Letters to the Editor

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Dear Sir: P. Prioreschi's interesting discussion of the evidence for the ubiquity of neolithic trephining (Perspectives 34:296 ff.) was certainly a novel approach to the inferred rationale for such early ventures in cranial surgery. And entertaining. Unfortunately, his explanatory hypothesis suffers from an all-too-common fatal a priori assumption: the implicit notion that neolithic man possessed only an infantile or at best a neotenic mentality. That idea is not supported by any evidence whatsoever. Neolithic humans passed the most severe of intelligence tests. They survived! With nothing more formidable than their brains to aid their pathetically fragile bodies, they endured the rigors of ice ages and worse. A test that the vast majority of present-day Homo sapkns would demonstrably flunk. Phrases such as "the breath of life" are known from mankind's very earliest written records. Surely, that observation didn'tjust spring to mind because we happened to learn to write and thus leave a record of our intelligence. Surely, thousands of generations of preliterate hunters knew that, if their prey was still breathing, it was still alive and possibly still dangerous. Certainly none but the most infantile or defective of our own era would confuse typical unconsciousness with death. Signs of real death were just as unmistakable, and assuredly a whole lot more familiar, to Neolithic peoples. Heartbeat aside, open, unresponsive eyes; no respiration; postmortem lividity; rigor mortis; then stink and decay were without question all very familiar attributes to early hunting societies. It may be that they confused unconsciousness with sleep. We might do the same. But it strains credulity beyond the breaking point to suggest that Neolithic folks confused mere unconsciousness with death. Both female great apes and cetaceans have been reported supporting the bodies of their infant dead until death was unmistakable. But that is the opposite "error," mistaking death for unconsciousness. And if the infant really is unconscious , instead of dead, that has survival value. It seems reasonable to assume our Neolithic parents were at least that clever. As for the hypothesis of raising the "dead" through trephining, from the pespective of contemporary superstitions and literature concerning the dead and the "living dead" (the "undead"), granting Neolithics intelligence not too different from our own, we can as easily conclude that postmortem trephining was done to ensure the dead stayed dead as to believe the motive was resurrection . Permission to reprint a letter printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 35, 2 ¦ Winter 1992 311 A wholly scientific answer to all the whys of neolithic trephining remains, simply: We don't know. D. B. Tyler POB 6017, Albany Station Berkeley, California 94706-601 7 Dear Sir: Dr. Tyler's criticism is interesting but unfortunately suffers from an all-toocommon , fatal a priori assumption: the implicit notion that Neolithic man operated according to modern paradigms. It appears that Tyler's main objection concerns Neolithic criteria of death. According to him, Neolithic man would have no problem at all in diagnosing death because of the presence of "open, unresponsive eyes" and the absence of respiration and heartbeats. Tyler also mentions "postmortem lividity; rigor mortis . . . stink, and decay" but these are, of course, late phenomena that have nothing to do with our discussion. Undoubtedly Tyler is aware that a person who has fainted has eyes (often open) that do not follow movement (I assume this is the meaning of "open, unresponsive eyes"—surely he does not mean pupillary rigidity). Concerning absence of respiration, Tyler undoubtedly knows how difficult it sometimes is to detect very shallow respiratory movements and how, in the not too distant past, mirrors were put in front of the mouth of presumably dead patients to be sure that they were not breathing. Pulse, in an unconscious patient, is often detected only after careful palpation ofarteries other than the radial, and heartbeats are sometimes difficult to detect even with a good stethoscope. The fear of being buried alive, so common in our society until quite recently, was, in fact, based on the possibility of death's being misdiagnosed. These points, however, are of marginal importance because they are elements of...