Mama’s Last Hug opens with the dramatic farewell between Mama, a dying fifty-nine-year-old chimpanzee matriarch, and biologist Jan Van Hooff. This heartfelt final meeting of two longtime friends, widely shared as a video, offers a window into how deep and instantly recognizable these bonds can be. So begins this whirlwind tour of new ideas and findings about animal emotions, based on the author's studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos, and other primates. He distinguishes between emotions and feelings, all the while emphasizing the continuity between our species and other species. And he makes the radical proposal that emotions are like organs: we don’t have a single organ that other animals don’t have, and the same is true for our emotions.
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