Abstract
A key feature that seems to separate humans and other species is humans’ ability to conceive of death. Although other species also respond differently to deceased individuals in their groups, we do not yet know what they understand about what has happened or at what point, if ever, they understand that another individual is gone permanently. Moreover, in many cases, we do not even know the degree to which other species possess the concepts that are necessary to understand these abstract concepts (i.e., inevitability, self, other, agency, absence, metacognition, and the ability to mentally time travel). However, pinning this down is important for several reasons. First, if we are to understand how our own conceptions of and reactions to death evolved, we need to understand other species as well, even though they will not likely be the same as humans. On the flip side, understanding how other species respond to death will also inform our understanding of their cognition and behavior, providing a window into abilities that have been difficult to empirically measure. In this chapter, we first consider some of the necessary cognitive abilities for humans’ conception of death, then discuss the extant evidence in other species (primarily nonhuman primates), and end with a consideration of the challenges facing our understanding of death and how solving these will concurrently address similar challenges in other areas of comparative psychology.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Whether this is because they are consistent with one another or because they are consistent with what we know as humans, and therefore project on to what we see in other species, is a different question that we will ignore in this chapter.
- 2.
The mourning by researchers is such that many primate centers, including those where we have worked, have traditions that mark the passing of any individual, ranging from making footprints of the deceased individual for each staff member to keep to planting of apple trees or leaving a permanent marker in a memorial area. One of us heard a researcher we work with tell a science writer that losing an ape you had a relationship with was somewhere between losing a beloved family dog and your child.
- 3.
We thank all of our colleagues who shared their thoughts with us.
- 4.
In captivity, infants may be removed to a nursery in contexts in which maternal care or adoption is impossible, but these occur primarily in contexts in which death was likely, making this a poor control condition.
References
Alvarez, S., Di Fiore, A., Champion, J., Pavelka, M. S., Páez, J., & Link, A. (2015). Male-directed infanticide in spider monkeys (Ateles spp.). Primates, 56, 173–181.
Anderson, J. R., & Gallup Jr., G. G. (2011). Which primates recognize themselves in mirrors? PLoS Biology, 9(3), 1–3.
Anderson, J. R., & Gallup Jr., G. G. (2015). Mirror self-recognition: A review and critique of attempts to promote and engineer self-recognition in primates. Primates, 56, 317–326.
Anderson, J. R., Gillies, A., & Lock, L. C. (2010). Pan thanatology. Current Biology, 20(8), R349–R351.
Andrews, K. (2018). Apes track false beliefs but might not understand them. Learning & Behavior, 46, 3–4.
Apperly, I. A. (2008). Beyond simulation-theory and theory-theory: Why social cognitive neuroscience should use its own concepts to study “theory of mind.”. Cognition, 107, 266–283.
Atsumi, T., & Nagasaka, Y. (2015). Perception of chasing in squirrel monkeys (saimiri sciureus). Animal Cognition, 18, 1243–1253.
Bartal, I., Decety, J., & Mason, P. (2011). Empathy and pro-social behavior in rats. Science, 334, 1427–1430.
Bartlett, T. Q., Sussman, R. W., & Cheverud, J. M. (1993). Infant killing in primates: A review of observed cases with specific reference to the sexual selection hypothesis. American Anthropologist, 95, 958–990.
Beehner, J. C., & Bergman, T. J. (2008). Infant mortality following male takeovers in wild geladas. American Journal of Primatology, 70, 1152–1159.
Benatar, D. (2017). The human predicament: A candid guide to life’s biggest questions. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Beran, M. J. (2016). “Zeroing” in on mathematics in the monkey brain. Learning & Behavior, 44, 4–6.
Berman, C. M. (1982). The social development of an orphaned rhesus infant on Cayo Santiago: Male care, foster mother-orphan interaction and peer interaction. American Journal of Primatology, 3, 131–141.
Biro, D., Humle, T., Koops, K., Sousa, C., Hayashi, M., & Matsuzawa, T. (2010). Chimpanzee mothers at Bossou, Guinea, carry the mummified remains of their dead infants. Current Biology, 20(8), R351–R352.
