Read more: “Death: A special report on the inevitable” and see our gallery “The life hereafter: Funeral technology old and new”
PANSY died peacefully one winter’s afternoon, her daughter Rosie and her friends Blossom and Chippy by her side. As she lay dying her companions stroked and comforted her; after she stopped breathing they moved her limbs and examined her mouth to confirm she was dead. Chippy tried twice to revive her by beating on her chest. That night Rosie kept vigil by her mother’s side.
Pansy’s death, in December 2008, sounds peaceful and relatively routine, but in fact it was highly unusual. Captive chimpanzees are rarely allowed to die at “home”; they are usually whisked away and euthanised. But the keepers at Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park in Stirling, UK, decided to let Pansy stay with her loved ones until the last .
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It is hard not to wonder what was going on in the minds of Rosie, Blossom and Chippy before and after Pansy’s death. Is it possible that they felt grief and loss? Did they ponder their own mortality? Until recently these questions would have been considered dangerously anthropomorphic and off-limits. But not any more.
The demise of Pansy is one of many recent observations of chimpanzee deaths, both in captivity and the wild, that are leading to surprising insights about our closest living relatives’ relationship with death. This, in turn, is opening up another, deeper, question: at what point in human evolution did our ancestors develop a modern understanding of death, including awareness of their own mortality? The answer goes much wider than our attitude to death – it may help us to better understand the origin of our unique way of life.
As far as most animals are concerned, a dead body is just an inanimate object. Some species have evolved elaborate-looking behaviours to dispose of bodies – mole rats, for example, drag them into one of their burrow’s latrines and seal it up – but these are practical acts with no deeper purpose or meaning.
Some non-human animals, though, clearly have a more complex relationship with death. Elephants are known to be fascinated with the bones of dead elephants, while dolphins have been observed spending long periods of time with corpses.
No animal, though, arouses interest as much as chimps do. Psychologists and Louise Lock from the University of Stirling, who recorded Pansy’s death, point out that her companions’ responses were “strikingly reminiscent of human responses to peaceful death”, including respect, care, testing for signs of life, attempts to revive, vigil, grief and mourning.
“Chimps’ response to death is strikingly reminiscent of our own”
Similar things have been seen in the rare occasions that death has been observed among wild chimps. Primatologists of the University of California, San Diego, and Fiona Stewart of the University of Cambridge witnessed just such an event in Gombe national park in Tanzania in January 2010. Early one morning, rangers discovered the body of a female chimp, Malaika, who had apparently fallen out of a tree.
When Piel and Stewart arrived at 9.15 am there was a crowd of chimps around Malaika’s body. For the next three and a half hours the pair observed and filmed the scene as a succession of chimps visited the body, while others observed from the trees. Some seemed merely curious, sniffing or grooming the body. Others shook, dragged and beat it as if in frustration and anger. Dominant males performed displays of power around it or even with it; the alpha male threw it into a stream bed. Many made distress calls.
When the body was finally removed by rangers, eight of the chimps rushed to where it had lain and intensively – and excitedly – touched and sniffed the ground. They stayed for 40 minutes, making a chorus of hooting calls before moving off. The last chimp to visit the spot was Malaika’s daughter Mambo.
What are we to make of this? According to Piel, the chimps’ behaviour can be classified into three categories: morbidity, or intense interest in the body, mourning and “social theatre”. And as with Pansy’s death, these are very reminiscent of how we behave.
“The danger is to anthropomorphise, but much of this behaviour is still practised by modern humans,” says , an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies the origins of human burial. “We see in chimps very simple behaviours that have become elaborated into more formal expressions of mourning. It gives us a feel for what we might expect to have been practised by Miocene apes and early protohumans.”
We will never know for sure, of course. But the fossil and archaeological record contains tantalising hints of how this kind of behaviour evolved into modern rituals. And this has become a major question in palaeoanthropology. Our treatment of the dead clearly falls into the category of “symbolic activity”, akin to language, art and the other things that make modern humans unique. These were all thought to have emerged around 40,000 years ago, but recent discoveries have tentatively pushed this back to 100,000 years or more.
