primitive burial practices
Doug Mounce
"Ancient humans in South America used complex funeral rituals and manipulated the bodies of their dead as early as 10,000 years ago.
Mauricio de Paiva
"André Strauss at the University of Tübingen in Germany and his colleagues analysed bones from 26 human burials, discovered during 15 years of archaeological excavations in a cave in east-central Brazil (pictured). They found that the remains were treated before and during burial in a variety of ways, including defleshing and tooth removal. Bones dating to roughly 9,500 years ago showed signs of dismemberment and burning before being carefully arranged, suggesting a ceremonial burial. Similar practices were known in the Andes from this period but not in eastern South America.
"The authors say these ritualized burials may have been important in maintaining social cohesion in times of stress and conflict."
If they had known Rank's work then they might have looked for evidence related to, "the second burial custom discovered by Frobenius along with the Fanany burial in South Africa. This consisted in placing the dead king's body in an arti cially emptied hull's skin in such a manner that the appearance of life was achieved. ...This sewing-up of the dead in the animal skin has its mythical counterpart in the swallowing of the living by a dangerous animal,out of which he escapes by a miracle. Following an ancient microcosmic symbolism, Anaximander compared the mother's womb with the shark. This conception we meet later in its religious form as the Jonah myth, and it also appears in a cosmological adaptation in the whale myths collected in Oceania by Frobenius. Hence, also, the frequent suggestion that the seat of the soul after death (macrocosmic underworld) is in the belly of an animal (fish, dragon). The fact that in these traditions the animals are always those dangerous to man indicates that the animal womb is regarded not only as the scene of a potential rebirth but also as that of a dreaded mortality, and it is this which led to all the cosmic assimilations to the immortal stars. Thus we perceive a development of the belief in the soul, ranging from the denial of maternal origin (as a symbol of mortality) to the assumption of divine descent from the imperishable stars, with the king (or chief) at first as earthly representative thereof."
Or, was there any similarity to the the Klaatsch so-called "crouched graves"? Beyond the rational idea about generally maintaining social cohesion (how would that exactly work?), burial rituals can inform us about their thoughts of an afterlife, belief in the soul, and a relation between individual and society.