Bliss-Moreau, E., & Brosnan, S. F. (in review). The emotional lives of non-human animals. In A. Scarantino (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of emotion theory. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis/Routledge.
Bonnie, K., Horner, V., Whiten, A., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2006). Spread of arbitrary customs among chimpanzees: A controlled experiment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 274, 367–372.
Botero, M., MacDonald, S. E., & Miller, R. S. (2012). Anxiety-related behavior of orphan chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) at Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Primates, 54, 21–26.
Bourjade, M., Call, J., Pele, M., Maumy, M., & Dufour, V. (2014). Bonobos and orangutans, but not chimpanzees, flexibly plan for the future in a token-exchange task. Animal Cognition, 17, 1329–1340.
Brosnan, S. F., Houser, D., Leimgruber, K., Xiao, E., Chen, T., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2010). Competing demands of prosociality and equity in monkeys. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(4), 279–288.
Bruck, J. (2018). Grief in animals: does an orca have to be a human with fins for us to care? Retrieved August 17, 2018, from http://awesomeocean.com/top-stories/grief-animals-orca-human-fins-us-care/
Burge, T. (2018). Do infants and nonhuman animals attribute mental states? Psychological Review, 125, 409–434.
Buttelmann, D., Buttelmann, F., Carpenter, M., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Great apes distinguish true from false beliefs in an interactive helping task. PLoS One, 12, 13.
Byrne, R. W. (2007). Culture in great apes: using intricate complexity in feeding skills to trace the evolutionary origin of human technical prowess. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362, 577–585.
Call, J., & Carpenter, M. (2001). Do apes and children know what they have seen? Animal Cognition, 3, 207–220.
Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (1999). A nonverbal false belief task: the performance of children and great apes. Child development, 70(2), 381–95.
Campbell, M. W., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2011). In-group-out-group bias in contagious yawning by chimpanzees supports link to empathy. PLoS One, 6(4), e18283.
Cäsar, C., & Young, R. J. (2008). A case of adoption in a wild group of black-fronted titi monkeys (Callicebus nigrifrons). Primates, 49, 146–148.
Chen, Q., Panksepp, J. B., & Lahvis, G. P. (2009). Empathy is moderated by genetic background in mice. PLoS One, 4(2), e4387.
Choe, D.-H., Millar, J. G., & Rust, M. K. (2009). Chemical signals associated with life inhibit necrophoresis in Argentine ants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 106(20), 8251–8255.
Claidière, N., Whiten, A., Mareno, M. C., Messer, E. J. E., Brosnan, S. F., Hopper, L. M., et al. (2015). Selective and contagious prosocial resource donation in capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees and humans. Scientific Reports, 5, 7631.
Clayton, N. S. (2017). Episodic-like memory and mental time travel in animals. In J. Call, G. M. Burghardt, I. M. Pepperberg, C. T. Snowdon, & T. Zentall (Eds.), APA handbook of comparative psychology: Perception, learning, and cognition (Vol. 2, pp. 227–243). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Culot, L., Lledo-Ferrer, Y., Hoelscher, O., Lazo, F. J. J. M., Huynen, M., & Heymann, E. W. (2011). Reproductive failure, possible maternal infanticide, and cannibalism in wild moustached tamarins Saguinus mystax. Primates, 52, 179–186.
Darwin, C. (1998/1899). The expression of the emotions in man and animals (Third). London: HarperCollins.
de Blois, S. T., Novak, M. A., & Bond, M. (1998). Object permanence in orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and squirrel monkeys (Saimiri sciureus). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112, 137–152.
de Lathouwers, M., & van Elsacker, L. (2007). Successful behavioural adaptation of an orphaned juvenile Bonobo Pan paniscus: a case study at the Primate Park Apenheul, the Netherlands. International Zoo Yearbook, 41, 176–182.
de Veer, M. W., & Van den Bos, R. (1999). A critical review of methodology and interpretation of mirror self-recognition research in nonhuman primates. Animal Behaviour, 58, 459–468.
de Waal, F. B. M. (1982). Chimpanzee politics: Power and sex among apes. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
de Waal, F. B. M. (2011). What is an animal emotion? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1224, 191–206.
de Waal, F. B. M., & Seres, M. (1997). Propagation of handclasp grooming among captive chimpanzees. American Journal of Primatology, 43, 339–346.
