Archaeology Lunchtime Talk: Evolution of Human Mortuary Activity

About

A talk on The Evolution of Human Mortuary Activity from Ape to Upper Palaeolithic with Dr Paul Pettitt, Reader in Palaeolithic Archaeology, University of Sheffield.

One of the defining traits of Homo sapiens is the way we treat the dead, from exposure of the corpse to the elements to elaborate burials.However, little attention has been paid to how such mortuary activities evolved.

In this talk, Dr Pettitt will present a long-term model of such development, taking the treatment of the dead from the face-to-face activities of apes to the places of the genus Homo. Dr Pettitt began by using modern chimpanzees to learn what the earliest mortuary activity may have been like among Miocene apes. He then interrogated the Pliocene and Pleistocene archaeological record for its subsequent development among the australopithecines and early Homo, ending with the origin of burial 'as we know it' in the Upper Palaeolithic.