If you found this interesting, then consider subscribing. Lots more videos on the stone age to come! I'm always trying to improve my videos and I only use academic sources. kzfaq.info/love/Z9jWH_8tJ-Nmaj8dSQdEYA?

You would think the practice of carrying your dead child around even when it's rotting would end pretty quickly if disease was a factor. Yikes.

You look like you always have some secret joke only you know. It's pretty endearing tbqh, good videos thanks

The cause of death could have a strong effect on how bodies were disposed of. Maybe they ate their dead opponents but handled their own dead differently?

I've worked in Search and Rescue, that includes body recovery, after several floods. I promise you that it is perfectly natural for groups of bodies to settle together. They usually orient themselves just as these individuals found as the waters retract and the pool dries. This looks very familiar to me.

Can’t wait for this dude to blow up

Another possibility for the antecessor site is that they were preyed upon by another hominid.

I'm glad project Odysseus helped me find your channel you do good work

Super interesting stuff about the chimpanzees! Had no idea. Great vid!

I think you may well be correct. You apply the most logical solutions to illogical problems. I saw the cave of the bones and have collected tools from early hominids since the 1980s. I do confess that I am more of a historian of the Medieval world than an anthropologist. Still, I fed my mind by sitting in on lectures from Dr. Spencer while he was at UT and shared my own pictures of myself with SAN people. I was too young and dumb to realize how hugely important they would become twenty years later with the Genome Project. I like your videos very much and if I could ask you one question, it would be this: How come we have so many images of the different kinds of hominids and scarcely any of extinct primates? What did the first Orang look like? What about the mountain gorilla? Where are their ancestors? Am I missing something?

"I don't know who will find this video interesting but I certainly do" I think this is the key to great youtube channels like this. Just cracking on with whatever you find interesting in the hope that others out there will also be into it. I've only recently found this channel but I'm mega into it.

when humans draw lines and then start shouting at each other, it is very reminiscent of two opposing troops of chimps are hooting and screaming at each other xD

I'll be 64 in July, and hominid evolution, and pre-history generally, have fascinated me ever since my older sister bought me my first dinosaur book for Christmas in 1965. I love your videos, Stefan. I find them both intetesting and quite relaxing! Weighing up a combination of archaeological; paleontological; genetic, current human behavioural; and current ape behavioural evidence; is both fiendishly tricky, and wonderfully enjoyable and fulfilling, all at the same time. Love it. Keep the videos coming Stefan, and thanks so much! Nigel, Scotland

That subscriber count is creeping up mate. Nice work.

Love your narrative style Stefano. It is so smooth and has a soothing quality. Damn good videos.. it's difficult to point out my favourite one..because i like them all !!

Even elephants are into this stuff. Sure dolphins and whales as well. I enjoyed this video. Thanks.

Amazing ending to the video. What an awesome channel Stefan!

Wonderful channel. Thx and keep up the good work.

Love your videos, man!

You sir are a treasure good sir! Always loving your work both new and old!

Wonderful video! So informative!

Love your insight .......I really enjoy learning from your knowledge

@6:00 unmodified bones, but a flash flood. From deduction, they must have strongest bones around or a flash flood didn't do that.

Dude nice! Another video. Love the content bro!

This is absolutely fascinating. I've been watching a few of your videos on and off over the past few weeks, and I'm careful who I subscribe to, because I don't want to unsubscribe later if the rest of the channel doesn't jive (shout out to Survive the Jive) but damn, bro, every video you do is so well-constructed and easy to watch and listen to. No harsh jump cuts, no blaring sound effects, just respectful educated delivery of academic considerations in the field. You earned yourself a permanent subscriber, man. Also, the video you did about spears where you stabbed the squirrel toy, that was funny lmao. Keep this up, dude, this slow and steady thing is how you earn forever fans.

I totally love the videos of Stefan Milosavljevich. So informative and thought provoking.

Great video on an underdiscussed topic. Subscribed!

I'd love to see a video where you take on the new findings of homo naledi, which is pretty compelling evidence for hominoid burials I think

Milo, really like the way you present this information, so incisive, with the need to ask more questions, that's what science is all about.

You're Uni experience studying history sounds similar to mine. 11 years later and a Masters degree down Im training yo be a History/Humanities teacher in Secondary. Keep up the good work dude, I've been recommending your videos to students across all Humanities subjects (yesterday your Shanidar I case to someone in an R.E lesson on eutenasia when talking about care and compassion

Hvala drugar sto se bavis ovako zanimljivim temama. Pozdrav iz Srbije :)

Only just managed to catch up with this one. Excellent, as usual.

This video brought some interesting thought in my mind. We discovered a lots fossil of the species's between us homo sapiens and the last common ancestors of Chimps and us. But what about the species leading to Chimps? Can the study of our own evolution ever be complete without a complementary study of Chimp evolution?

