Ancestors

In biology, that tendency to overemphasise the role of causal factors over chance can lead to ‘hyperadaptionism’, where every facet of the structure and function of an organism is interpreted as an adaptation with a particular function that has been evolutionarily selected for. We know this is foolish, as we have plenty of examples of whole suites

Even if we don’t know what past people were thinking when they performed funerary rites, the practices themselves speak of some sort of symbolic thinking – some sort of appreciation of the difference between being alive and being dead, the meaning of loss, the importance of ritual.

And yet, for the Victorian tourists, Gough’s Cave was ticking a lot of boxes. With its walkways, impressive displays (if not all home-grown) of stalactites and stalagmites, and aesthetically pleasing fake pools, it was starting to out-compete the neighbouring show-cave, run by Gough’s cousins – the Cox brothers. The rivalry between the cousins spil

In the Mesolithic, we find traces of more permanent – or at least, less ephemeral – buildings in the landscape. This is the point in time where we find evidence of what may reasonably be called Britain’s first houses – robust huts or tipi-like structures that were permanent in the landscape and used over several generations – where, previously, peo

on the casket is a roundel depicting a Bronze Age urn, a mace-head and a skull; a sword buried underground; a pick and theodolite – archaeological finds and tools. ‘This must be Pitt Rivers.’

There was still huge popular opposition to cremation up to the First World War. The war and the dreaded flu outbreak that followed may have been instrumental in forcing a more pragmatic approach to the disposal of dead bodies. In 1944, William Temple became the first Archbishop of Canterbury to be cremated, signalling an acceptance of the method by

And then there is burial. A ritual which seems to encapsulate a familiar concept of life and death, the need to mark an ending, to achieve closure by folding the dead into the bosom of the earth. Other funerary rituals speak similarly of that acknowledgement and marking of a life that has ended. Fire sends the cremated body up in smoke, becoming pa

The archaeological record of the Neolithic in Scandinavia is similar to that in Britain: farming arrives some 6,000 years ago, and then there’s at least a millennium where farming communities and hunter-gatherer groups are co-existing in the broad landscape. Pontus and his colleagues managed to extract and sequence DNA from four individuals who had

But the numbers and proportions of bones found in the tombs suggest that some purposeful movement of certain elements was going on. And some arrangements seem very deliberate – such as the finger bones stuck into the nasal aperture of the skull from Belas Knap in Wiltshire, or the careful arrangement of skulls around the edge of a chamber at Lanhil