North and South America.  Among the Caribs in the West Indies (and the Caribs, Brasseur de Bourbourg says, were the same as the ancient Carians of the Mediterranean Sea) the man takes to his bed as soon as a child is born, and kills no animals.  And herein we find an explanation of a custom otherwise inexplicable.  Among the American Indians it is believed that, if the father kills an animal during the infancy of the child, the spirit of the animal will revenge itself by inflicting some disease upon the helpless little one.  “For six months the Carib father must not eat birds or fish, for what ever animals he eats will impress their likeness on the child, or produce disease by entering its body.” (Dorman, “Prim.  Superst.,” p. 58.) Among the Abipones the husband goes to bed, fasts a number of days, “and you would think,” says Dobrizboffer, “that it was he that had had the child.”  The Brazilian father takes to his hammock during and after the birth of the child, and for fifteen days eats no meat and hunts no game.  Among the Esquimaux the husbands forbear hunting during the lying-in of their wives and for some time thereafter.

Here, then, we have a very extraordinary and unnatural custom, existing to this day on both sides of the Atlantic, reaching back to a vast antiquity, and finding its explanation only in the superstition of the American races.  A practice so absurd could scarcely have originated separately in the two continents; its existence is a very strong proof of unity of origin of the races on the opposite sides of the Atlantic; and the fact that the custom and the reason for it are both found in America, while the custom remains in Europe without the reason, would imply that the American population was the older of the two.

The Indian practice of depositing weapons and food with the dead was universal in ancient Europe, and in German villages nowadays a needle and thread is placed in the coffin for the dead to mend their torn clothes with; “while all over Europe the dead man had a piece of money put in his hand to pay his way with.” ("Anthropology,” p. 347.)

The American Indian leaves food with the dead; the Russian peasant puts crumbs of bread behind the saints’ pictures on the little iron shelf, and believes that the souls of his forefathers creep in and out and eat them.  At the cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise, Paris, on All-souls-day, they “still put cakes and sweetmeats on the graves; and in Brittany the peasants that night do not forget to make up the fire and leave the fragments of the supper on the table for the souls of the dead.” (Ibid.. p. 351.)

The Indian prays to the spirits of his forefathers; the Chinese religion is largely “ancestor-worship;” and the rites paid to the dead ancestors, or lares, held the Roman family together.” ("Anthropology,” p. 351.)

We find the Indian practice of burying the dead in a sitting posture in use among the Nasamonians, tribe of Libyans.  Herodotus, speaking of the wandering tribes of Northern Africa, says, “They bury their dead according to the fashion of the Greeks. . . .  They bury them sitting, and are right careful, when the sick man is at the point of giving up the ghost, to make him sit, and not let him die lying down.”