Love
Is Old
“Love
expressed through grief, it turns out, is the oldest identifiable human
feeling.”
Candida
Moss (The Daily Beast, “What an 80,000-Year-Old Burial Site Reveals About
Humanity,” May 17, 2021)
I just
read this article from The Daily Beast about the oldest burial site in Africa,
found in the mouth of a cave in Kenya’s tropical uplands. The skeletal remains
of a boy, possibly a toddler about 3 years old, had been placed in fetal
position, wrapped in animal skins or plant fibers, and carefully buried. This child
died between 78,000 and 80,000 years ago, making it by far the oldest site to
show signs of ritualistic human burial practices. Other higher animals—elephants,
chimpanzees, dolphins, (I would add, dogs, cats, horses)—grieve, but no other
animal carries that grief for a lifetime—though I have read accounts of
elephants returning to the site where a loved one died, year after year, as we
might visit a cemetery where our ancestors are buried.
What I found most
interesting about this archeological find is that, in 80,000 years, humans
haven’t changed very much in the way we care for the bodies of our dead loved
ones. This child was swaddled and placed in his grave, obviously by the hands
of someone who loved him. There are variations on our religious rituals of
death—New Orleans’ style Cajun jazz parade comes to mind, as well as the horse-drawn
cortege of dead leaders, the playing of taps at a military burial—but we are
still putting bodies in the ground just as we did then. This begs the question
as to whether human beings practiced religious rituals even when we were simply
another species of Hominid. Is it innately human, or even simply mammalian, to
grieve and ritualize death?
At what point do we recognize love as an
organizing principle? According to this article, love expressed through grief is
the oldest known human emotion. But what about love all by itself. I have a pair
of cardinals nesting in my yard. Every afternoon around 4 p.m., they come to
the maple tree outside my kitchen window. She gets into the small birdbath under
the tree and has a splashing bath, while he perches in the tree and keeps watch
over her. Last week, I saw him drop to the rim of the birdbath and give her a
piece of food—beak to beak—while she was still in the water. Is that love? Looks
like it to me.
Since
humans were counted among the family of greats apes, love has been the organizing
principle of life. It’s not based on religious affiliation, race, or ethnicity.
It is not species-specific. Love is simply a universal principle like gravity or
planets revolving around the sun. We are creatures given to love and
connection, to loss and grief, and to joy and celebration. I have a sneaking
suspicion that dolphins and elephants are, too. Life commands it. “Love one
another.”
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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