This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Chimpanzee and bonobo mothers sometimes continue to carry their infants after they have died, a behavior known as infant corpse carrying (ICC). It is widely documented, and many explanations have been proposed, but few have been quantitatively tested.
New University of Oxford research, published in Biology Letters, finds that carrying is likely driven by the strong bond between chimpanzee mothers and their offspring and that the cause of an infant's death is the most consistent explanation for how long its mother carries it. Importantly, these patterns need not mean mothers recognize death as final. The research found that infants that were older when they died, and therefore more closely bonded with their mothers, were carried longer than younger infants and that infants who died from disease were carried longer than those that died through infanticide.
The study brought together data from 83 published cases of ICC across 15 different sites. The cases document mothers who carried their dead infants for only about 30 minutes to as long as 126 days. The average ICC duration was about 11 days.
Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest living relatives. Most experts think our last common ancestor lived between 6 and 8 million years ago, and studying death-related behaviors in these species may provide key insights into the evolutionary origins of human responses to death. The study was conducted by doctoral candidate Reece Hammond and Dr.
Püschel, Wendy James Associate Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology, both at Oxford's School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. Rather than observing one group of chimpanzees, they brought together cases from across the published literature. "By bringing together a large multisite sample of ICC cases from 15 distinct sites, we can draw generalizable conclusions about the behavior at the species level.
This is something that cannot be done by using cases from just one site or subspecies. This means that our findings can be used to make inferences about the evolution of death-related behavior in humans after we diverged from chimpanzees some 6–8 million years ago," said Hammond, a doctoral candidate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography. They tested the data against nine hypotheses for the length of ICC.
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