"The Evolution of Death Understanding" has been published in the academic anthology "Death and Anti-Death, Volume 1: One Hundred Years After N. F. Fedorov (1829-1903)"

"The anthology discusses a number of interdisciplinary cultural, psychological, metaphysical, and moral issues and controversies related to death, life extension, and anti-death. This first volume in the series is in honor of the 19th century Russian philosopher N. F. Fedorov. (Some of the contributions are about Fedorov; most are not.) Each of the 17 chapters includes a selected or short bibliography. The anthology also contains an Introduction and an Index -- as well as an Abstracts section that serves as an extended table of contents.

"A variety of differing points of view are presented and argued. Most of the 400-plus pages consists of contributions unique to this volume. Although of interest to the general reader, the anthology functions well as a textbook for university courses in culture studies, death-related controversies, ethics, futuristics, humanities, interdisciplinary studies, life extension issues, metaphysics, and psychology."

"The Evolution of Death Understanding" can be found as chapter 5 in "PART I: Cultural And Psychological Perspectives". Here is a summary of said chapter:

The concept of death is a result of our existence as embodied, sociable, and self-conscious beings. Once the concept of the self had evolved, the concept of the inevitable destruction of the self, with the death of the body became unavoidable. The body, the group, and the self are essential realities from a psychological standpoint and are sufficient to yield an understanding of death. The evolution of embodied selves living in groups ensured a universal awareness of death as "strangeness." We show how bodily uniformities and experiential invariants lead to this awareness.

The article owes its primary debt to the ideas of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and corresponding co-author David S Stodolsky. The main theoretical background in drawn from the existentialist school of philosophical thought. The bibliography below shows exactly who.

Heidegger, M. (1982). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indianan University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1974). The primacy of perception and its philosophical consequences. In J. O’Neill (Ed.) Phenomenology, Language and Sociology: Selected Essays of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. London: Heinemann.

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1931). The Modern Theme. London: The C. W. Daniel Company.

Sartre, J. P. (1996). Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1990). The Roots of Thinking. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Sheets-Johnstone, M. (1994). The Roots of Power. Chicago & La Salle: Open Court.

Stodolsky, D. (2002, 15 October). Essential realities and their meanings [Objective]. Immortalist Philosophy. Essential realities and their meanings (v. 3.2)

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