September 8th 1998, Tuesday
Yesterday, I learnt that the first graves ever-found date back 100.000 years from now. It was the Homo Sapiens who began burying the dead — only 300.000 years since the discovery of the fire. That's certainly a milestone in the history of human beings, but it's not an obvious one. I've tried to think about it.
What does burying implies? In short, it means that human beings have begun giving a sense to their lives, beyond the mere physical survival. I'm not interested here in the religious contents that can inform that meaning, because religion is quite an elaborate product that might have made its appearance only later in the history of mankind. Instead, I'd like to point out some previous, more basic motivations our ancestors felt that compelled them to spend their time and energy in such useless a practice as that of burying their fellow beings.
Perhaps it wasn't so useless. If they invested their physical energy in such things as digging, or making vases where keeping the ashes, or simply locating a suitable place to put the mortal remains in, it was because they had established a kind of mental energy that forced them to do so. In other words —for the first time maybe, human beings had developed an articulate thinking of the world, of them in the world, and had started ordering the chaos. By taking good care of the dead, they're giving them the status of fellow beings. They're significant because they belong to the same social group. You get rid of the animals, or simply leave them behind. You also leave your enemies' bodies in the battlefield. But you do take care of your people —the ones like you. Please note how important this sense of belonging will be for the ensuing evolution of the human race —it's in the base of social organization and social differentiation. Eventually, this sense of belonging will get narrow; smaller, emotionally-tighter groups like the family will emerge.
Furthermore, burial ceremonies help the group to fix itself historically, i.e., to understand its existence diachronically, in generational succession. By ritualizing the disposal of the deceased, the living enable their remembering them and the dead can take their place in the history of the group.
It took almost 6 million years to do that.
September 4th 1998, Tuesday
Apart from my own intellectual limitation, I left my studies of Mathematics because I feared the perspective of having to give up thinking, in the next five years, if I wanted to succeed.
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