“There is an interesting array of correlative developments that appear in our understanding of accessible records of human developmental history. Although it appears from fossils that we had the necessary physical and craniostructural precursors at least 400k years ago, we do not appear to have developed formal representation until around 40k-80k years ago. That is strikingly recent when taken against our evolutionary history. One imagines that somewhat comparable social behaviors in birds began millions of years earlier.

Around this time, a variety of seemingly related developments suddenly appear. Symbols, visual art, language, and… here’s the highlight: obvious memorialization of the dead. This last feature is actually dangerous. What creature on earth has the survivable luxury of expending attention and resources on continued relations with the dead?

In fact, when you examine this matter carefully, is not ‘re-presentation’ akin to a game played with corpses? The ‘abstracted remains’ of moments, beings, experiences, situations? Did we not become undertakers in the wake of Cain’s absurd disclaimer regarding his brother’s keeper? Cain, the one who divides, who specifies. The one who represents.

What I would like to suggest is that some aspect of our deep and abiding intimacy with departed social members may have been instrumental in our development of representational memory — which is the necessary precursor to all of its related expressions. Including language itself. And the suggestion here is that it was born of love and loss, and the hypostasizing of departed others whose loss was too agonizing to bear amongst animals who ‘live through one another”. The whole game of representational cognition could be the result of the same array of forces that demand our common fascination with funerary memoria.”

— an anonymous informant