"For thousands of years, Parsi communities, first in Persia and later in India, placed their deceased on squat stone structures called Towers of Silence, in a practice known as sky burial. Historically, in places like Mumbai, vultures disposed of the bodies—but, in the nineties, the vultures stopped showing up."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-nepal/consider-the-vulture