Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Munster Zoo in Germany, held her dead baby, Claudio, for days.

NATALIE ANGIER ESSAY

As anybody who has grieved inconsolably over the death of a loved one can attest, extended mourning is, in part, a perverse kind of optimism. Surely this bottomless, unwavering sorrow will amount to something, goes the thinking . Surely if I keep it up long enough, the person will stop being dead.
Recently the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Munster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings of: You see- Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.
Primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did . For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away. “The only time I was ever mobbed by langurs was when I tried to inspect a baby corpse,” said the primatologist Sarah Hrdy. Only gradually will she allow the distance between herself and the carcass to grow.
Yes, we’re a lot like other primates, particularly the great apes, with whom we have more than 98 percent of our genes in common. Yet elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief like Gana’s may reveal less about our shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist. Dr. Hrdy said it made adaptive sense for a primate mother to hang onto her motionless baby and keep her hopes high for a while. “If the baby wasn’t dead, but temporarily comatose, because it was sick or fallen from the tree, well, it might come back to life,” Dr. Hrdy said.
Michael Wilson, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota , said chimps were “very different from us in terms of what they understand about death and the difference between the living and the dead.” A mother will try to nurse her dead baby back to life, Dr. Wilson said, “but when the infant becomes quite decayed, she’ll carry it by just one leg or sling it over her back in a casual way.”
Juvenile chimpanzees show signs of grief when their mothers die. Yet adult chimpanzees rarely react with overt sentimentality to the death of another adult, Dr. Wilson said.
Researchers have determined that elephants deserve their reputation as exceptionally death-savvy beings . Reporting in the journal Biology Letters, Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in England and her colleagues found that when African elephants were presented with an array of bones and other natural objects, the elephants spent more time exploring the skulls and tusks of elephants than they did anything else .
George Wittemyer of Colorado State University and his colleagues described in Applied Animal Behavior Science the extraordinary reactions of different elephants to the death of one of their prominent matriarchs. “One female stood over the body, rocking back and forth,” Dr.Wittemyer said . “Others raised their foot over her head. Others touched their tusks to hers.
They would do their behaviors, and then leave.” They were saying goodbye, or maybe, Won’t you please come back home?