How is there room in graveyards for all the people who have died since the beginning of time?

Answer 1

Here are some comments from our contributors.

* Most of those bodies have decomposed, and the location of most of those graveyards is lost. Widespread preservation of bodies through embalming and elaborate caskets and vaults is a fairly recent development, and even now is more a "first world" luxury. * An additional possibility, not in conflict with the above: maybe it hasn't been as long since the beginning of time as we are lead to believe. == == * Graveyard density is becoming a problem in a few places. In centuries to come, we'll have to get creative. == == * Bodies were burned; thrown in the ocean; decomposed into the soil, etc. Not as many cultures as you think bury dead bodies; some cultures leave carcases out for vultures to eat because they wouldn't defile the ground with the impurity of a dead person. == == * Up until more recently, and is still the case in some cemeteries, when you buy a plot, unless there is a tomb there, you are only buying 100 years. Then they resell it and bury someone else there. This worked because a lot of people couldn't afford grave markers so there was no sign that anyone had ever been buried there and they didn't embalm, so the body would be fully decomposed. And also a lot of people were never buried, they were "buried at sea" or cremated or just left outside, or they were buried in mass graves. And almost everyone that has died since the beginning are long gone and recycled. Even bones don't last forever. == == * There are more people alive on the earth today than have lived before us so you can add that to all the answers above. == == * I know that sometimes they bury you on top of someone else. My father is buried on top of my mother. And I've read that certain countries (and maybe in this one, I don't know) they bury you standing up. So they can cram as many in one area as possible. == == * In some European countries, Germany for one, there are cemeteries where they remove bodies from the graves after a certain length of time and place the bones in something similar to a mass crypt. The pile of bones left after one's flesh has decayed does not take up a lot of room. I think you will see alternatives to burial becoming a lot more common in the future. == == * They usually build new graves above old ones. There is a graveyard near where I live that is over 400 years old and every time they run out of room they start at the oldest end again and there are graves on top of more graves. === === * When taking into account all the wars which have been fought in the centuries past, and the traditional practice of burning corpses on the battlefield and mass graves, not a lot of people are traditionally interred as you think.

* In Japan they stand the bodies upright. After 9 years or so they use the same areas again. That shows that about 9 years is enough for the body to fully go back to dust.