I am doing a lot of researches on genealogy, old obituaries for web analytics company. Part of what I do is related to funeral rites and cultural funeral traditions of nations all over the planet. Let me share some stuff with you....

In many cultures, human corpses were usually buried in soil. The act of burying corpses is thought to have begun around 200,000 years ago during the Paleolithic period by homo sapiens, before spreading out from Africa. As a result, burial grounds are found throughout the world. Mounds of earth, temples, and underground caverns were used to store the dead bodies of ancestors. In modern times, the custom of burying dead people below ground with a stone marker to mark the place is used in almost every modern culture, although other means such as cremation are becoming more popular in the west (cremation is the norm in India and mandatory in Japan). Some burial practices are heavily ritualized; others are simply practical.