Chimpanzees in West Africa have been seen carrying their dead for weeks, grooming the body, chasing away flies, and sitting close to the remains — behaviours so close to mourning that researchers still argue over what they mean

Chimpanzees in West Africa have been seen carrying their dead for weeks, grooming the body, chasing away flies, and sitting close to the remains — behaviours so close to mourning that researchers still argue over what they mean

Two days after her daughter died, Vuavua was still waving the flies away from the body. She had been carrying it since the morning it happened, a small limb gripped in one hand as she walked, and she would keep carrying it for another seventeen days. Field researchers in the forest around Bossou, in south-eastern Guinea, filmed the lot. What happened at Bossou A respiratory illness swept the Bossou community in 2003 and killed five chimpanzees, …