Do Chimps Have An Awareness of Death?
Posted by Science Oxford on May 8, 2010 | comments
So it seems that Chimps’ “awareness of death is probably more highly developed than is often suggested. Fascinating stuff:
Visit this page »Two new studies offer rare glimpses into how chimpanzees deal with the deaths of those closest to them, scientists say.
Chimps’ “awareness of death is probably more highly developed than is often suggested. It may be related to their sense of self-awareness, shown through phenomena such as self-recognition and empathy,” said said James Anderson of the University of Stirling in the U.K., who collaborated in one of the studies.
In that research, Anderson and colleagues described the final hours and death of an older female chimp living in a small group at a U.K. safari park as captured on video. In the other study, scientists watched as two chimp mothers in the wild carried their infants’ mummified remains for weeks after they were lost to an illness.
Researchers have posted videos from both studies online. Both studies are published in the April 27 issue of the journal Current Biology.
Few have witnessed chimps’ response at the moment a member of their group dies, Anderson said. Mother chimps have been known to carry their dead infants, he noted, and some observers have seen the commotion that follows when an adult chimp is lost to some sort of sudden trauma.
“In contrast to the frenzied, noisy responses to traumatic adult deaths, the chimpanzees witnessing the female’s death in our case were mostly calm,” Anderson said.
In the days leading up to the older chimp’s death, the group was very quiet and paid close attention to her, the researchers report. Right before she died, she received much grooming and caressing from the others, who seemed to test her for signs of life as she died. They left her soon after, but her adult daughter returned and remained by her mother all night, scientists said. When keepers removed the mother’s body the next day, the chimpanzees remained subdued and stayed that way for some time. For several days they avoided sleeping on the platform where the female had died, though it was normally a favored sleeping spot.
“In general, we found several similarities between the chimpanzees’ behavior toward the dying female, and their behavior after her death, and some reactions of humans when faced with the demise of an elderly group member or relative,” Anderson said.
In the second study, Dora Biro of the University of Oxford and her colleagues witnessed the deaths of five members, including two infants, of a semi-isolated chimp community that researchers have been studying for over three decades in forests around Bossou, Guinea.
“We observed the deaths of two young infants—both from a flu-like respiratory ailment,” Biro said. “In each case, our observations showed a remarkable response by chimpanzee mothers to the death of their infants: they continued to carry the corpses for weeks, even months, following death.”
In that time, the corpses mummified completely, and the mothers showed care of the bodies reminiscent of their treatment of live infants: they carried them everywhere during their daily activities, groomed them, and took them into their day and night nests during rest times, Biro said. Over this extended period, they also began to “let go” of the infants gradually, Biro added. They allowed other group members to handle them more and more often and tolerated longer periods of separation from them, including instances where other infants and juveniles were allowed to carry off and play with the corpses.
Other group members showed some interest in the bodies, and almost none showed any aversion toward the corpses, according to Biro and colleagues. She noted that a member of her team made very similar observations following the death of one chimpanzee infant in Bossou back in 1992.
“Chimpanzees are humans’ closest evolutionary relatives, and they have already been shown to resemble us in many of their cognitive functions: they empathize with others, have a sense of fairness, and can cooperate to achieve goals,” Biro said. “How they perceive death is a fascinating question, and little data exist so far” concerning it.
“Our observations confirm the existence of an extremely powerful bond between mothers and their offspring which can persist, remarkably, even after the death of the infant, and they further call for efforts to elucidate the extent to which chimpanzees understand and are affected by the death of a close relative or group-mate. This would both have implications for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of human perceptions of death and provide insights into the way chimpanzees interpret the world around them.”
What do you think?