This is one of the most interesting videos you have ever done.

Dobar video, Stefane!

Thanks for all the great vids!

Best KZfaq site ever! Thanks for all your research. Have you watched any of Dr. Barnharts, Great Courses series? Really good stuff on ancient North America. Also I had no idea Dave Mathews was so interested in human evolution?

This is wonderful stuff! As a writer and an amateur psychologist, I'm extremely interested in the reasons things are done, whether by humans or non-humans. This explores a middle ground that I rarely see.

Your thuroughly rational presentation considering multiple possibilities without leaning bias is scientific and easy to listen to. Leading the topic with the chimpanzee behavioral model is so appropriate. Thank for your good work.

Very interested!! Can't wait to see more.

Great topic. Subscribed.

V informative & clearly narrated.

Stefan, have you heard of the Red Lady of Paviland? Fascinating if you fancy a look.

Final example suggests some sort of convergence between latrine habit and burial habit. Smell perhaps? A cave site concentrates the smell during decomposition, but otherwise restricts it from spreading in every direction per winds.

Great video !

So what happened after apes spend hours with the corps? did they just leave the corpse, where it was dropped or did they perform some sort of covering the corps?

That was fascinating!

Stefan, I just recently 'discovered' your little lectures ans I adore them (well, most of it). Now I would like so much to hear from you what might possibly the reason behind all these Naledi's found together behind a very tiny entrance in the back of a cave in Sterkfontein (SA)? And, a second question, has it ever occured to scientists that hominids feeling their time was up did go look for a quiet spot, as cats and other mammals so often do...?

If the flies were so bothersome to the chimpanzees that they would continue to swat them away would it be safe to say the act of burial of the dead in a more advanced early primate hint at some empathy for the deceased to keep the pests off their friend?

No mention of rising star cave in South Africa, a very interesting mystery. Loved the video. I hope you continue to make videos like this.

Fascinating stuff.

Hadar. Possible lighting strike?

So I watched this way later than I wanted :( BUT the wait will have been worth it tbh awesome work, thanks!

On a tangentially relate topic, I've actually been wondering lately - what did ancient and medieval people think of rotting corpses? Surely seeing a lively person turn into a decaying corpse must have been quite shocking - how did they rationalise this?

Just stumbled across your channel, absolutely love it! So fucking interesting!! Keep it up bro

Carry on,please! This stuff is great! A superduper wish? A specialmilo on sapiens,neanderthal,heidelbergensis roots! Cheers🙂 Bra gjort! Alltid intressant!

I have been delving into your vids since KZfaq popped it in my itinerary . Fantastic way to deliver various hypothesis. You do not overcomplicate things so much to the point of overload... and you are willing to say "I don't know" instead of trying to convince anyone of your particular premise. Rather refreshing.... thank you very much. I expect to learn a lot. Have a great week and please.. may you and yours remain Covid 19 free.

for some reason your video gave me a appetite.

It would be cool if you created a video on modern and historical burial practices as a sort of overview of the way humans in particular have been known to mourn their dead. This could be appropriate given the pandemic we're dealing with and how often our society has had to grapple with the grief of death in recent years. You could make parallels to evidence from our hominin ancestors throughout, stuff like that. It would be a really great video and a way to diversify your topics to include contemporary society!

Great combination of intelligence and humour. Brilliant channel.

I have given most of my pet dogs 'surface burials'. I had fifty dogs over time and don't recall burying any in the ground, although three I enclosed in sand-filled stone mounds.

I believe the position in which tho bodies were found would be key to tell the ritual from the accidental accumulation of corpses!

i really love your videos

I wish there was more content like this

I got excited at 10:30 when you said “too rap this video...” not what i was hoping

The ufo guy! You crack me up!

Excellent, thank you! Your cemetery comment was hilarious 😁.

Very cool video on early hominids and the dead, it makes sense at the first site that the bodies were left deliberately, that alone is fascinating and 7m2 is not that big space. I would have thought the predator would have spread the bodies about in a bigger space. Hills certainly can be boggy, been on a few, but like you, I'm doubtful on the bog theory. Cut marks on bones of the early hominids are always very interesting thought and subject. Enjoyed this and strangely was the 2nd video in a row I've seen someone with a hot flask, hope it was coffee? Nice to see this channel growing and keep up the great work Stefan...

Could you tell me the source of the study on the deceased chimp? I tried to find it but couldn't. Thanks.

Real clear evidence of the presence of early deliberate rituals involving the dead. Nice shout out to your prof!

I find it interesting. I do wonder why antessor isnt classified as Heidburgensis. Were they that morphologically different?

Coming from a Campbellian point of view, I think that hunting rituals and death rituals grew up in relation to each other. This was a very interesting video.

In sima de los uesos, a handaxe or biface has been found that has never served for anything and was apparently made to be disposed in the burials...

