Why Humans Started Burying Their Dead

Somewhere right now, someone is keeping a dead person's phone charged. Not because they'll ever call — because deleting the number feels like a second death. That exact feeling is the oldest human feeling we can still dig out of the ground.

Long before farming, before writing, before a single city, someone knelt in the dirt and did something no animal on Earth needed to do. They buried their dead. In this video you'll meet Mtoto, a toddler laid to rest on the coast of Kenya almost 80,000 years ago with their head on something soft. You'll meet a Neanderthal buried on purpose in a French cave, the famous "flower burial" that turned out to be a lie, and the small-brained cousin whose graves scientists are still fighting over right now. And you'll see why the useless, tender things you do for people who can't repay you — the voicemail you'll never play, the sweater you can't give away — are the same act as a grave dug by hand 80,000 years ago.

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Chapters:
00:00 The phone you can't delete
01:14 An 80,000-year-old grave in Kenya
02:35 A Neanderthal, buried on purpose
03:42 The flower burial that wasn't
04:32 The bones no one can explain
05:47 Why so many of the oldest graves are children
06:22 What a grave actually is
06:53 The useless things you still do


#ancienthumans #humanevolution #psychology #prehistory #grief