Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane

‘To be human means above all to bury,’ declares Robert Pogue Harrison in his study of burial practices, The Dominion of the Dead, boldly drawing on Vico’s suggestion that humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando, meaning ‘burying, burial’, itself from humus, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘soil’. We are, certainly, a burying species as well as a building species – and our predecessors were buriers too. In a cave system called Rising Star in the limestone of South Africa a team of palaeoarchaeologists led by six women has discovered fossilized bone fragments thought to belong to a previously unknown early human relative, a species now named as Homo naledi. The disposition of this dark matter in two deep-set chambers suggests, remarkably, that Homo naledi was already interring its dead underground some 300,000 years ago. In burial, the human body becomes a component of the earth, returned as dust to dust – inhumed, restored to humility, rendered humble. Just as the living need places to inhabit, so it is often in the nature of our memory-making to wish to be able to address our dead at particular sites on the Earth’s surface. The burial chamber, the gravestone, the hillside on which ashes have been scattered, the cairn: these are places to which the living can return and where loss might be laid to rest. The grief of those who have been unable to locate the bodies of their loved ones can be especially corrosive – acid and unhealing. We give bodies and their residues to t...