Altruism and Burial Practices

It often puzzles me to think of all the time and resources put into burials. Why? It may seem like a waste to the outsider, however burial rituals and grave goods are obviously a large part of the many layers of the past. 
Altruism is a fascinating topic to me, so I wanted to make this final post about care and compassion. How does this tie into anthropology? Well let me tell you... 
My main question is what is the payoff of putting energetic, economic and material investment in the dead and dying? You would think that this method of use of resources would put a population at a disadvantage, thereby limiting their reproduction. If this is true, eventually those cultures with the most lavish burials would not be reproducing frequently or passing on their genes. It's a bit of a leap, but it could be argued that natural selection should select against groups who invest in their dead and dying. So why hasn't it? Humans have unarguably evolved the skills and behaviour to care for the dying, and invest time and energy in the dead. Where did this originate from? Is it solely human? I believe that the root of burial practices must have come from engrained altruistic tendencies, and I am certain that it is not only humans who behave altruistically.
Let's start with Neanderthals. The remains of an old, decrepit male Neanderthal were found at La Chapelle-aux-Saints. The assumption is that even though he was no longer useful to society, this man lived to quite a ripe age. Presumably, he did this by being cared for. 

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Chimpanzees have been known to handle death in a startlingly human way. After the death of their infants, many mothers will carry around the dead body of their child. This is quite amazing, I think, because it doesn't make perfect evolutionary sense. What advantage would this provide? The only thing that I can think of is that it shows a strong connection to the offspring and an intrinsic sense of motherhood, both which would be advantageous in an evolutionary sense. For some heartbreaking but truly astonishing videos, visit this website. 

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Additionally, many types of squirrels, for example, display altruism. This ultimately contributes to their fitness, increasing it and thus allowing them to pass on altruistic genes. Many, many other animals show altruism within their social groups.

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So what is my point? My point is that, as seen in many vertebrate species, altruism exists in humans as  and may be a powerful force helping to drive evolution. I would like to argue that compassion is innate. Acting altruistically must be beneficial, because it has been selected for. 

I think that altruism is at the base of burial practices and the use of grave goods. Because so many diverse human cultures expend resources into burials, I would argue that burial practices and grave goods increase fitness. Perhaps the treatment of the dead promotes peace or community bonding, which reduces conflict therefore increasing fitness. It's a bit of a wild guess, but I think there could be some real truth to it!

Grave Goods. Source

Problems, problems and more problems...

After our class today concerning repatriation of the remains of indigenous people, I was left with food for thought. Having only recently switch my major from Biology to Anthropology, I have noticed a definite different in tone between classes in these two categories. In my anthropology classes, I find that we often talk about "problems" - like the social constraints of repatriation, or human behaviour surrounding HIV/AIDS, or genocide, or cultural differences, or lack of resource distribution, or corruptive government, or, or, or.....
Needless to say, there are many problems in our society today. I am sad to admit that these challenges lead me to hold a pessimistic attitude at times. In many of my Biology classes, we are taught "look what we've found!" instead of "listen to yet another problem with our society". The difference, I believe, comes down to one fact: humans are complicated. While studying us complicated creatures, many problems are unearthed, however discoveries and interpretations can be extremely exciting and influential.
While I may appear to be whining about anthropology, this is not a my intention. Humans and primates awe me on a daily basis, and I am proud to be studying them. With the wonderful diversity of human life comes a diversity of different types of problems. I am excited to be part of the team of people who discuss those problems and bring awareness to them, as well as attempting to tackle these problems with solutions. Cheers to anthropology and the anthropologists who attempt to make sense of us crazy creatures!

Humans can be awesome, am I right?! 

Pets in the Past

I believe that you can tell a lot about people from how they treat their pets. I was intrigued to look up pet burials, and I came across Archaeology Magazine's website, which caught my eye with some interesting pictures...

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What I learned from the website was that the Chiribaya people of Peru buried their pet dogs in graves right next to their owners. They even provided their dogs with grave goods of llama and fish bones to enjoy in their afterlife! What more could a dog want?

The first dog shown above is an estimated 1000 years old, while the second is an estimated 3000 years old. As you can see, the dogs are remarkably well preserved. This is due to the dry climate as well as the burial technique used (which, for some, involved being wrapped in a blanket). Likely used as herding dogs and as companions, these dogs made a mark on their owners and therefore on the archaeological record. Pretty heart-warming if you ask me. 

A Website Evaluation: The Sacrificial Ceremony

The website I chose to evaluate based on our group's rubric is the pbs NOVA website, and specifically an article called The Sacrificial Ceremony by Liesl Clark. This article explores child sacrifice in Incan culture... Check it out! Because it is an article and is short and our project will be in a magazine format and will be longer, it will be a little difficult to evaluate using the same rubric, but I'll give it a go...

A child who was sacrificed. No caption was given within the website about who this was and where he or she was found. 

Topic Choice - worth 15%

• Score: 15% - I thought this was a fascinating topic, and it relates well to the class and to our project.

Overall Appearance - worth 25%

• Score: 20% - In the context of the pbs website it looks quite nice, however it is not as creative as it could be.  It is organized and has good headings, and I enjoy the color change in the text. The inserted "quotes"provide some added interest and emphasis of child sacrifice. The pictures are great - there are only three of them but considering the size of the article, I felt like three good pictures mostly did it justice. I was taken aback by the pictures, to be honest, because they are a little creepy and sad. One downfall is that the first picture (shown above) has no information in the caption concerning how old that individual was and where they were found. The other two pictures had appropriate and informative captions, as shown below. 

Figurines similar to this one may have been added in with sacrificial victims in order to provide them with companionship after their death. 

Juanita, an 11-15 year old female found on Mount Ampato.

Content - worth 30%

• Score: 20% - The article contains valuable information while remaining approachable to the reader. However, it was kind of a short article and I felt that it skimmed over many topics. I would have liked to see more information. I really liked the introduction in the green text, but felt as though there was not much explanation of evidence in the body of the text. Additionally, there was no obvious conclusion. 

Quality of Sources - worth 10%

• Score: 0% or Not Applicable - No sources were cited (other than for the photos). This could be due to the fact that it is an article.... therefore I don't think it's fair to judge this category for this website. Let's go with N/A. 

Mechanics - 10%

• Score: 10% - Excellent sentence and paragraph structure. There are no spelling mistakes and the article is easy to read. 

Cooperative Work - 10%

• Score: Not applicable to this article, seeing as how only one person wrote it!

I feel as though it's most fair not to count the Quality of Sources and Cooperative Work sections of the rubric. Therefore, this website article would score 65/80, giving it an overall score of 81%.

Here are a couple questions that this article brought up for me... Any comments would be great!

How do you feel about the display of these pictures? Do you think there should be some sort of warning to give readers a heads up? 

Beautiful Grave Goods...

I find it fascinating that many of us enjoy decorating ourselves with pieces of clothing and jewelry that we feel represent us. It is only natural, then, that I am interested in the elaborate jewelry found in graves. So much of this jewelry is elaborate and, as we discussed in class, it is hard to imagine how it was possible to make it. Such fine detail... so many valuable stones... how did they do it?! Anyways, here is a photo I came across of said beautiful jewelry. This particular collection is from the Arslev grave in Denmark. The website where I found this picture didn't say much about the site, however I still wanted to post it because they are just too pretty!

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