Dunham, N. T., & Opere, P. O. (2016). A unique case of extra-group infant adoption in free-ranging Angola black and white colobus monkeys (Colobus angolensis palliatus). Primates, 57, 187–194.
Eaton, T., Hutton, R., Leete, J., Lieb, J., Robeson, A., & Vonk, J. (2018). Bottoms-up! Rejecting top-down human-centered approaches in comparative psychology. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 31. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/11t5q9wt.
Eckert, J., Rakoczy, H., & Call, J. (2017). Are great apes able to reason from multi-item samples to populations of food items? American Journal of Primatology, 79, 1–14.
Emery, N. J., & Clayton, N. S. (2004). The mentality of crows: Convergent evolution of intelligence in corvids and apes. Science, 306, 1903–1907.
Etienne, A. S. (1984). The meaning of object permanence at different zoological levels. Human Development, 27, 309–320.
Fashing, P. J., Nguyen, N., Barry, T. S., Goodale, C. B., Burke, R. J., Jones, S. C. Z., et al. (2011). Death among geladas (Theropithecus gelada): A broader perspective on mummified infants and primate thanatology. American Journal of Primatology, 73, 405–409.
Flavell, J. H. (1999). Cognitive development: Children’s knowledge about the mind. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 21–45.
Fruteau, C., Range, F., & Noë, R. (2010). Infanticide risk and infant defence in multi-male free-ranging sooty mangabeys Cercocebus atys. Behavioural Processes, 83, 113–118.
Goodall, J. (1986). The chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Goodall, J. (1990). Through a window: My thirty years with the chimpanzees of Gombe. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., Solomon, S., Simon, L., & Breus, M. (1994). Role of consciousness and accessibility of death-related thoughts in mortality salience effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 627–637.
Hamilton, W. J., Busse, C., & Smith, K. S. (1982). Adoption of infant orphan chacma baboons. Animal Behaviour, 30, 29–34.
Hampton, R. (2018). Parallel overinterpretation of behavior of apes and corvids. Learning & Behavior. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-018-0330-5
Harvell, L. A., & Nisbette, G. S. (Eds.). (2016). Denying death: An interdisciplinary approach to terror management theory. New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Hauser, M. D. (1998). A nonhuman primate’s expectations about object motion and destination: The importance of self-propelled movement and animacy. Developmental Science, 1, 31–37.
Hernandez-Lallement, J., van Wingerden, M., Marx, C., Srejic, M., & Kalenscher, T. (2015). Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 8, 443.
Heyes, C. (2017). Apes submentalise. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 1–2.
Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, M. (1988). Adaptive significance of infanticide in primates. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 3(5), 102–105.
Hirata, S., Fuwa, K., & Myowa, M. (2017). Chimpanzees recognize their own delayed self-image. Royal Society Open Science, 4, 170370.
Hobaiter, C., Schel, A. M., Langergraber, K., & Zuberbühler, K. (2014). ‘Adoption’ by maternal siblings in wild chimpanzees. PLoS One, 9(8), e103777.
Horn, L., Scheer, C., Bugnyar, T., & Massen, J. J. M. (2016). Proactive prosociality in a cooperatively breeding corvid, the azure-winged magpie (Cyanopica cyana). Biology Letters, 12, 20160649.
Horner, V., Carter, J. D., Suchak, M., & de Waal, F. B. M. (2011). Spontaneous prosocial choice by chimpanzees. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(33), 13847–13851.
House, B. R., Silk, J. B., Lambeth, S. P., & Schapiro, S. J. (2014). Task design influences prosociality in captive chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). PLoS ONE, 9(9), e103422.
Howard, D. F., & Tschinkel, W. R. (1976). Aspects of necrophoric behavior in the red imported fire ant, Solenopsis invicta. Behaviour, 56, 157–180.
