[quetzthecoatl]

nothing beats the "religious afterlife" takes. When they find some skeleton with some cooking pottery and archeologists/historians assume it's because the pre h historic culture had buried this person with cookery because he/she would need to cook in the after life - when most likely it's because the person was contaminated, and got buried/left with all his worldly possessions and everything else was burned off.

[angiosperm]

It has been quite common to believe that all the personal property of any dead person was unsafe or unclean to use, and so was often burned or buried with them. This was observed, for example, in northern California tribes in historical times. Sometimes it only applied to weapons.

It doesn't depend on a belief in the afterlife. What archaeologists call "ritual" need have nothing to do with religion. Washing your car and mowing the lawn are American suburban rituals. Halloween, Christmas, and birthday celebrations are ritual. We also have ribbon-cuttings and graduations. When I was growing up we "pledged allegiance" to the US flag.

[jannyfer]

And you theorize that people understood contamination thousands of years ago?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease

[dotnet00]

I don't think they'd have needed a model for why it happens to see the obvious correlation between using things used by a sick person and getting sick. It'd be compatible with the older idea of a "miasma" spreading the disease.

[anvandare]

I agree. Evolutionary speaking, animals that develop different behaviors based on 'clean' versus 'unclean' would have a leg-up against the competition. Ants, to give a quick example, throw their dead out with the rest of the garbage.[1] (Which can lead to a funny experiment to have them carry out living members as well - "I'm not dead yet!"[2])

You don't have to understand why you are doing something - or even that you are doing it at all - as long as it works and gives you a benefit, however small. Without proper understanding you will also have false positives, but it's better to be assume there is danger than to assume there isn't any. False positives outweigh false negatives. (To a certain level, of course, too much of it and paranoia becomes harmful again.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necrophoresis

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/04/01/102601823/h...

[positus]

Laws were given to ancient Israelites about how to properly identify and quarantine those with infectious skin diseases somewhere around 1446 BCE.

[quetzthecoatl]

they don't necessarily need to figure out the germ theory to know that diseases spread from proximity and/or contact with sick people when it happens right in front of them.

Also, there could be many such reasons for burying/burning someone dead with his/her possessions. My point was that almost always it becomes "elaborate rituals and beliefs of afterlife with same worldly possessions that they had here on earth" - just because we know pharaohs/ancient Egyptians did it.

[melagonster]

However, the custom of burying someone together with everyday objects is still observed, and the Egyptians also practiced a similar tradition. On the other hand, epidemiology has only become widely known in the last few centuries.