The New Yorker:

In recent years, researchers have challenged the idea that farewells are uniquely human.

By Shayla Love

In February, a pop-up science column, Annals of Inquiry, is appearing in place of Kyle Chayka’s column, Infinite Scroll. Chayka will return in March.

Jane Goodall, the late primatologist, was known for her imitations of chimpanzee greetings. When she met with Prince Harry, in 2019, she approached him slowly, making panting noises through circular lips. She prompted him to pat her lightly on the head, then reached up for an embrace, making soft hooting sounds. During her career, Goodall observed chimps engaging in more than a thousand such greetings. They sometimes touched their lips together, breathed into one another’s open mouths, or stood on two legs and hugged.

Greetings are found across the animal kingdom. Dogs sniff each other’s rears, African elephants swing their trunks, and songbirds peck at one another’s feathers. Orcas face off in rows before rushing into a sort of whale mosh pit, in which they slap tails, squeak, and whistle. Greeting behaviors are universal enough that they are thought to be ancient, emerging before primate groups evolved. When a spectral bat wraps its wings around another bat in what looks like a hug, it seems to be communicating something that we’re familiar with.

Goodbyes, on the other hand, were long understood as a behavior that only humans perform. In 2013, Goodall watched as a chimpanzee named Wounda, who had almost died at the hands of poachers, was released to a Congolese animal sanctuary. Before Wounda walked into the trees, she hugged Goodall for several seconds. After Goodall died, this past October, some claimed that the video showed Wounda saying goodbye—but the Jane Goodall Institute had only described the embrace as a way of “giving thanks.” Indeed, a survey of researchers at ten wild-chimpanzee sites, co-conducted in 2016 by Lucy Baehren, a Cambridge student, documented numerous chimp greetings but nothing that could be construed as a “leave-taking” behavior. “The idea that nonhuman animals say goodbye did not exist,” Susana Carvalho, a primatologist and a paleoanthropologist at Oxford who became Baehren’s supervisor, told me.

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