ArticleRoyal Society open science2020
Baboon thanatology: responses of filial and non-filial group members to infants' corpses.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Primate carcass ecology in the Urema Rift, Mozambique.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Article
- Post-mortem infant-directed behaviours in wild Guinea baboons.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Article
- Carrying the dead: behavior of a primiparous capuchin monkey mother and other individuals towards a dead infant.Primates; journal of primatology · 2025Article
- Cycle length flexibility: is the duration of sexual receptivity associated with changes in social pressures?Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Dead-infant carrying by chimpanzee mothers in the Budongo Forest.Primates; journal of primatology · 2022Article
- Maternal caretaking behavior towards a dead juvenile in a wild, multi-level primate society.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Why do some primate mothers carry their infant's corpse? A cross-species comparative study.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Article
- Are They Really Trying to Save Their Buddy? The Anthropomorphism of Animal Epimeletic Behaviours.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2020Article
- Reactions to infant death by wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: prolonged carrying, non-mother carrying, and partial maternal cannibalism.Primates; journal of primatology · 2020Article
- Why chimpanzees carry dead infants: an empirical assessment of existing hypotheses.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
What do animals know of death? What can animals' responses to death tell us about the evolution of species' minds, and the origins of humans' awareness of death and dying? A recent surge in interest in comparative thanatology may provide beginnings of answers to these questions. Here, we add to the comparative thanatology literature by reporting 12 cases of group members' responses to infants' deaths, including 1 miscarriage and 2 stillbirths, recorded over 13 years in wild Namibian chacma baboons. Wild baboons' responses to dead infants were similar to other primates: in general, the mother of the infant carried the infants' corpse for varying lengths of time (less than 1 h to 10 days) and tended to groom the corpses frequently, though, as in other studies, considerable individual differences were observed. However, we have not yet observed any corpse carriage of very long duration (i.e. greater than 20 days), which, though rare, occurs in other Old World monkeys and chimpanzees. We hypothesize this is due to the costs of carrying the corpse over the greater daily distances travelled by the Tsaobis baboons. Additionally, in contrast to other case reports, we observed male friends' 'protection' of the infant corpse on three occasions. We discuss the implications of these reports for current questions in the field.
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