Humans are not the only species to bury their dead; the practice has been observed in chimpanzees, elephants, and possibly dogs.
The ritual of burying the dead is usually considered a unique human characteristic, one of the behaviors that distinguishes us from other animals. However, the idea that other animals can bury the dead is not new. Pliny believes that in addition to humans, ants are the only animal that buries the dead with funerals. We now know that certain types of ants bury the dead ants they find, regardless of whether they are from their own colonies, and the worker ants seem to be genetically programmed to remove dead and sick animals from their nests.
Recently, there is evidence that chimpanzees take care of sick and dying army members, and they have been observed in the wild covering the bodies of dead army members with leaves and branches. Similarly, in 2004, it was observed that an elephant in Kenya trampled the dead mother and child with leaves before leaving the scene. As we all know, elephants bury the dead and stay next to the corpse after a period of time, behaving similar to human mourning. In fact, the obvious sadness or association of sadness is thought to mean “burial” rather than simply covering or discarding the body.
