Corpse-directed play parenting by a sterile adult female chimpanzee

Pretend play as abstraction: Implications for early development and beyond

Humans are the only species that engages in sustained, complex pretend play. As pretend play is practically ubiquitous across cultures, it might support or afford a context for developmental advances during the juvenile period that have implications for functioning in adulthood. Early in development, learning to separate our thoughts from reality is practiced in pretend play and is associated with changes not just in cognition, but in emotional and social domains as well. Specifically, pretend play affords opportunities to engage in abstractions that could support abilities such as perspective-taking, emotion recognition and regulation, and cooperation and negotiation in childhood. In turn, the abstraction skills promoted by early pretend play might underlie creativity, innovation, and our capacity to feel empathy and moral obligation to others in later childhood and adulthood. In fact, because pretend play affords sharing our abstractions with others, it might be an early context for behaviors that ultimately promote the shared abstractions of human culture itself.

Responses to death and dying: primates and other mammals

Although some definitions of thanatology-broadly definable as the study of death and dying-exclude nonhumans as subjects, recognition of the scientific value of studying how other species respond to sick, injured, dying and dead conspecifics appears to be growing. And whereas earlier literature was largely characterized by anecdotal descriptions and sometimes fanciful interpretations, we now see more rigorous and often quantitative analysis of various behaviors displayed towards conspecifics (and sometimes heterospecifics) at various stages of incapacitation, including death. Studies of social insects in particular have revealed chemical cues that trigger corpse management behaviors, as well as the adaptive value of these behaviors. More recent research on other taxonomic groups (including aquatic and avian species, and mammals) has sought to better document these animals' responses to the dying and dead, to identify influencing factors and underlying mechanisms, and to better understand the physiological, emotional, social and psychological significance of the phenomena observed. This special issue presents original short reports, reviews, and full research articles relating to these topics in New World monkeys, Old World monkeys and apes, as well as equids and proboscids. The range of events, data, hypotheses and proposals presented will hopefully enrich the field and stimulate further developments in comparative evolutionary thanatology.