The eyes have it: Chimps are complex creaturesCaptures on camera, it was a tender scene of love and loss.
As the ailing matriarch slipped gently away, she was tended by a small gathering of friends and relatives.
They fondly stroked her head, held her hand and gently fussed around her, ensuring she was comfortable in her final hours.
And when she finally passed, they staged a moving vigil beside her body.
So far, so touching. But what makes the sad death of fiftysomething Pansy truly extraordinary is that she was a chimpanzee.
And so were those so devotedly tending and mourning her.
Indeed, the footage of Pansy’s death from old age at a Scottish safari park in 2008, which was released by scientists for the first time this week, amounts to an extraordinary - and deeply unsettling - insight into the inner world of humankind’s closest living relative.
It is often claimed that while we share 99 per cent of our DNA with chimpanzees, they are incapable of feeling the complex emotions we humans so often take for granted. This new footage, however, will force us to reconsider.
For the recording reveals that as Pansy, the oldest chimpanzee in the UK, started to weaken - and was given a shot of pain-killers by her human keepers at the Blair Drummond Safari Park - her fellow apes huddled around, and stared intently at her face.
As she grew weaker, the three other chimps - her daughter, and an unrelated male and female - gently lifted her head and shook her shoulders to see if she was dead. The apes kept her clean and comfortable, and looked to see if she was still breathing.
One was filmed gently shaking Pansy, as if to revive her, and they all took turns to affectionately caress her. One clutched her hand. ‘It is difficult to avoid thinking that they were checking for signs of life,’ says Dr Jim Anderson, an animal behaviour scientist at Stirling University.
Alasdair Gillies, a zookeeper at the park, said that observing the dying ape was ‘one of the most moving experiences of my life... they behaved just like a group of human friends would if a friend died’.
Tender: Pansy's friends gather around her as she diesAfter Pansy died, her clearly distraught daughter spent a long, restless night lying next to her late mother’s corpse. And in the days that followed, the whole group was visibly depressed and subdued, and avoided the place where Pansy had passed.
The footage of Pansy’s serene - and scientifically astonishing - death formed the basis for a report published in the journal Current Biology. In the same edition, another extraordinary sequence is described, this one filmed in the wild, in the Bossou forest of Guinea, West Africa.
Pansy the chimp, shortly after she died. Footage taken at a wildlife park showed the animals apparently comforting terminally ill chimpHere, Dr Dora Biro, an Oxford University scientist, witnessed the harrowing demise of two infant chimpanzees. And how, after their death, their mothers carried them around for several weeks.
‘We observed the deaths of two young infants,’ says Dr Biro. ‘In each case, our observations showed a remarkable response by chimpanzee mothers to the death of their infants: they continued to carry the corpses for weeks, even months, following death.’
Naturally, in the fierce West African heat, the babies’ corpses deteriorated rapidly, and in time mummified - drying out completely
Despite this, the mothers cared for them as if they were still alive; they carried them everywhere during the day, groomed them and took them into their nests. But this did not seem to be a case of demented grief or fantasy.
Instead, says Dr Biro, the ape mothers appeared to be using this extended period to ‘let go’ of the infants gradually. They were essentially ‘mourning’.
And it seemed to work. For as the period of grieving went on, the mother chimps gradually became more willing to be apart from the bodies of their dead babies.
Eventually, they appeared to come to terms with the deaths and even allowed other chimps to carry off the corpses.
‘How they perceive death is a fascinating question,’ Biro says, ‘Our observations confirm the existence of an extremely powerful bond between mothers and their offspring which can persist, remarkably, even after the death of the infant.’ This research, she goes on to suggest, may even shed light on the evolution of human grief
Sad: Chippy the chimp looks downcast while clutching a banana in an enclosureThe heart-rending behaviour of these chimpanzees - both in the wild and in captivity - surely goes some way beyond what is often labelled as ‘instinct’ and forces us, yet again, to confront the true nature of animal minds and their possible sentience - self-awareness, a knowledge of their own existence and of the plight of others.
The fact that chimps are clever, of course, is not news. They are closely related to humans, share most of our genes and have big brains. They use tools, can pick up the rudiments of human language (via signing) and have even been trained to communicate using computer touch-screens.
BUT it is only now becoming clear just how extraordinary and advanced the chimp mind is - and how many other species may have brains not entirely unlike our own as well.
In fact, grief, which even a decade ago was thought to be a purely human trait, may not be confined to primates, nor even to mammals.
Earlier this year, for example, evidence was published that magpies, members of the highly intelligent crow family, not only appear to grieve for their dead, but also carry out what can only be described as funeral rituals.
Chippy and Rosie (back) on chimp island. They showed a level of self-awareness, a knowledge of their own existence and of the plight of othersIn one case, a group of four magpies took it in turns to approach the corpse of their dead comrade. Two even flew off to fetch pieces of grass, which they then carefully laid beside their comrade, as if they were funereal wreaths of flowers.
Elephants will also spend weeks guarding a fallen comrade, gently prodding the corpse with their trunks and appearing lost in grief.
Suggesting animals grieve, even animals as clever as chimpanzees, would have been dismissed as hopelessly sentimental just 30 years ago.
But since then, a whole plethora of studies, especially of apes, has forced us to completely reappraise our understanding of the animal mind.
Dr James Anderson (right) from Stirling University with PHD student Louise C Lock (left) and head keeper from Blair Drummond Safari Park Alasdair Gillies (centre). They wrote a report about Pansy's deathIndeed, the more we learn about them, the more we discover that animals are more, not less, like us. Not only are they cleverer than we once believed, they are also more emotional, even self-aware.
They can use tools, language, recognise themselves in mirrors - an important test of cognitive ability - and comprehend the notion of past, present and future (it was once almost the definition of the animal mind that it lived only in the present).
Now, it seems, we have discovered that they may also be able to comprehend, in quite a profound way, the concept of death. And that brings us and our fellow creatures closer together than ever before.
source: dailymail
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