“Mothers carrying dead infants is not uncommon in the primate world,” confirms Dawn Starin, a London-based anthropologist who has spent decades studying primates in Africa, Asia, and South America. In her research on red colobus monkeys in Gambia, one female “carried her maggot-riddled infant around with her for days, grooming it, sticking it in the crotches of trees so that she could feed without it slipping to the ground, and never letting any of the others touch it.” Encounters like these left her with the impression that an infant is treated like an extension of the mother’s body, a real
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