Primates, Grief, and Ritual

 So, some monkey and ape mothers will keep carrying their dead infant around for a while. This is really disturbing, but appears to be part of the grief process.

We also know that human mothers who are allowed to hold a stillborn baby process their grief better.

Other primates will return to the corpse for a while and talk to it (lemurs).

Is this the root origin of many of our rituals around death? It's easy to see how returning to a corpse and calling to it would evolve into, well...putting flowers on a grave.

(Sorry for the morbid topic, but it's kind of fascinating).