a fairly localised area and solely by individuals attributed to the Magdalenian culture, means we believe this behaviour was one that was performed widely by the Magdalenian, and was therefore a funerary behaviour in itself,’ says William.
In this context, the eating of the dead can be seen as different in practice, but perhaps not meaning, to cremations, burials or mummification.
Changing funerary practices
Building on this, William and Silvia were then able to look at whether any genetic analysis had been done on the human remains from these sites. This would enable the researchers to see if there were any links between who was practicing which funerary behaviours.
Remarkably, the genetic evidence seems to suggest that the two groups practicing different funerary behaviours were genetically distinct populations. All the sites from which evidence of cannibalism has been found show that the people were part of a genetic group known as ‘GoyetQ2’, while all of the more ordinary burials were of people who belonged to the ‘Villabruna’ genetic group.
While both groups were living in Europe at the same time, individuals showing GoyetQ2 ancestry are associated with the region spanning the French-Spanish border, whilst Villabruna ancestry was carried by individuals who inhabited the Italian-Balkan region. This implies that when the practice of eating the dead ended and more conventional burials became common place in north-western Europe, it wasn’t through a spreading of ideas but rather Epigravettian people replacing the Magdalenian.
‘At this time, during the terminal period of the Palaeolithic, you actually see a turnover in both genetic ancestry and funerary behaviour,’ explains William. ‘The Magdalenian associated ancestry and funerary behaviour is replaced by Epigravettian associated ancestry and funerary behaviour, indicative of population replacement as Epigravettian groups migrated into north-western Europe.’
‘We believe that rather than being an example of transcultural diffusion, the change in funerary behaviour identified is an example of demic diffusion where essentially one population comes in and replaces the other population.’
Interestingly, this mirrors how researchers believe farming arrived in the UK some 6,000 years later.
Questions still remain about the funerary practices of these ancient humans. For example, William and his colleagues are now trying to can figure out whether these cannibalised humans were related to one another, or whether they were eating people from outside their immediate groups.
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