Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

What is called belief in another life is for primitives or children only inability to grasp completely the very difficult fact of death and to distinguish it from sleep. The disposition of some of the troglodyte skeletons suggests that these ancient forbears of our race were unable to realize that death ends all. Despite the close analogy and even kinship between human and animal life so deeply felt in early days, it was probably always somewhat harder for early man to conceive death for himself as complete cessation than to so conceive it for the higher forms of animal life with which his own was so intimately associated. Our ignorance of all these stages of human evolution becomes all the more pathetic as we are now coming to understand that it was then that all the deeper unconscious and dispositional strata of Mansoul, which still dominate us far more than we are even yet aware, were being laid down, and it is upon these traits that the later and conscious superstructure of our nature has been reared. Only hard things survive the ravages of time, and psychic traits and trends are the softest of all soft things, although they are no less persistent by way of biological and social inheritance than skeletons and flints.

Turning to the lower races of mankind that now survive and are accessible to study, we find only very few scattered, fragmentary, and often contradictory data as to old age. Yarrow has made a comprehensive study of mortuary customs, both of savages and man in the earlier stages of civilization. Mallory brought together what we know of sign language. Ploss has given us a compend on the child among primitives and, with Bartels, on woman. I have tried to compile the customs and ideas of pubescent initiation;[33] while animism, marriage rites, property and ownership, systems of kinship, mana concepts, hunting and trapping, war weapons, dances, ideas of disease and the function of the “medicine man,” dwellings, dress, ornamentation, number systems, language, fire-making, industries, food, myths, and ceremonies galore, and many other themes have had comprehensive and comparative treatment. But I am able to find nothing of the kind (and Professor F. Boas, our most accomplished American scholar in this field, knows of nothing compendious) on old age in any language. Anthropology, therefore, has so far produced no gerontologists. I have looked over many volumes of travel and exploration among the so-called lower races of mankind, only to find nothing or brief and more or less incidental mentions of senescence. This neglect is itself significant of the inconspicuous rôle the old play in rude tribal life and also of the lack of vital interest in the theme by investigators.

From my own meager and inadequate gleanings in this field the unfavorable far outweigh the favorable mentions. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that from Herodotus, Strabo, and others we learn of people like the Scythian Massagetæ, a nomad race northeast of the Caspian Sea, who killed old people and ate them. For savages the practice of devouring dead kinsfolk is often regarded as the most respectful method of disposing of their remains. In a few cases this custom is combined with that of killing both the old and sick, but it is more often simply a form of burial. It prevails in many parts of Australia, Melanesia, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Reclus[34] tells us that among the various Siberian tribes aged and sickly people who are useless are asked if they have “had enough of it.” It is a matter of duty and honor on their part to reply “yes.” Thereupon an oval pit is roughly excavated in a burial ground and filled with moss. Heavy stones are rolled near, the extremities of the victim are bound to two horizontal poles, and on the headstone a reindeer is slaughtered, its blood flowing in torrents over the moss. The old man stretches himself upon this warm red couch. In the twinkling of an eye he finds that he is securely bound to the poles. Then he is asked “Art thou ready?” At this stage of the proceeding it would be folly to articulate a negative response. Moreover, his friends would pretend not to hear it. So his moriturus saluto is “Good night, friends.” They then stop his nostrils with a stupefying substance and open his carotid and a large vein in his arm, so that he is bled to death in no time. Among most races, Reclus tells us, children are killed by being exposed; the old, by being deserted.

In Terra del Fuego, Darwin tells how Jimmy Buttons, a native, described the slaughter of the aged in winter and famine. Dogs, he said, catch otters; old women, not. He then proceeded to detail just how they were killed, imitated and ridiculed their cries and shrieks, told the parts of their bodies that were best to eat, and said they must generally be killed by friends and relatives.

Among the Hottentots, when their aged men and women can “no longer be of any manner of service in anything,” they are conveyed by an ox, accompanied by most of the inhabitants of the kraal, to a solitary hut at a considerable distance and, with a small stock of provisions, laid in the middle of the hut, which is then securely closed. The company returns, deserting him forever. They think it the most humane thing they can do to thus hasten the conclusion of life when it has become a burden.

With at least one of the Papuan races in New Guinea, people when old and useless are put up a tree, around which the tribe sing “The fruit is ripe” and then shake the branches until the victim falls, tearing him to pieces and eating him raw. Among the Damaras the sick and aged are often cruelly treated, forsaken, or burned alive. In some of the East African tribes the aged and all supposed to be at the point of death are slain and eaten. One author tells us that among the Fijians the practice of burying alive is “so common that but few old and decrepit people are to be seen.” In Herbert Spencer’s anthropological charts we are told that among the Chippewas “old age is the greatest calamity that can befall a northern Indian for he is neglected and treated with disrespect.”

C. Wissler[35] says, “As to the aged and sick, we have the formal practice of putting to death among some of the Esquimaux and other races.” On the other hand, among all hunting people who shift from place to place the infirm are often of necessity left behind to their fate. Yet the reported examples of such cruelties can usually be matched by instances of the opposite tenor. He goes on to say that since the mythologies of various tribal groups contain rites showing retribution for such cruelties we must regard them as, on the whole, exceptional.

S. K. Hutton[36] says,

I found age a very deceptive thing. “Sixty-two” might be the answer from a bowed old figure crouching over the stove. I would have guessed twenty years more than that. The fact is, the Eskimo wears out fast. After fifty he begins to decline, and few live long after sixty. I have known a few over seventy, and the people told me with wonderment about an old woman who lived to be eighty-two and who worked to the last. But these are great rarities. It must be a unique thing in one’s lifetime to meet with an Eskimo great-grandmother. The very old people seem always to be active to the last. They have an unusual amount of vitality and die in the harness, dropping out like those too tired to go any further and passing away without illness or suffering. These are always those who have clung most closely to their own native foods and customs. Women who are too old and toothless to chew the boot-leather can still scrape the seal-skins, perhaps with a skill which the younger women lack; if they are too blind and feeble to scrape, they can sit behind a wall of snow upon the sea-ice and jig for the sleepy rock-cod through a hole.