“Under natural conditions, an orangutan, chimpanzee, or gorilla baby nurses for four to seven years and at the outset is inseparable from his mother, remaining in intimate front-to-front contact a hundred percent of the day and night. The earliest a wild chimpanzee mother has ever been observed to voluntarily let a baby out her grasp is three and a half months,” Hrdy notes in her 2009 book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. She includes a picture she once took of a female langur who was so attached to her baby that she faithfully carried around its corpse
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