Carter Alecia J, Baniel Alice, Cowlishaw Guy, Huchard Elise
ISEM, Université de Montpellier, CNRS, IRD, EPHE, Montpellier, France.
Department of Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, WC1H 0BW, London, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2020 Mar 11;7(3):192206. doi: 10.1098/rsos.192206. eCollection 2020 Mar.
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.
动物对死亡了解多少？动物对死亡的反应能告诉我们关于物种心智的进化以及人类对死亡和濒死的认知起源的哪些信息？最近对比较死亡学的兴趣激增或许能为这些问题提供初步答案。在此，我们通过报告在纳米比亚野生 chacma 狒狒群体中 13 年间记录到的 12 起群体成员对幼崽死亡的反应案例（包括 1 次流产和 2 次死产），来丰富比较死亡学的文献。野生狒狒对死亡幼崽的反应与其他灵长类动物相似：一般来说，幼崽的母亲会携带幼崽尸体不同时长（从不到 1 小时到 10 天），并且倾向于频繁梳理尸体，不过，正如其他研究一样，观察到了相当大的个体差异。然而，我们尚未观察到持续时间非常长（即超过 20 天）的尸体携带行为，这种情况虽罕见，但在其他旧世界猴和黑猩猩中会出现。我们推测这是由于 Tsaobis 狒狒每天行进距离更长，携带尸体的成本所致。此外，与其他案例报告不同的是，我们有三次观察到雄性朋友对幼崽尸体的“保护”行为。我们讨论了这些报告对该领域当前问题的影响。
