The funeral business of the future is definitely directed towards "green burials" and finding places for new cemeteries
For the last 300.000 years man burying your loved ones. One of the oldest discovered tombs is in the Atapuerca cave in Spain, where the remains of about thirty people were found in an excavated pit. Even for Neanderthals, burial was a common way of saying goodbye to loved ones, and for the last 40.000 years, people have been buried with various rituals.
The ancient Greeks buried their aristocracy in large tombs as early as the 14th century BC, and surrounded their bodies with gifts, jewelry, weapons, food, including dead horses and other animals. They used to have a "second burial", when they would bring the bodies of new deceased to the same tomb and change the arrangement of the bodies and gifts. Poor people were not like them buried in chamber-like tombs, but a single body was buried in a modest rough. The exception was the Athenians who were cremated and the remains were then kept in urns. As in many other cultures, in Ancient Greece women washed and perfumed the body, and a talisman or metal coin would be placed on the mouth of the dead to pay the ferryman who transported the souls to the next world.
It would be said that during the thirty centuries that have passed in the meantime, the customs have not changed much. Coffee cups, glasses of brandy, fruit or some other food can still be seen in cemeteries in Serbia.
We also witnessed the most diverse rituals and ways of burying or destroying the body. Sky burial among Tibetans involves placing the body on a large stone in the higher regions, so that the dead body is left to be torn to pieces by animals. In any case, the land in Tibet is too hard and rocky to dig a grave, and besides, the body is just a shell to the Tibetans and there is no point in keeping it.
In some cultures, they buried their dead in the sea, and this custom is not only still alive, but is practiced very often. In India, it is traditionally buried in the Ganges River, and in the United States, Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was buried at sea this year by spilling the ashes of his remains from a US Navy ship. The same happened with the remains of numerous artists such as Janis Joplin, Alfred Hitchcock and Steve McQueen, but also with the ashes of American President John Kennedy and Osama bin Laden, so that his grave would not become a "temple for terrorists".
However, it is not always about scattering the ashes. Sometimes the remains are mixed with concrete and poured into a block that remains forever at the bottom of the sea. Buddhists put the ashes together with a lighted candle on a wreath which then floats in the sea...
In the last fifteen years, a large number of people, hundreds of them, have been buried in a very unusual place - in space. The first person who fortunately managed to avoid such an end is the already mentioned Neil Armstrong. Namely, if the Apollo 11 mission had failed, the document "In case of an accident on the moon" would have been applied, which was prepared by the staff of the White House in the days before the landing of the lunar module on the moon. It describes the entire procedure in the event of such an accident, including the commemoration and the poignant eulogy that the US president would give, so it is considered the first official protocol for a space funeral.
The document stipulates that after an accident in which astronauts are killed, NASA will shut down communication with the module if it still exists at that time. Then the priest would hold a funeral, and he would consecrate the souls of the deceased to the "deepest of depths". The president would then telephone the widows, and then give a speech about the heroes of the Apollo mission that would end with the sentence: "And every human being, staring at the moon, will know that there in the darkness there is a corner of another world that will belong to mankind forever."
The only person actually buried on the moon is Eugene Shoemaker, an American geologist and astronomer. He died in 1997 on Earth in a car accident, but two years later part of his ashes were taken to the Moon by the Lunar Prospector probe.
A large number of people buried in space got there through the company Celestis from Houston, which places the ashes of the deceased in a special capsule and together with the capsules of other clients, launches them into orbit with a commercial rocket. They then, driven by the Earth's gravity, begin to endlessly circle the planet. For example, Eugene Roddenberry, the author of the series, had such a funeral Star Trek, but also a large number of quite "ordinary" people. This year in May, Celestis sent the ashes of 308 people, each one gram, into space.
One of the reasons that so little ash is sent into space (a maximum of seven grams) is that not all Celestis missions succeed, so the material should be saved for a new attempt (of course, free of charge). This service, by the way, costs several thousand dollars, depending on the idea of the family of the deceased in which way they want to perform the burial.
However, one of the burial methods that could really become popular in the future is cryonic burial - keeping body remains at extremely low temperatures. The potential goal of such a procedure is eventual thawing and reviving, sometime in the future, when man discovers a cure for death.
The funeral business of the future is definitely directed towards "green burials" and finding places for new cemeteries. It is expected that some new ways of burial will be popularized because there is no more space for grave sites, and cremation is non-ecological and consumes a lot of electricity. The British Center for Natural Death estimates that cremation requires an average of 35 kilowatt-hours. At the same time, a significant amount of toxic substances is released into the atmosphere, including 400 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Nor is the traditional burial of the dead in a coffin any more ecological, because cemeteries are full of various dangerous chemicals, including embalming agents, so it often happens that nearby waters are also polluted.
