Evolutionary thanatology

Abstract

Societies, including those of humans, have evolved multiple ways of dealing with death across changing circumstances and pressures. Despite many studies focusing on specialized topics, for example necrophoresis in eusocial insects, mortuary activities in early human societies, or grief and mourning in bereavement, there has been little attempt to consider these disparate research endeavours from a broader evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary thanatology does this by adopting an explicit evolutionary stance for studies of death and dying within the sociological, psychological and biological disciplines. The collection of papers in this themed issue demonstrates the value of this approach by describing what is known about how various nonhuman species detect and respond to death in conspecifics, how problems of disposing of the dead have evolved in human societies across evolutionary time and also within much shorter time frames, how human adults' understanding of death develops, and how it is ultimately reflected in death-related language. The psychological significance and impact of death is clearly seen in some species' grief-like reactions to the loss of attachment figures, and perhaps uniquely in humans, the existence of certain psychological processes that may lead to suicide. Several research questions are proposed as starting points for building a more comprehensive picture of the ontogeny and phylogeny of how organisms deal with death.This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary thanatology: impacts of the dead on the living in humans and other animals'.

Death recognition by undertaker bees

“…Recognition of death is an important behaviour of being social. In social groups, detection of death and rapid removal of corpses is essential in order to defend the colony against pathogen transmission (1–4). Humans use the cessation of heartbeats and breathing or cooling body temperature to diagnose death.…”

Baboon thanatology: responses of filial and non-filial group members to infants' corpses

“…We discuss the implications of these reports for current questions in the field. thanatology aims to understand whether and how animals' responses to and understanding of death differ from humans' responses [1][2][3]. Little empirical research has addressed how animals respond to death.…”

Primate thanatology and hominoid mortuary archeology

“…In recent years, considerable advances have been made in our understanding of the behavior of an increasing number of nonhuman taxa towards dead conspecifics. In primatology, early accounts were largely anecdotal or second-hand with little verification, but researchers have come to realize the value of recording activities around and involving corpses, and as a result the field of primate thanatology is gaining both in momentum and credibility (Anderson 2011;Anderson et al 2018;Gonçalves and Carvalho 2019). In evolutionary archaeology, while research is limited to the vagaries of archeological preservation, interest is finally turning away from old dichotomies that saw human groups that 'buried their dead' as 'cognitively modern' (whatever that is) and those that apparently did not as somehow less sophisticated, towards a more nuanced approach that recognizes that burial was relatively rare until the Late Pleistocene and that there are many ways to deal with corpses (Pettitt 2011(Pettitt , 2018.…”

“…Recently, we attempted to define shared goals for an evolutionary thanatology that would encompass as inclusive a sample of animal taxa as possible, while also including modern, exclusively human sociological studies on topics such as the mortuary commemoration by humans of inorganic objects such as robots (Anderson et al 2018). The breadth of scope of evolutionary thanatology is exemplified by a recently published themed issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, which included papers focusing on corpse management in eusocial insects, responses of corvids to dead conspecifics, responses to dead infants in cetaceans and primates, burials in early humans, children's developing understanding of death, human language and mental representations of death, suicide, whether the dead have moral standing, bereavement and grief, and recent cultural transformations in human funerary practices (see Anderson et al 2018 and accompanying articles).…”