In February 2024, published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa reported on an intriguing finding: five corpses of Asian elephant calves had been found buried within irrigation drains of various tea plantations in northern Bengal, India. While elephant graveyards are present in popular culture, researchers tend to dismiss them as a myth. In fact, this is the first time that burials like these have been reported in a scientific journal. And yet, according to the authors, Parveen Kaswan and Akashdeep Roy, the elephant conservation community in India has long been aware that these pachyderms sometimes bury their young. Could these, then, be true elephant graveyards?
Although these animals weren鈥檛 witnessed burying the calves, several circumstances point to them as the ones responsible. The corpses were all found in the same position: buried belly up with their four legs protruding from the soil. This suggests that they were placed that way intentionally, rather than having simply fallen into the trench and died. Moreover, the carcasses had contusions on their backs, suggesting someone had dragged them across the ground until reaching that particular destination, where the geography of the tea plantations may facilitate burial. Elephant footprints and excrements were also found near the graves, and in at least two of the cases nearby humans reported having heard elephant calls at the time when the burials would have been taking place.
While none of this evidence is conclusive, my research suggests that it would not be an entirely surprising finding. Elephants, after all, are excellent candidates for a concept of death.
To see this, we need to first consider what understanding death means. Although the concept of death to demanding cognitive capacities, such as abstract thought, a theory of mind, or the concept of absence, that understanding death minimally just requires grasping the notions of non-functionality and irreversibility. That is, in order to comprehend that someone has died, you just need to grasp that she is not doing the sorts of things that living beings of her kind typically do and that this is a permanent, irreversible state.
What would it take for an animal to reach such an understanding? Biologist Antonio Osuna-Mascar贸 and I that the concept of death emerges in nature as a result of the interaction of three causal factors. The first of these is cognition: while a minimal concept of death is not very cognitively demanding, we do need a certain level of intellectual complexity to be present for an animal to grasp the notions of non-functionality and irreversibility. The second one is emotion: one cannot learn about death from one quick look at a corpse 鈥� instead, one must pay attention to it for some length of time to understand what is going on, and our in turn is modulated by our emotions. The last causal factor is experience: we can assume that no animal is born with a concept of death (though some may have that prime them to pay attention to cues of death), and so an animal needs to accumulate a series of experiences with death in order to learn about it.
These three causal factors must all be in place for an animal to develop a concept of death, but the high presence of one can compensate for the relative absence of another. So, for example, a being with many experiences with death might end up learning about it even if she鈥檚 not particularly bright, and conversely, an exceptionally smart animal might need few experiences with death to grasp it. Likewise, losing someone that you are extremely bonded to might cause you to stay close to the corpse and pay so much attention to it that that single experience might suffice to set you on the journey to a concept of death.
Coming back to elephants, they are good candidates for a concept of death because they tend to have a high level of these three causal factors. First, as everyone knows, elephants are pretty smart. They boast the of all terrestrial mammals and one of the largest relative to their body size. They have , being able to remember familiar conspecifics for years through scent alone. They can of members of their herd, being aware while they travel of whether they are absent, in front of them, or behind them, which shows remarkable working memory. Recent has shown that African elephants address each other with name-like calls that are specific to individuals. But most importantly, they seem to be keenly aware of the typical behaviours of their conspecifics, which allows them to detect when an individual is displaying anomalous behaviour. There have been many cases reported of elephants who is distressed or who are lost or have difficulties moving. In one , a dying matriarch was attended to by an unrelated female, who actively tried to help her stand upright and appeared visibly stressed when she couldn鈥檛 help her. The ability to detect when an individual is displaying atypical behaviour is a first step in grasping the absence of behaviour that comes with death.
The emotional factor is also going to be quite high in them. Elephants appear to be fascinated by dead conspecifics, with from individuals from various families. Experimental research has shown that, while they鈥檙e in the remains of conspecifics, the bones of other animals garner very little attention. There are further reasons to think that these pachyderms are going to be especially emotionally invested in the deaths of calves. They have one of the longest pregnancies in the animal kingdom (). If we factor in the fact that calves develop relatively slowly, each baby amounts to a huge resource investment, which is why elephant mothers devote great levels of care to their own and , which makes it more likely that they will reach maturity. Unfortunately, around die in their first five years of life, while they are still dependent on the group鈥檚 care. These deaths are likely to generate very intense emotions.
In addition to this, elephants will tend to accumulate a high number of experiences with death. They are very long-lived animals, with Asian ones having a of around sixty years. This, added to the high mortality rates in nature and their powerful memories, makes it very likely that they will encounter death several times throughout their lives and will be able to recall what the phenomenon entails.
Elephants, therefore, will tend to have the cognition, emotions, and experiences necessary to acquire a concept of death. So, while the case of the Indian burials remains a mystery, it鈥檚 not outlandish to suppose that the elephants understood what had had happened to the calves, and for reasons yet unknown to us, they decided to bury them.
Susana Mons贸 is associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science at the National Distance Education University in Madrid. She is the author of Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.