Howard, S. R., Avarguès-Weber, A., Garcia, J. E., Greentree, A. D., & Dyer, A. G. (2018). Numerical ordering of zero in honey bees. Science, 360, 1124–1126.
Hrdy, S. B. (1999). Mother nature: A history of mothers, infants, and natural selection. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Jaakkola, K. (2014). Do animals understand invisible displacement? A critical review. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 128, 225–239.
Janson, C. H., & van Schaik, C. P. (2000). The behavioural ecology of infanticide by males. In C. P. van Schaik & C. H. Janson (Eds.), Infanticide by males and it’s Implications (pp. 469–494). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Kabadayi, C., & Osvath, M. (2017). Ravens parallel great apes in flexible planning for tool-use and bartering. Science, 357, 202–204.
Kano, F., Krupenye, C., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Submentalizing cannot explain belief-based action anticipation in apes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 633–634.
Kaplan, J. (1974). Responses of mother squirrel monkeys to dead infants. Primates, 14, 89–81.
King, B. J. (2013). How animals grieve. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kooriyama, T. (2009, December). The death of a newborn chimpanzee at Mahale: Reactions of its mother and other individuals to the body. Pan Africa News, 16(2)4.
Kornell, N. (2009). Metacognition in humans and animals. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 11–15.
Krupenye, C., Kano, F., Hirata, S., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2016). Great apes anticipate that other individuals will act according to false beliefs. Science, 354, 110–113.
Langford, D. J., Crager, S. E., Shehzad, Z., Smith, S. B., Sotocinal, S. G., Levenstadt, J. S., et al. (2006). Social modulation of pain as evidence for empathy in mice. Science, 312, 1967–1970.
Li, T., Ren, B., Li, D., Zhang, Y., & Li, M. (2012). Maternal responses to dead infants in Yunnan snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus bieti) in the Baimaxueshan Nature Reserve, Yunnan, China. Primates, 53, 127–132.
Lillard, A. S., Zeljo, A., Curenton, S., & Kaugars, A. S. (2000). Children’s understanding of the animacy constraint on pretense. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 46, 21–44.
Maréchal, L., Levy, X., Meints, K., & Majolo, B. (2017). Experience-based human perception of facial expressions in Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus). PeerJ, 5, e3413. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3413
Marticorena, D. C. W., Ruiz, A. M., Mukerji, C., Goddu, A., & Santos, L. R. (2011). Monkeys represent others’ knowledge but not their beliefs. Developmental Science, 14, 1406–1416.
Matsuzawa, T. (1997). Reviewed Article: The death of an infant chimpanzee at Bossou, Guinea. Pan Africa News, 4, 4–6.
Merritt, D. J., Rugani, R., & Brannon, E. M. (2009). Empty sets as part of the numerical continuum: Conceptual precursors to the zero concept in rhesus monkeys. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 258–269.
Mitani, J. C., Watts, D. P., & Amsler, S. J. (2006). Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees. Current Biology, 20(12), R507–R508.
Nakamichi, M., Koyama, N., & Jolly, A. (1996). Maternal response to dead and dying infants in wild troops of ring-tailed lemurs at the Berenty Reserve, Madagascar. International Journal of Primatology, 17, 505–523.
Nieder, A. (2016). Representing something out of nothing: The dawning of zero. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20, 830–842.
Nishida, T., Haraiwa-Hasegawa, M., & Takahata, Y. (1985). Group extinction and female transfer in wild chimpanzees in the Mahale National Park, Tanzania. Zeitschrift Fur Tierpsychologie, 67, 284–301.
Okuyama, S., Kuki, T., & Mushiake, H. (2015). Representation of the numerosity “zero” in the parietal cortex of the monkey. Scientific Reports, 5, 10059.
Osvath, M., & Persson, T. (2013). Great apes can defer exchange: A replication with different results suggesting future oriented behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 8.
Pepperberg, I. M. (2006). Grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus) numerical abilities: Addition and further experiments on a zero-like concept. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 1–11.
