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Chimpanzees have a highly developed awareness about deaths, two new studies say. In one study, researchers describe the final hours and moment of death of an older female chimp living in a small group at a British safari park as captured on video. In the other, researchers observed as two chimpanzee mothers in the wild carried their infants’ mummified remains for a period of weeks after they were lost to a respiratory epidemic.
"Several phenomena have at one time or another been considered as setting humans apart from other species: reasoning ability, language ability, tool use, cultural variation, and self-awareness, for example," said James Anderson of the University of Stirling. "But science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other species are nowhere near to being as clearly defined as many people used to think," added Anderson, regarding his observations about the safari park chimps. "The findings we’ve described, along with other observations of how chimpanzees respond to dead and dying companions indicate that their awareness of death is probably more highly developed than is often suggested," said Anderson. 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 said, 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 chimp’s death, the group was very quiet and paid close attention to her, the researchers report. Immediately before she died, she received much grooming and caressing from the others, who appeared 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. When keepers removed the mother’s body the next day, the chimpanzees remained calm and subdued. For several days, they avoided sleeping on the platform where the female had died, even though it was normally a favoured sleeping spot, and remained subdued for some time after the death. "In general, we found several similarities between the chimpanzees’ behaviour toward the dying female, and their behaviour after her death, and some reactions of humans when faced with the demise of an elderly group member or relative, even though chimpanzees do not have religious beliefs or rituals surrounding death," Anderson said. Whatever the reasons for the chimps’ actions, he added, they suggest that chimpanzees have a highly developed awareness of death, according to an Oxford and Stirling release. 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 chimpanzee community that researchers have been studying for more than three decades in the forests surrounding 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 exhibited 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 the periods of rest. Over this extended period, they also began to "let go" of the infants gradually, Biro said. They allowed other individuals within the group to handle them more and more frequently 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. These findings were
published in the recent edition of Current Biology, a Cell
Press publication. — IANS
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