Thomas Swan

The Role of Implicit and Explicit Beliefs in Grave-Good Practices: Evidence for Intuitive Afterlife Reasoning.

Cognitive Science April 2023 Thomas Swan, Jesse M. Bering, Ruth Hughes et al.

The practice of burying objects with the dead is often claimed as some of the earliest evidence for religion, on the assumption that such "grave goods" were intended for the decedents' use in the afterlife. However, this assumption is largely speculative, as the underlying motivations for grave-good practices across time and place remain little understood. In the present work, we asked if...