Chimpanzee News - Biology and Behaviour
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Evolution and Genetics | Conservation and Threats | Captive Chimpanzees | Other Great Apes
Like humans, chimps have culture, too
10-05-2012 - Live Science
Like humans who might use a different slang term for "that's cool" or have distinct fashion sense, adjacent chimpanzee groups also show cultural differences, in this case, in their nut-cracking techniques, researchers have found.
"In humans, cultural differences are an essential part of what distinguishes neighboring groups that live in very similar environments," study researcher Lydia Luncz, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said in a statement.
Chimps show lethal side
13-04-2012 - ScienceNews
PORTLAND, Ore. — In a cooperative venture aimed at understanding the most uncooperative of acts, researchers studying different African communities of wild chimpanzees have pooled their data and found that the apes sometimes kill each other nearly everywhere they’ve been studied.
Chimp homicides occurred most frequently in groups with the most adult males, anthropologist Michael Wilson of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis reported April 12 at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists’ annual meeting.
Wilson persuaded researchers at 10 wild chimp sites, containing a total of 17 communities, to contribute their findings on lethal attacks collected over the past several decades.
Toddlers and chimps 'go with the crowd'
12-04-2012 - LiveScience
Chimps and toddlers rely on the "wisdom of the crowd" to sway their decision-making processes, new research indicates. Orangutans don't, which could be because they live solitary lives. The researchers were interested in finding out more about social learning — how one animal picks up behaviors from others rather than learning something by trial and error. This could be anything from tool use to cultural traditions. This social learning is present in many primate species and has been seen throughout the animal kingdom. "We study humans, chimpanzees and orangutans, because they are closely related species, all belonging to the great ape family," study researcher Daniel Haun, of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, told LiveScience. "Investigating similarities and differences between closely related species provides insight into what makes each of them unique against the backdrop of their close relatives." |
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Sh*t my chimp throws
10-04-2012 - Psychology Today
You’ve been to the zoo, right? So surely you’ve seen a chimp sit on his haunches while looking with one eye and then the other, and again with one eye and then the other at something far away. He jumps to his feet. He starts to screech and hop menacingly. Then one arm starts whirling like a softball pitcher's, except the chimp's arm is circling in the wrong direction for underhand pitching. He does have something in his hand, and he's preparing to throw it, hard. And then ... the pitch! Woosh!
Ewww. He threw his feces. No. it's never pleasant.
But when you are a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University, you see a lot of this sort of thing. And it's not always feces that chimps throw.
Chimps teach young to communicate with humans, scientists say
21-03-2012 - Huffington Post
Captive chimpanzees learn from their mothers to call out to humans, new research suggests. Those chimps raised by their moms were also most likely to use similar calls, from lip-smacking to blowing kisses.
This teaching from mother to child is an example of "social learning," which played an important role in the development of human culture and language.
While social learning of tool use has been seen in chimps before, "it has never really been shown for communication before," study researcher Jared Taglialatela, an assistant professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, told LiveScience. Before this study, he said, "social learning of communication signals was seen as unique to human language."
High ranking chimps act as mediators
19-03-2012 - Times LIVE
Conflict management is highly significant for life in social groups, the researchers concluded in their findings published in the magazine PLoS ONE. The study was based on the behaviour of a group of hominids in the zoo at Gossau in Switzerland. The team said it was astonishing that chimpanzees were able to mediate in a conflict, without themselves deriving any immediate advantage from their efforts. “The rarest and most interesting form of conflict management is policing, that is impartial interventions by bystanders, which is of considerable interest due to its potentially moral nature,” they said. |
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Female bonobos have social climbing sex
01-03-2012 - DiscoveryNews
When female bonobos join a new group, they will do anything to get with the "it" crowd — which often means having sex with the alpha female. And according to new research, females of this promiscuous primate species who are climbing the social ladder will advertise their successes during sex by calling out, especially when their partner is of higher status or when the alpha female is in the audience. "These females are climbing social ladders," study researcher Zanna Clay, a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University, told LiveScience. "By engaging in these social-sexual interactions, they are showing off their social abilities." |
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Chimpanzees help, but only when asked
13-02-2012 - Scientific American
Chimpanzees have a bad reputation. Maybe it’s because humans have a thing about wanting to feel unique among primates. Some have argued that humans are the only species that truly behaves altruistically, the only species that actively helps out other individuals even when there is no direct benefit. Despite mounting evidence that other animals, including non-human primates, have various forms of theory of mind, many still believe that human altruism exists because we – and we alone among all the animal kingdom – can understand the goals of others. Or, if there are other animals that can understand the goals of others, perhaps we somehow do it more readily. |
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Like us, a chimp seemingly can get inside another's head
06-02-2012 - MSNBC
Chimps know what tools others need to get work done and can help them select the right instruments, suggesting the apes have the ability to understand the minds of others, scientists find.
The capability to consider the goals and share the perspective of others, known as " theory of mind," has long been considered unique to humans. This aptitude may be why humans cooperate in an altruistic, "prosocial" manner to develop societies.
"Humans sometimes help others just upon witnessing others' predicaments — donations for tsunami and earthquake victims are a typical case," said researcher Shinya Yamamoto, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan.
If I'd had any inkling, I'd have been scared to do it
19-01-2012 - NewScientist
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is a primatologist who works at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where she explores the mental and linguistic skills of our primate cousins.
