This message was self-deleted by its author

[whatthehey]

41. Cannibalism? I love dogs, but they are not human and, Korea aside, not food

Now social mores are in play yes, but that's just sticking a nicer label on "ooh icky".

I'm genuinely curious about why burial rituals and "respect" for the dead up to and including worship became such a nigh-universal human norm over the last 35,000 years or so. On the surface it's easy to say "religion says humans are special", but that begs the question why worms eating our bodies is more religiously...well, kosher than dogs eating us. The Parsis seem ok with wild animals of course, but few people seem ok with pets and it's not like there are billions of Parsis.

To me feeding human bodies to animals which are directly useful to us makes more selective sense than feeding them to worms, and there aren't too many domesticated carnivores/omnivores. Feeding us to pigs we later eat might potentially risk some prion issues but even if plausible now, that would have been hard to work out in prehistoric times unless they had some seriously imaginative trials established.

There must be some reason for why such things arose. It may IMO have been a result of becoming gregarious in both larger and more static groups. While civilization started millennia after burial rituals, human population was already becoming more concentrated, not because of population pressure but because of selection of better feeding/hunting areas and the better success of larger groupings. What that meant is that more people in your "in-group" not only died per se, but died in areas where you were going to be hanging around for a while. Since, while there is no way to know, it seems reasonable that human brain power was developed enough to understand kinship with ingroup members, it was probably distasteful to see your brother/friend/"neighbor" putrefying and being fought over by animals. The ways to get rid of them more neatly and quickly were going to devolve pretty quickly to burying, burning or disposal in moving/deep water. Obviously speculative, but given the timing it seems to make some sense to me at any rate.