A paper by Dr Alecia Carter (see profile), titled Baboon thanatology: responses of filial and non-filial group members to infants' corpses was published back in March 2020.
What is the paper about?
Every living animal dies. Yet we know next to nothing about how animals respond to the deaths of others, even in our closest living relatives, the primates. What we do know is remarkable: many priate mothers will carry the corpse of their infant after death. To better understand this behaviour, over a period of 13 years at the Tsaobis Baboon Project in Namibia, we recorded mothers' and other's responses to the corpses of infants. Like other primates, baboons mothers cared for the corpses of their infants by transporting and grooming them. However, we also witnessed male 'protection' of some corpses, and unrelated individuals caring for an infant's corpse. These behaviours remain mysterious, but studying them could help us to understand the evolutionary origins of grief and the awareness of death.
You can read more about the paper over at IFLScience, and the original paper can be access over at Royal Society Open Science.