I’m not sure if it was intended, but I liked the what happened at site 13 reference.

If I remember correctly, there is a tribe that cuts the meat off the bones of their dead and bury both. I far as I remember they did dig the bones up and cleaned them 10 years afterwards before reburying them again...

Thanks!

Hmmmmm. I been watching a few of your vids Stefan during this 2020 year of the COVID. Interesting stuff. I always like early history. Didn't know your surname was so long. I seen your attempts at pronouncing hungarian place names, how do you go at pronouncing your own surname, it looks slavic in origin. Any way ciao for now.

You should find the work done on Homo Naledi very interesting!

As for the Sima de los Huesos case, what about the possibility that the bodies wound up there as not the result of paleolithic foul play but of an earthquake, instead?

One question I have, which I am sure people have tried to answer, is whether animals realize death is permanent and irreversible. For example, a friend of mine has a basset hound and had a cat who recently passed away. She found the cat half in and half out of a little cubbyhole, with the basset hound lying next to the body, seemingly guarding it. Over the next few days, the hound would return to the cubbyhole and bark. To me this sounds as though the dog is trying to draw my friends attention to the fact that the cat (with which he had been on good terms and had known for a decade) was missing, in the expectation that she could somehow make everything right again.

Very interesting.

The tables have turned. Now I'm hitting the bongs and you're the lecturer.

Lol I love it how you say your profs didn’t remember you. None of mine did I’m sure besides the handful I had to desperately accost for help to not flunk out of college.

Could these groups of dead hominins be a result of war? A kind of micro-genocide and mass grave(without the digging). Two clans meet and fight it out, the losing group gets gathered in a group and systematically slaughtered. Personally I feel it could be some kind of early cemetery, but, then why would they eat them at that one site...

Using the word “know” is quite a tricky way to describe it, let alone saying that they “understand” something and using it for death is a wild stretch. Even for humans we have a certain difficulty to describe what really means "to know" something (we have our approximation under Positivism, but it also has its limits). Chimps don’t handle concepts (not in the way we do as to use such terms); they may FEEL something is wrong, unusual, strange, that something demands the attention of the group or at least those whose hierarchy puts them into a position of intervention. But they do not know what death means, only that a member of the group has stopped behaving in recognizable way and are trying to comfort it (and stopping younger members from troubling it) but they don’t have more emotions than the direct one related to immediate events. They don’t understand death neither conceptually nor temporarily. This also explain why sometimes they drag corpses (especially if they are of infants) as if they were simply sleep and unable to respond, their animal social bonds to the subject that now is merely a corpse doesn’t stop existing, internally in them, there is little to no translation into “knowing” or “understanding” but their reaction change because: the member stop behaving how it is expected from it after while, it doesn’t give the signs that calls for empathy or help from the group either, it doesn’t even try to follow the group, it begins to give offensive signs (rotten smell) that usually is only overlooked when the bond is too strong (infants upon dead mother, or mothers upon dead offspring). The group stop caring an forgets the not reacting member but they don’t understand its death (some infants even die while attached to their dead mothers but this is more understandable).

The cache makes perfect sense... if hominids haven't figured out burial yet, dropping the bodies in a pit used for nothing else protects the bodies from large predators (don't want to attract cave lions), isolates the stink-putrefaction-flies-maggots, and the containment would allow individuals to visit and "pay their respects" if that was a thing then. There are probably a lot of other great reasons for doing the cache not occurring to me at the moment.

Homo Naledi? Given where the bones were found deliberate burial has to be a possible explanation

Ants are known to carry their dead away from the nest to a designated “graveyard,” even taking time to find the right spot for the deceased. Perhaps early hominids did something similar, carefully finding a spot away from wherever they were camping to place their dead.

I wonder if these cave burials may also be distantly remembered in the early myths about the underworld being the land of the dead. Like styx and all that jazz.

What about war between groups or other hominid species?

Another theory is lightning that could knock down a group of individuals so closely organized

Milo, you're the best at getting to the crux of the matter.

I found it interesting thank u

Interesting question. Is there just one definition for "ritualistic" behavior? Does the behavior have to involve a deity or some spiritual dynamic, or simply a repeated behavior implying emotional social bonding that occurred with a combined sense of loss and mourning? Sounds to me like arranging bodies would be a sign of mourning, but I'm not sure I'd call it a ritual.

how do you edit?

so good

Upvote for including sources

The "elephant graveyard" of legend is, alas, just a legend, but they show somewhat similar behavior with their dead.

Yeah, nothing against the video, but I didnt want to know any of this. Now I'm just creeped out by our cousins haha But for real Stefan, great video. Your subjects are always unique and interesting, although I can start seeing a type ;)

is this guy That High, Every Video? or only in the ones i've seen. i dig it, but, a little subtlety might be in order?