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by lvs 3884 days ago
Seems overly anxious, don't you think? Isolated incidents occur between humans and all natural predators on occasion. Obviously humankind isn't currently threatened in a serious way ... until these interbreed with zombies, of course.
1 comments

Btw, have you ever considered the real reason why humans so eagerly bury/burn their dead?

It's quite likely because we don't want natural predators to get used to the taste of human flesh.

I live in a country where bears have been hunted for millenia. As a result I've slept about 1,5km away from known bear nest in the woods. It was scouting trip and none of us was really worried. Because we knew that by now, bears really don't like to get in touch with humans.

The point is not to "eradicate" anything. The point is to instill fear. Which these days has allowed so harmonious human-bear relations here, that their numbers are rising.

Hopefully stuff like pepper spray and rubber bullets are used before that shoot on sight is necessary.

> It's quite likely because we don't want natural predators to get used to the taste of human flesh.

What do you suggest to dispose of human cadavers other than burying them because other methods like incineration and the likes are not as economic as the former method?

There's this method which is used in Tibet and a few other places

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

I had no idea that such practice existed, thanks for sharing!

Not to take away any credit from your argument but not all places on Earth have mountains nearby. Also, I assume that since these nations and people live in mountainous terrains, they had to come up with a method to dispose of those cadavers in the face of land scarcity where they live.

Tibetans also do a water burial. The first time I was there, I was asking about eating fish and birds in addition to mammals, and was told, "Tibetans do not eat fish and birds because fish and birds eat people," which I first thought was a joke.
> not all places on Earth have mountains nearby

Zoroastrians also left them out to be eaten by nature. They build a small structure for it. Exposure of the dead is not that strange.

Why would bronze age humans dispose corpses at all? Just drag them away so you don't get diseases.

But every culture we know of disposed bodies in some way that wolves, lions and other big land predators could not eat them.

Isn't that idea just because we don't find or recognize remnants of burial practices from cultures that did allow predators to consume the bodies?
> What do you suggest to dispose of human cadavers other than burying them...[?]

Have you read Stranger in a Strange Land?

Yeah, I'll do that when my friends' ghosts show up to tell me that I should do it. And even then, they might get run through another link in the food chain first--maybe even two--because I don't want spongiform encephalopathy (kuru).
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