ABSTRACT
The Palaeolithic archaeological record is a unique database for the understanding of how distinctly human forms of mortuary and funerary activity evolved over the long term, and how these may have been underpinned by cognitive evolution among the homininae. The earliest archaeological manifestation of treatment of the dead is present only in the Middle Pleistocene, if one can convincingly conclude that the dead were being cached in caves and fissures by some archaic Homo populations. We are only on firm ground with the appearance of formal burials from ~100,000 years ago by some Homo (sapiens) neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens groups in Eurasia. Prior to this, we are dependent on using observations from modern zoological (including primatological) and anthropological studies to make inferences about what pre-Palaeolithic hominins may have been doing with their dead. In this chapter I outline a long-term evolution of hominoid and hominin mortuary behavior, organized into several phases derived from increasingly complex cognitive structures.
