James R Anderson, Dora Biro, Paul Pettitt
6 min
Societies, including those of humans, have evolved multiple ways of dealing with death across changing circumstances and pressures. Despite many studies focusing on specialized topics, for example necrophoresis in eusocial insects, mortuary activities in early human societies, or grief and mourning in bereavement, there has been little attempt to consider these disparate research endeavours from a broader evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary thanatology does this by adopting an explicit evolutionary stance for studies of death and dying within the sociological, psychological and biological disciplines. The collection of papers in this themed issue demonstrates the value of this approach by describing what is known about how various nonhuman species detect and respond to death in conspecifics, how problems of disposing of the dead have evolved in human societies across evolutionary time and also within much shorter time frames, how human adults' understanding of death develops, and how it is ultimately reflected in death-related language. The psychological significance and impact of death is clearly seen in some species' grief-like reactions to the loss of attachment figures, and perhaps uniquely in humans, the existence of certain psychological processes that may lead to suicide. Several research questions are proposed as starting points for building a more comprehensive picture of the ontogeny and phylogeny of how organisms deal with death.This article is part of the theme issue 'Evolutionary thanatology: impacts of the dead on the living in humans and other animals'.
Death is a universal biological event, yet the study of how organisms respond to it has historically been siloed within specific disciplines like archaeology, primatology, and sociology. This paper introduces 'evolutionary thanatology' as a formal, interdisciplinary field designed to synthesize these disparate research efforts. By adopting an explicit evolutionary perspective, the authors argue that we can better understand the ontogeny and phylogeny of death-related behaviors, ranging from the chemical signals used by eusocial insects to the complex cultural rituals of modern humans.
The authors highlight that responses to death are not merely cultural constructs but have deep biological roots. For instance, eusocial insects utilize olfactory cues to manage corpses, while vertebrates often exhibit 'animacy detection malfunctions'—a cognitive state where the brain struggles to reconcile the absence of life with the physical presence of a familiar individual. By comparing these mechanisms across taxa, researchers can identify which behaviors are phylogenetically ancient and which are derived, providing a clearer picture of how social structures and cognitive abilities shape the treatment of the dead.
Understanding the evolution of thanatological behavior is crucial for addressing modern human challenges. As societies become increasingly urbanized and industrialized, many individuals are shielded from the direct experience of death, leading to a reliance on euphemisms and outsourced funerary services. Furthermore, the study of death-related behaviors—including grief, suicide, and the moral standing of the deceased—provides insight into human cognition and social evolution. By establishing a shared research agenda, the authors hope to move beyond anecdotal reports toward a rigorous, comparative science of death that encompasses the full spectrum of life.
Alex: So the paper is more of a theoretical scaffolding exercise than an empirical result?
Sam: Largely, yes—and the authors are transparent about that. Their concrete proposal is to stop treating single case studies as too anecdotal to publish, and instead use them as data points in a systematic comparative database. If you code post-mortem behaviors consistently—grooming, protection, disposal, carrying—you can start to ask whether those behaviors cluster by phylogeny, by social structure, by the nature of the prior relationship between the living animal and the deceased. The cetacean and primate data they discuss is suggestive here: both groups show extended corpse-carrying, but the durations and contexts differ in ways that likely track differences in parent-offspring bond dynamics. That's the kind of signal a proper database could formalize.
Alex: And what's the proposed trajectory from there? How does this framework connect insect necrophoresis—which is essentially a chemical trigger—to something like a human burial ritual?
Sam: That's actually one of the more interesting parts of the argument. The authors sketch a phylogenetic gradient from purely chemical-mediated responses, where a specific decay compound triggers removal behavior with no cognitive representation of death involved, up through increasingly complex behavioral sequences that appear to require some model of the other's prior animacy. The claim isn't that ants are grieving—it's that necrophoresis and human mourning sit at opposite ends of a continuous evolutionary axis, and that mapping where different taxa fall on that axis might let us identify when something like genuine death awareness first emerged. They bring in cognitive science and comparative linguistics to triangulate that, though those sections are more programmatic than evidential at this stage.
Alex: What about the modern end of that axis? Does the paper address how industrialized societies have altered these evolutionary pressures?
Sam: They do, and it's one of the more thought-provoking threads. The argument is that over the last century, Western societies have systematically removed direct exposure to death—through hospital deaths, professionalized funeral services, and a cultural vocabulary built on euphemism. From an evolutionary thanatology perspective, that's a significant environmental shift: the agency-detection system that evolved in contexts of direct conspecific death is now operating in a setting where most people rarely encounter a corpse. Whether that produces measurable downstream effects on how people cognitively process mortality is an open empirical question the paper flags but doesn't pursue.
Alex: So the framework has real ambition—but the honest read is that it's a research agenda more than a body of findings.
Sam: That's a fair characterization. The load-bearing contribution here is the mechanistic framework itself: centering animacy detection as the common substrate lets you generate cross-taxa predictions that weren't previously articulable. The empirical scaffolding to test those predictions doesn't yet exist in any systematic form. What the authors are really doing is making the case that it should—and that the field's reluctance to treat isolated case studies as publishable data has been a structural obstacle to building it.
Alex: It's a foundational move. Not a solved problem, but a reframing that makes the problem tractable in a way it wasn't before.
Sam: Precisely. And for a field that has historically been fragmented by disciplinary boundaries, having a shared mechanistic vocabulary—even a provisional one—is a meaningful step. The next test is whether the comparative database actually gets built, and whether the predictions about social structure, maternal investment, and phylogenetic position hold when you run the numbers. That's where the framework either earns its keep or gets revised.
Alex: Thanks for walking through that. It's a genuinely interesting attempt to bring evolutionary rigor to a domain that's been resistant to it—and the animacy detection mechanism gives it a foothold that pure behavioral description never quite managed.
Sam: Thanks for listening to ResearchPod.