It is commonly accepted that conceptions of soul and afterlife must have developed among many human societies—China included—long before the appearance of written evidence. Unsparing efforts to discover traces in archaeological remains have yielded varying degrees of success. In the case of ancient China, the position of bodies buried at the Banpo Neolithic (c. 5000–4000 BCE) cemetery near present-day Xian was often interpreted as indicating the existence of an idea of an afterlife. The evidence—a unified westward head position—was explained as the expression of a belief in the west as the world of the dead. There is, however, very little further evidence, and nothing else is known of such a belief in a world after death during this period. A parallel situation in ancient Egypt indicates that burial positions varied from cemetery to cemetery, which should be considered a warning against interpreting burial...