Anything resembling mortuary practices predating 40,000 years ago used to be dismissed as an artefact. But not any more, says Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France. “Most archaeologists now accept that modern humans, Neanderthals and possibly other archaic hominins were engaged in mortuary practices well before 40,000 years ago.”
Hominids on a hillside
The earliest signs are very old indeed. In 1975, on a steep grassy hillside near Hadar, Ethiopia, palaeontologists discovered 13 specimens of our 3.2 million-year-old ancestor Australopithecus afarensis – nine adults, two juveniles and two infants – all within touching distance of one another and apparently deposited around the same time. How they got there is a mystery. There is no evidence of a flash flood or similar catastrophe that could have killed all of them at once. There is no sign that the bones had been chewed by predators. They are, as discoverer Donald Johanson later wrote, “just hominids littering a hillside” (see diagram)
Last year, partly in light of chimp research, Pettitt proposed a new explanation: the bodies were left there deliberately in an act of “structured abandonment”. That doesn’t mean burial, or anything with symbolic or religious meaning. “It was probably just the need to get rid 0f a rotting corpse,” says Pettitt. Even so, it represents a significant cognitive advance over what is seen in chimpanzees, who leave their dead where they fall – perhaps the first stirring of something human. “It could be recognition that the appropriate place for the corpses is not among the living – a first formal division between the living and the dead,” says Pettitt.
Barring new discoveries it will be impossible to confirm that australopithecines deposited their dead in a special place. But by half a million years ago the evidence is much clearer.
Sima de los Huesos – the pit of bones – was discovered in the 1980s at the bottom of a limestone shaft in a cave in the Atapuerca Mountains of northern Spain. It contained the remains of at least 28 archaic humans, most likely Homo heidelbergensis, a probable ancestor of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
How did they get there? An obvious possibility is that they accidentally fell down the shaft, but that seems unlikely from the way the bones fractured. “It doesn’t look like a natural accumulation,” says Pettitt. Most of the skeletons are adolescent males or young men, and many show signs of bone disease or deformity.
According to Pettitt the best explanation is that they were deliberately placed at the top of the shaft after death and then gradually slumped in. If so, this is the earliest evidence of funerary caching, or the designation of a specific place for the dead – perhaps, in this case, for deformed outcasts – a further advancement towards the modern conception of death. Once you have designated places for the dead you are clearly treating them as if they still have some kind of social agency. “Once you’ve reached that point you’re on the road to symbolic activity,” says Pettitt.
What did these protohumans understand about death? Did they know that they themselves were mortal? Did they have a concept of an afterlife? “We haven’t got a clue,” says Pettitt.
What we do know is that funerary caching became increasingly common: bodies are found in places that are hard to account for any other way, tucked into fissures and cracks, in hard-to-reach overhangs or at the back of caves.
From funerary caching it is a short conceptual leap to burial – creating artificial niches and fissures to stash the dead. The earliest evidence we have of this is from two caves in Israel – Skhul and Qafzeh – where the skeletons of 120,000-year-old Homo sapiens were found in what are clearly human-made hollows. There is also evidence of Neanderthal burials from around the same time. All this adds to the evidence that humans were on their way to a symbolic culture much earlier than we thought. “Once you start getting deliberate burials I think it’s much more likely that people are thinking in formalised terms, things like life after death,” says Pettitt.
Even so, these burials do not represent a point of no return. Only a handful of such sites are known; compared with the number of people who must have died they are incredibly rare. It appears that burial was for special occasions; most dead people were probably still cached or abandoned.
“Burial was for special occasions; most dead people were cached or abandoned”
It was not until about 14,000 years ago that most people were buried in what we would recognise as cemeteries. Around the same time people were settling in one place and inventing agriculture and religion – it is probably no coincidence that the world’s oldest ceremonial building, Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, was built at that time.
Well before that, however, archaic humans appear to have had a concept of death not unlike ours. Art, language, elaborate funerary practices – they are just expressions of the same thing, says Pettitt. “It’s part of what distinguishes us not only from other animals but from every other type of human that’s gone before.”
