Name: What crows teach us about death | Kaeli Swift
Uploaded: 2020-11-24T18:25:17.000Z
Duration: 13 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Whether we want to or not, humans spend a great deal of time

Adverbs of manner

And it's possible we've been doing so since shortly after homo sapiens

After all, the first intentional human burial

is thought to have occurred around 100,000 years ago.

What might those early people have been thinking

as they took the time to dig into the earth,

Were they trying to protect it from scavengers

Or did they just not want to have to look at a dead body?

we may never know for sure what those early people were thinking,

but one thing we do know is that humans are far from alone

including the corvids, the family of birds

that houses the crows, ravens, magpies and jays,

also seem to pay special attention to their dead.

In fact, the rituals of corvids may have acted as the inspiration

After all, it was the raven that God sent down

to teach Cain how to bury his slain brother Abel.

But despite this clear recognition by early people that other animals

it's only fairly recently that science has really turned its attention

In fact, a formal name for this field -- comparative thanatology --

In this growing field, we are beginning to appreciate what a rich place

the natural world is with respect to how other animals interact with their dead,

and it's in this growing body of knowledge

that that time machine to our early ancestors might be possible.

So what are we learning in this growing field?

Well, right now we can split our understanding into two main groups.

In the first, we have animals that display stereotyped, predictable behaviors

and for whom much of what we understand about them

This group includes things like the social insects --

and for all of these animals, colony hygiene is of critical importance,

and so as a result these animals display rigorous undertaking behaviors

For example, they may physically remove carcasses from the colony.

We see similar hygiene-driven responses in some colony-living mammals.

Rats, for example, will reliably bury cage-mates

In our other group, we have animals that display more variable,

This is the animals whose death behaviors

I suspect might be more familiar to folks.

which are well-known for their attendance to their dead,

In fact, they're even known to be attracted

which display a wide variety of behaviors around their dead,

And that's actually a behavior we've seen in a number of animals,

the orca in the resident J pod in the Puget Sound,

but it offers far more questions than it does answers.

For example, why did Tahlequah carry her calf

Was she more confused by her unresponsive infant?

Or is this behavior just less rare in orcas

it's difficult to do the kinds of experimental studies

in an animal like an orca, or many of these other large mammals,

that might elucidate those kinds of questions.

So instead, science is turning to an animal whose behaviors around death

crows also seem to pay special attention to their dead.

Typically, this manifests as the discovering bird alarm calling,

followed by the recruitment of other birds to the area

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What crows teach us about death | Kaeli Swift

stuff

weird

fascinating

treat