Sarah Hrdy.

Yes, we’re a lot like other primates, particularly the great apes, with whom we have more than 98 per cent of our genes in common. Yet elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief like Gana’s may reveal less about our shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist. Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and the coming Mothers and Others, said, “We’re talking about primates who have singleton births after long periods of gestation. Each baby represents an enormous investment for the mother.”

Michael Wilson, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota who has studied chimpanzees at Jane Goodall’s research site in Gombe, Tanzania, said chimps were “very different from us in terms of what they understand about death and the difference between the living and the dead.” A mother will try to nurse her dead baby back to life, Wilson said, “but when the infant becomes quite decayed, she’ll carry it by just one leg or sling it over her back in a casual way.” Juvenile chimpanzees display signs of genuine grief when their mothers die. Yet adult chimpanzees rarely react with overt sentimentality to the death of another adult, Wilson said. As a rule, sick or elderly adults go off into the forest to die alone, he said.

For some animals, the death of a conspecific is a little tinkle of the dinner bell. A lion will approach another lion’s corpse, give it a sniff and a lick, and if the corpse is fresh enough, will start to eat it. For others, such as naked mole rats, a corpse is considered dangerous and must be properly disposed of. Honeybees are such compulsive housekeepers that if a mouse or other large creature, drawn by the warmth or promise of honey, happens to make its way into the hive and die inside, the bees, unable to bodily remove it, will embalm it in resin collected from trees.

... contd.