The Buried Soul - How Humans Invented Death

Archaeologist Timothy Taylor brings together evidence of how the ancients saw their universe and asks how we came to have not only a sense of the afterlife but also an image of the soul. After we began to speak but before we could write, Taylor suggests that early humans, in an astonishing conceptual leap, divided the body from the spirit that animated it. Thus arose a series of rituals that attempted to placate, tempt, scapegoat, destroy or contain this potentially malevolent spirit...