Today there is an entire movement advocating "returning to nature" after death. For such burials, a "green" location is carefully chosen, the material for the coffin necessarily decomposes very quickly, and the means for embalming the deceased are absolutely prohibited. This is not helped by the fact that more and more people are dying with mouthfuls of dental fillings and that due to the large amount of canned food we eat, the average dead person's body decomposes significantly longer.
One of the inventive methods, ecologically unproblematic if we ignore the consumption of electricity, is to freeze the body of the deceased with liquid nitrogen, and then turn it into powder with strong vibrations. That powder would then be heated under pressure in a vacuum chamber, and finally traces of metals, especially mercury, would be removed from it. The remains would be buried in small cornstarch boxes in very shallow graves. After a year there would be nothing left...
History of tombs
Pre 3,2 million years, hadar, Etiopija
Some paleontologists believe that thirteen remains of the species australopithecus afarensis, the first human-like ancestor to walk on the savannah, found in 1975 at the famous site of Hadar in Ethiopia, including nine adults and four children, may represent the first burial. This idea arose since there are no clear signs that they died suddenly. Although some species take the deceased individuals to one location, scientists doubt that Australopithecus with their development were even close to ritual burial. If they had buried their dead, many more of their graves could be found today.
Pre 500.000 years, Atapuerca, Spain
Paleontologists found the remains of 28 individuals in the Sima los Huesos cave, a well-known archological site on Mount Atapuerca, in the early XNUMXs, which some experts consider proof that burials existed even before the appearance of homo sapiens. Remains were found here homo heidelbergensis, a species that preceded man. Some findings indicate that it is a place where cannibalistic rituals were performed, but there is no solid evidence that the remains of human ancestors were really buried in this place. The most likely explanation is that the corpses simply sank, although the skulls and bones indicate that these primitive hominids died of disease.
Pre 120.000 years, Karmel, Israel
In the 1930s, archaeologists discovered the remains of early humans of our species at two locations in Israel, Skul and Kafzen. Homo sapiens, 80.000 to 120.000 years old. Skul is located on the slopes of Mount Carmel, and Kafzen is in lower Galilee. These sites are particularly interesting because it is the earliest find that undoubtedly shows that the remains of the individuals found were buried in graves that were made by human hands. Experts believe that this does not yet mean the beginning of ritual and organized burial, but that it occurs sporadically, in special cases. Most people are still left where they died.
Pre 14.000 years, Gobekli Tepe, Turska
The first burials in human communities are thought to begin with the development of agriculture and the first religions. The oldest ceremonial tomb, at the site of Gobelki Tepe in present-day Turkey, dates from this time.
On the other side
It is commonly believed that after death, when a person passes away, his hair continues to grow even in the grave. It is also believed to be the same with nails. However, this is not true despite the photos showing the corpses covered in hair. Quite simply, after death there is dehydration, drying of the body, and the skin near the hair shrinks, which gives the impression that the hair grows. Although today almost everything is known about the moment of death itself, there are other widespread misconceptions about what happens when the soul leaves the body. Some came from science itself.
In 1866 in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the American physician Duncan MacDougall (1920–1907) observed the death of six of his seriously ill patients, of whom, according to a paper published in the journal "American Medicine", four suffered from tuberculosis, one from diabetes, and one from an unknown disease. Namely, at the beginning of the XNUMXth century, McDougall conducted a series of experiments in which he tried to answer the question posed by the philosopher René Descartes - what is the mass of the human soul?
Implicit in this question is a whole bunch of hard-to-test assumptions—that the soul exists as a material entity, that it can be associated with measurable observables, that it has any mass, or that it can be subjected to robust experiments at all. But MacDougall still tried to investigate what happens at death and got an answer about the mass of the human soul, the mass that will become an urban legend - 21 grams.
For this purpose, he constructed a special bed under which there was a specially made sensitive mechanism for measuring mass. On this deathbed-scale, Dr. MacDougall established that during the death of a slave there is some change in mass, which was reported by the "New York Times" in the issue of March 10 of that year. However, although he and his four collaborators tried to eliminate the effects of sweating and other biological effects, MacDougall himself stated that he had great difficulty establishing the precise moments of death of patients, which was crucial for this experiment.
On the other hand, he had too few statistics, and at the same time he got six completely different results. However, throughout the experiment, those who interpreted it succumbed to the impression of the first obtained, "round" result. McDougal's dead bodies lost 21 grams in the first, 14 grams each in the second and third, as well as ten grams in the fifth test, while two tests failed due to placing the dead body on the bed too late. No subsequent research has produced a reliable and reproducible result.
A few years later MacDougall himself tried without success to make an X-ray of the soul leaving the body, and he also measured the mass of fifteen dying dogs, but found that their mass did not change after they expired. However, the information from the first McDougall test, that the human soul weighs 21 grams, has spread so much through the media and books that today it is part of general culture. Among other things, the genius Mexican writer and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga used it for the title of a famous Hollywood film from 2004.
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