Pepperberg, I. M., & Gordon, J. D. (2005). Number comprehension by a grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus), including a zero-like concept. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119, 197–209.
Perry, S., & Manson, J. (2008). Manipulative monkeys: The capuchins of Lomas Barbudal. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Poulin-Doubois, D., Lepage, A., & Ferland, D. (1996). Infants’ concept of animacy. Cognitive Development, 11, 19–36.
Povinelli, D. J., & Simon, B. B. (1998). Young children’s understanding of briefly versus extremely delayed images of the self: Emergence of the autobiographical stance. Developmental Psychology, 34, 188–194.
Povinelli, D. J., Landry, A. M., Theall, L. A., Clark, B. R., & Castille, C. M. (1999). Development of young children’s understanding that the recent past is causally bound to the present. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1426–1439.
Povinelli, D. J., Bering, J. M., & Giambrone, S. (2000). Toward a science of other minds: Escaping the argument by analogy. Cognitive Science, 24, 509–541.
Pradhan, G. R., Engelhardt, A., van Schaik, C. P., & Maestripieri, D. (2006). The evolution of female copulation calls in primates: A review and a new model. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 59, 333–343.
Premack, D., & Woodruff, G. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, 515–526.
Preuschoft, S., & van Hooff, J. A. R. A. M. (1995). Homologizing primate facial displays: A critical review of methods. Folia Primatologica, 65, 121–137.
Pruetz, J. D., Ontl, K. B., Cleaveland, E., Lindshield, S., Marshack, J., & Wessling, E. G. (2017). Intragroup lethal aggression in west African chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus): Inferred killing of a former alpha male at Fongoli, Senegal. International Journal of Primatology, 38, 31–57.
Rosenblatt, A., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Pyszczynski, T., & Lyon, D. (1989). Evidence for terror management theory: I. The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who violate or uphold cultural values. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 681–690.
Rosenson, L. M. (1977). The response of some prosimian primate mothers to their own anesthetized infants. Primates, 18, 579–588.
Santini, L. (2011). Conflictual behavior in a lemur mother toward a dying infant. Lemur News, 16, 26–27.
Scarry, C. J., & Tujague, M. P. (2012). Consequences of lethal intragroup aggression and alpha male replacement on intergroup relations and home range use in tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella nigritus). American Journal of Primatology, 74, 804–810.
Schmelz, M., Grueneisen, S., Kabalak, A., Jost, J., & Tomasello, M. (2017). Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114, 7462–7467.
Schwartz, B. L., & Evans, S. (2001). Episodic memory in primates. American Journal of Primatology, 55, 71–85.
Shettleworth, S. J. (2012). Darwin, Tinbergen, and the evolution of comparative cognition. In J. Vonk & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), The oxford handbook of comparative evolutionary psychology (pp. 529–546). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Small, M. F. (1993). Female choices: Sexual behavior of female primates. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Smith, J. D., Shields, W. E., & Washburn, D. A. (2003). The comparative psychology of uncertainty monitoring and metacognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 26, 317–373.
Sugiyama, Y., Kurita, H., Matsui, T., Kimoto, S., & Shimomura, T. (2009). Carrying of dead infants by Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata) mothers. Anthropological Science, 117, 113–119.
Swartz, K. B. (1997). What is mirror self-recognition in nonhuman primates, and what is it not? In J. G. Snodgrass & R. L. Thompson (Eds.), The self across psychology: Self-recognition, self-awareness, and the self concept; the self across psychology (pp. 65–71). New York, NY: New York Academy of Sciences.
Tecwyn, E. C., Denison, S., Messer, E. J. E., & Buchsbaum, D. (2017). Intuitive probabilistic inference in capuchin monkeys. Animal Cognition, 20, 243–256.
Teichroeb, J. A., Wikberg, E. C., Bădescu, I., Macdonald, L. J., & Sicotte, P. (2012). Infanticide risk and male quality influence optimal group composition for Colobus vellerosus. Behavioral Ecology, 23, 1348–1359.
Thierry, B., & Anderson, J. R. (1986). Adoption in Anthropoid primates. International Journal of Primatology, 7, 191–216.
