You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hu. Some of us humans can get fixated on death or how we're going to die. But we're not the only species to do so. In her TEDx Salem talk from 2020, wildlife researcher Kaylee Swift offers what we can learn from crows and how they attend to the dead,

or what we might have already learned from them that shows up in our rituals.

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

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

began roaming the landscape. 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, deposit the body,

and carefully cover it up again. Were they trying to protect it from scavengers or stymie the spread

of disease? Were they trying to honor the deceased? Or did they just not want to have to look

at a dead body? Without the advent of a time machine,

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

in our attention towards the dead.

Like people, some animals, including the corvets,

the family of birds that houses the crows, ravens, magpies, and jays, also some animals, including the Corvettes, 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 for our own. After all, it was the raven that God sent down to teach

Kane how to bury his slain brother Abel.

But despite this clear recognition by early people that other animals attend to their dead,

it's only fairly recently that science has really turned its attention towards this phenomenon.

In fact, a formal name for this field, comparative thanatology, wasn't first introduced until 2016.

In this growing field, we are beginning to appreciate

...