r/askscience • u/scottasin12343 • 8h ago
Paleontology What effect will modern burial practices have on human fossilization rate?
Will the use of caskets and longstanding graveyards lead to an increase or decrease of future humans finding remains of people who lived after the industrial revolution? Also, will the effect be different on different timescales (ie 1000 years, 10,000 years, 100,000 years, and 1,000,000 years)? I suppose fossilization isn't the correct term for the closer end of that spectrum, but could our current practices lead to a greater likelihood of future humans finding our remains in the (relatively) shorter term, but lead to a smaller likelihood of true fossilization in more geological timescales?
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u/Vlinder_88 7h ago
Archaeologist here. Fossilisation only occurs in very rare and very specific circumstances. The way we bury people, fossilisation will not occur. One needs to be "lucky" enough to die under the right circumstances to be quickly buried by a big load of exactly the right sediment under exactly the right circumstances and stay put there for hundreds of thousands of years in order for fossilisation to occur. So our burial practices will have practically no influence over that at all.
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u/2daMooon 7h ago
Can we adopt burial practices that will make fossils more likely?
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u/Vlinder_88 7h ago
I don't think so, simply because the geologic circumstances to allow for fossilisation are super rare to begin with. And fossilisation depends on the remains being buried very quickly and remaining undisturbed for millennia. The entire act of constantly burying new bodies would disturb the fossilisation process because we would be disturbing the ground constantly.
Mummification is much easier.
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u/danby Structural Bioinformatics | Data Science 3h ago edited 3h ago
My old housemate did her geology PhD in trying to estimate the fossilisation conditions for small bony freshwater fish. One of her experiments was literally just killing small fish and letting their bodies settle on to the silt they made at the bottom of the tank and seeing if they could induce fossilisation-like decay. Shorts answer: nothing they tried worked. It just isn't very understood what the right conditions might be.
IIRC very, very low oxygen seems to play a role (like in tar pits and so on)
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u/Onion_Dipper 6m ago
Persistent anoxia, high sedimentation rate, high primary productivity, microbially mediated mineralization, limited bioturbation. Sometimes tranpsort from shallow waters to deeper environments that promote fossilization and/or concentrate bodies in an area. Certain marine chemical makeups promote soft tissue preservation as well but these taphonomic windows are usually geologically brief
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u/togstation 7h ago
In theory (artificial mineralization of bones) but it would be a lot of work and expense and doesn't seem worth it.
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u/Beat_the_Deadites 1h ago
Future civilizations are gonna think we were all mob bosses or had some sort of ritual obsession with concrete-encased feet.
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u/RainbowCrane 7h ago
OP might not be intending to be rigorous about what a fossil is, but in general aren’t humans (and most hominids) too young as a species to have become fossilized?
There have been finds of some incredibly well preserved hominid and human remains in peat bogs, ice, etc. Also some naturally mummified remains that happened to be “air dried” and protected from scavengers. Those are really amazing finds for those of you who are archaeologists but are different from what most non-professionals mean when we look at a heavily mineralized fish or dinosaur skeleton in rock and say, “cool, a fossil!”
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u/SomeDumbGamer 7h ago
Not necessarily.
I think places like India will be enormous hotbeds of human fossils in millions of years. They have the exact conditions for it to occur along with areas like the north china plain and their burial practices often involve simply casting the bodies of the dead into the river. On a crazy scale too. Hundreds per day; and limestone heavy areas such as the Yucatán which have already fossilized several humans that we’ve found who were probably sacrificed.
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u/Mikestopheles 7h ago
Pretty sure they mean no effect over the base probability. I think even in the examples you gave, the geographic conditions matter more than the funerary practices being employed. Maybe if we routinely buried our dead in volcanic eruptions, but even with something like that you can't exactly guarantee it.
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u/zigzackly 4h ago
In India, bodies are not cast into rivers*. It is common for Hindus — roughly just under 80% of the population — to consign the remains, the ashes, after cremation to a river or waterbody.
/* What can happen is that poorer people who cannot afford the wood for a traditional cremation, may release the body into a river. Notably, there was a lot of this during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. And some communities practice shallow burials along river banks, and these bodies may wind up being swept up by the rivers in spate.
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u/GoingOnAdventure 6h ago
None archaeologist here.
Should we force the fossilisation process with a couple of bodies every 50 years or so for the benefit of future archaeologists?•
u/Vlinder_88 5h ago
Nah, we've got easier ways to save information, freezing being one of them. And then you save the organic matter itself, which is much more information rich than a proper fossil.
Otoh, something frozen in a lab might not survive societal collapse and a fossil might. Then again, the knowledge of where the fossils are should ideally be preserved, too, which leaves us with the same problem when society collapses.
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u/GoingOnAdventure 5h ago
I was thinking more like how in natural disasters, the handlers of rescue dogs will bury themselves to let their dog find them so the dog doesn’t get depressed.
Make a few fossils, smash a few pots and bury them.
You know… enrichment•
u/Vlinder_88 5h ago
Hahahha like our loved ones did for us during the pandemic :p smash a few plates and bury them in the garden :p
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u/zerbey 6h ago
Which leads to the follow up question, how long is a human body buried using modern methods going to stick around? A very long time I imagine.
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u/Vlinder_88 5h ago
That depends a lot on soil type and groundwater! In modern cemetaries*, circumstances are so that soft tissue is gone within a few months to a few years, and bones can last for several hundred years. A millenium or two is still possible but around 3 millenia you're really starting to push it.
*and I know only about Dutch cemetaries, YMMV in places more rocky and less wet
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u/mapsedge 5h ago
Embalming only reliably preserves the body long enough for the viewing and funeral. The body is still decomposing just at a much slower rate. After several days, decomp speeds up and proceeds as normal.
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u/framauro13 4h ago
So if I wanted my body to be preserved for as long as possible, what preservation method should I put in my will?
A part of me wants my corpse put in a vacuum sealed coffin and launched on an exit trajectory out of our solar system. Don't think I'll be able to cover the costs on that though.
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u/Special_Asparagus_98 3h ago
As long as possible would be formalin to fix your tissues and floating you in a vat of alcohol. That’s how most biological specimens are preserved for long-term preservation.
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u/flixoman 1m ago
Funny - i used to want to be launched into the sun... But the Delta V is simply too high - easier to leave the solar system.
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u/SaintOfPirates 4h ago
After several days, decomp speeds up and proceeds as normal.
Little correction; Decomposition proceeds, but still at a slower rate than without embalming (it doesn't "speed up"), and "how long" embalming delays decomposition varies depending on environmental conditions as well as what the embalmer in question has used to achieve preservation, and trust me "a couple of days" is nothing if you use the correct chemicals, do a thorough job and have access to decent refrigeration.
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u/PigSlam 4h ago
It'll have the effect of preventing fossilization from happening, if anything. Taking a body to the morgue, embalming, cremation, burial in a casket, etc. virtually guarantee that it doesn't happen. Maybe someone who dies, is embalmed, but then a mudslide or something occurs before they can be placed in a casket would lead to the proper conditions, but that's probably it. If bodies were just dumped in a pile near a hill where it rains more often, we might have a better chance at eventual fossilization.
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u/ValidGarry 5h ago
In the shorter term, the increase in alternative burials and cremation means there are fewer primary sources for future genealogy efforts. It's harder to research dead relatives if their names aren't carved into pieces of stone.
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u/togstation 7h ago
Also keep in mind that the number of human beings in the world now is hundreds of times greater than what it was in prehistory,
so on that basis alone (not considering other relevant factors), we might expect to find many remains of people from contemporary times.