Tsutsumi, S., Ushitani, T., Tomonaga, M., & Fujita, K. (2012). Infant monkeys’ concept of animacy: The role of eyes and fluffiness. Primates, 53, 113–119.
Uehara, S., & Nyundo, R. (1983). One observed case of temporary adoption of an infant by unrelated nulliparous females among wild chimpanzees in the Mahale Mountains, Tanzania. Primates, 24, 456–466.
van Leeuwen, E. J. C., Mulenga, I. C., Bodamer, M. D., & Cronin, K. A. (2016). Chimpanzees’ responses to the dead body of a 9-year-old group member. American Journal of Primatology, 78, 914–922.
Vonk, J. (2015). Corvid cognition: Something to crow about? Current Biology, 25(2), R69–R71.
Vonk, J. (2016). Apes have eyes to the future. Learning and Behavior, 44, 207–208.
Vonk, J. (2018). Are chimpanzees ‘stuck’ on their ‘selves’ in video? Learning and Behavior, 46, 227–228.
Vonk, J., & MacDonald, S. E. (2002). Natural concept formation in a juvenile gorilla (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) at three levels of abstraction. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, 78, 315–332.
Vonk, J., & MacDonald, S. E. (2004). Levels of abstraction in orangutan (Pongo abelii) categorization. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 118, 3–13.
Vonk, J. & Povinelli, D. J. (2006). Similarity and difference in the conceptual systems of primates: The Unobservability hypothesis. In E. Wasserman and T. Zentall (Eds.) Comparative Cognition: Experimental Explorations of Animal Intelligence. pp.363–387 Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press.
Vonk, J., Jett, S. E., Mosteller, K. W., & Galvan, M. (2013). Natural category discrimination in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) at three levels of abstraction. Learning and Behavior, 41, 271–284.
de Waal, F. (2016). Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Warren, Y., & Williamson, E. A. (2004). Transport of dead infant mountain gorillas by mothers and unrelated females. Zoo Biology, 23, 375–378.
Watts, D. P., Muller, M., Amsler, S. J., Mbabazi, G., & Mitani, J. C. (2006). Lethal intergroup aggression by chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda. American Journal of Primatology, 68, 161–180.
Whilde, J., & Marples, N. (2011). The behavior of a zoo-housed orangutan after the death of its mother. Zoo Biology, 30, 205–211.
Whiten, A., Goodall, J., McGrew, W. C., Nishida, T., Reynolds, V., Sugiyama, Y., et al. (1999). Cultures in chimpanzees. Nature, 399, 682–685.
Whiten, A., Horner, V., & De Waal, F. B. M. (2005). Conformity to cultural norms of tool use in chimpanzees. Nature, 437, 737–740.
Wilson, E. O., Durlach, N. I., & Roth, L. M. (1958). Chemical releasers of necrophoric behavior in ants. Psyche, 65, 108–114.
Wilson, M. L., Boesch, C., Fruth, B., Furuichi, T., Gilby, I. C., Hashimoto, C., et al. (2014). Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts. Nature, 513, 414–417.
Wroblewski, E. E. (2008). An unusual incident of adoption in a wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) population at Gombe National Park. American Journal of Primatology, 7, 995–998.
Yamamoto, S., & Takimoto, A. (2012). Empathy and fairness: Psychological mechanisms for eliciting and maintaining prosociality and cooperation in primates. Social Justice Research, 25, 233–255.
Yang, B., Anderson, J. R., & Li, B.-G. (2016). Tending a dying adult in a wild multi-level primate society. Current Biology, 26(10), R403–R404.
Yao, H., Yu, H., Yang, B., Yang, W., Xu, H., Grueter, C. C., et al. (2016). Male infanticide in the golden snub-nosed monkey (Rhinopithecus roxellana), a seasonally breeding primate. International Journal of Primatology, 37, 175–184.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Brosnan, S.F., Vonk, J. (2019). Nonhuman Primate Responses to Death. In: Shackelford, T.K., Zeigler-Hill, V. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Death. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25466-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25466-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-25465-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-25466-7
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and PsychologyBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)