[djscram]

Actually there are a lot of reasons for dead people apparently coming back. Burying bodies so they stay down is actually a big effort for most cultures, wild animals and weather conditions can easily pull a body from a shallower grave and redeposit it somewhere else. Add that to the tendency of bodies to continue to change after death, or at least appear to (gums receding looks like teeth growing, etc.) and it's not hard to see how people in earlier culture s might get the impression that the dead are up and walking around. Factor in also how diseases can take members of a family or others close to the dead person invisibly, and, well...

[awinter-py]

Disagree -- agriculturists & hunter-gatherers are way more familiar with death than moderns because they slaughtered their own livestock. We don't even experience human birth & death at home; it's packaged for us by hospitals and funeral parlors.

The basic anatomical knowledge in a society where everyone has killed a goat is arguably higher than industrialized 2017 where we get our steaks pre-cut.

I'd be interested in an argument that says wealthy, artistic, anatomically modern humans in the stone or bronze age aren't aware of the symbolic content of their death rituals. But I haven't heard one yet.