An interesting article on how we as great apes deal with death.
I've always said that we are the only species whose members know they’re going to die. I’m not sure that’s true, of course, but there have been suggestions that some mammals, even if they don’t grasp their own personal mortality, at least understand that death is something final and unique.
Two years ago, Natalie Angier of The New York Times had a piece on this issue, prompted by the death of a baby gorilla in a German zoo whose mother continued to carry the corpse for days, refusing to surrender it to keepers. Angier mentioned work by Karen McComb and her colleagues showing that African elephants preferentially fondle the bones of dead elephants as opposed to bones from other species.
The latest issue of Current Biology has two thanatological notes (thanatology is the scientific study of death) suggesting that chimps, our closest relatives, perceive death as something unique.
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