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Two mysteries of creation -- life and death |
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Their dead were buried, fearing their resurrection |
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The placement of heavy stone slabs upon their graves seen as impeding their dead from returning |
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Neanderthal corpses, tightly flexed, tied with thongs |
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Interring their dead, performing burial rituals |
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The defleshing of the body -- a symbolic act -- preventing it's spirit from haunting them |
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Removing flesh to silence the destructive will of nature |
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Removing flesh to see death making it's way into the carcass |
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Removing flesh... |
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Flesh, doomful like a rapid ghastly river |
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Cheek muscles from children were filleted out, |
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Tendons were sliced and skulls were cracked to remove brains |
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Flaying will silence the vile enemy in the form of the |
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Neanderthal ghost |
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Allaying the dead spirits, who possess destructive powers to the continent (For thousands of years or more, the shell will see it's ghostly owner nevermore) (Series of rituals, praising the individual) |
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Buried together, entire kin groups remained united after death |
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Believed in an afterlife, a vision beyond death in their pre-abstract minds |
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Artifacts and fauna |
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Guaranteed health in the spirit world... |
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Defleshing |
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The Cadaver |
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Before Burial, to protect the living from the undead |
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Death itself, regarded as a kind of sleep |
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Corpses arranged in sleeplike positions |
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Death had become something more than a mere brutish fact of nature |
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Leave the rotten meat witnessing the rebirth of an epoch |