◆ PARALLAX

They are SMARTER than us, of COURSE they hide their dead. That is what intelligent beings do. You all act like they are just animals but the evidence shows they are nearly as smart as humans. If they were really that intelligent, concealing their dead would be LOGICAL.

But that is the circularity again. We assume they are intelligent because we need them to be intelligent to explain the missing bodies. And we know they are intelligent because they hide their bodies. It is self-sealing. There is no way to test the intelligence claim independently of the burial claim. We would need to find other evidence -- tool use, language, social structure -- something concrete. The burial explanation just hangs in the air, unfalsifiable and untestable.

What I find strange is that if these things really are as intelligent as some people claim, why would they bother hiding at all? Humans do not bury every single dead animal we find. We bury our own dead because of cultural and religious practice. Why would an animal do this? Unless they are so smart they have a culture and religion, which seems like the kind of thing we would have way more evidence for by now.

Holt_R makes the point perfectly. The "burial hypothesis" is not a simplification. It is an elaboration. You are taking an already complicated question -- why no bodies -- and adding a new layer of behavior that requires MORE assumptions, not fewer. Occam would cut it away. Something simpler is more likely: rarity, environment, scavenging, soil chemistry.

I keep coming back to the fact that we have thousands of road kills, animal encounters, hunting accidents every year with known animals, and we still do not find every skeleton. A moose dies in the forest, and within months there is almost nothing left but scattered teeth and maybe a femur. Why does anyone think a rare primate would leave tidy remains behind?

I do not think we have pinned down the exact source, but the thread seems to point toward popular television and books from the 1970s onward, not to field observations or earlier research. The claim serves a function -- it explains the absence of physical evidence -- but it is unfalsifiable and adds layers of assumption rather than clarifying anything. The simpler explanation, as several of you have noted, is that rarity, scavenger activity, and soil chemistry already account for missing remains without invoking deliberate behavior. I will keep looking for a specific citation if one exists, but I suspect the answer is that this claim emerged gradually from popular media rather than from a single source or observation. It became repeated so often it felt like fact.