As a graduate, you were all set to do a postdoc in psychology at Harvard University. What happened?
Yes, I was due to go to Harvard to work with behaviourist B. F. Skinner and his famous pigeons. But before I left I happened to sit in on a class by primate researcher Roger Fouts, who brought a chimpanzee named Booee to class. Roger held up objects like a hat, a key and a pair of shoes, and Booee would make what Roger said were signs for those objects. I saw a chimpanzee doing what seemed to be a symbolic task and I was hooked. I said to myself: "Wait a minute, people are teaching chimpanzees human language, and I'm going to Harvard to study pigeons? You need to stay here, this is where it's at if you are interested in the origins of the human mind." I have worked with apes ever since.
Great apes make sophisticated choices than assumed
30-12-2011 - ZEEnews
Chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas and bonbos make more sophisticated decisions than was previously thought, a new study has suggested.
Max Planck Institutes researchers suggested that great apes weigh their chances of success, based on what they know and the likelihood to succeed when guessing.
The findings may provide insight into human decision-making as well.
The team led by Daniel Haun of the MPI for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) and Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), investigated the behaviour of all four non-human great ape species.
The apes were presented with two banana pieces: a smaller one, which was always reliably in the same place, and a larger one, which was hidden under one of multiple cups, and therefore the riskier choice.
Chimpanzees seem to know what's on other chimps' minds
29-12-2011 - The Guardian
Chimpanzees moving through the forest take into account other chimps' ignorance or knowledge of a threat when they raise the alarm.
The apes were more likely to make warning calls when they spotted a venomous snake if others in their troop had not seen the danger, researchers found. As chimps in the know arrived at the scene, they passed the warning on to others who lagged behind but were still within earshot.
Video footage of wild chimps foraging in Uganda's Budongo forest show apes at the front of their groups jumping with surprise on spotting a model snake lying camouflaged in the undergrowth.
When the chimps regained their composure, they called out with repeated "hoos" to alert those behind them that a threat lay ahead. They made calls less often when other chimps already knew of the danger.
The origins of bullying
15-12-2011 - Scientific American
Late on a Saturday night in September, a 14-year old boy named Jamey Rodemeyer, who had been the target of bullying from fellow students at Williamsville North High School in Buffalo New York, took his life. Just hours before he killed himself, Jamey left the last of his numerous messages online talking about the pain he had been dealing with for a long time. []
Bullying-like behaviors are not restricted to female primates. Chimpanzees live in communities with many males and females and males live in the groups their born into their entire lives. Males also form dominance relationships with each other based on physical power and friendships, which they use in competition over mates. Male chimpanzees regularly intimidate each other with bluffs, displays, charges and aggression, which can range from making another male move from a resting spot to physical violence.
Language, and how to have a fair fight with a chimpanzee
15-12-2011 - Psychology Today
Go mano-a-mano against a chimpanzee and the chimp wins, hands down - and fingers, testes and face off.
But what happens when a group of humans goes up against a same-sized group of chimpanzees? For specificity, imagine it's a several-dozen-person tribe of bare-knuckle brutes versus a same-sized troupe of chimps. Who wins?
I seriously hope no one knows the answer to this, but it seems plausible to speculate that it would be a tough fight. The humans are physically weak in comparison, of course, but with language on the field of battle they can better organize their attack and defense. Perhaps language can help the brainy human team yank victory from the brawny jaws of defeat. But wait. Isn't using language cheating?
It depends.
Those lying apes
13-12-2011 - Psychology Today
Apes like to deceive, too--but do they dislike being deceived? Published on December 13, 2011 by Dale Peterson, Ph.D. in The Moral Lives of Animals Young Dandy was excitedly courting a female by, in the usual way, showing her his inspired erection, when suddenly an older and higher-ranking male appeared on the scene. For Dandy, that meant big trouble. Worse, the young male's forbidden interest in the female was being communicated honestly by something he seemed to have little control over, an erect penis--which he quickly covered with his hands, apparently hoping thus to deceive the higher-ranking male.
The chimpanzee who sees sounds
05-12-2011 - Nature
Chimpanzees meld sounds and colours, associating light objects with high tones and dark objects with deeper tones. The finding hints that chimps, like humans, experience some form of synaesthesia, an uncommon condition in which the senses become intertwined, says Vera Ludwig, a cognitive neuroscientist at Charité Medical University in Berlin, Germany, who led a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Some synaesthetes associate different colours with letters and numbers, for instance, whereas others taste shapes.
Chimpanzees, like humans, seem to associate high-pitched tones with light colours and low-pitched ones with dark colours.
Researches find poop-throwing by chimps is a sign of intelligence
30-11-2011- PhysOrg.com
A lot of people who have gone to the zoo have become the targets of feces thrown by apes or monkeys, and left no doubt wondering about the so-called intellectual capacity of a beast that would resort to such foul play. Now however, researchers studying such behavior have come to the conclusion that throwing feces, or any object really, is actually a sign of high ordered behavior. Bill Hopkins of Emory University and his colleagues have been studying the whole process behind throwing and the impact it has on brain development, and have published their results in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Study by ISU's Pruetz finds savanna chimps exhibit sharing behavior like humans
28-11-2011 - Health Canal
AMES, Iowa -- Sharing food has widely been considered by scholars as a defining characteristic of human behavior. But a new study by Iowa State University anthropology professor Jill Pruetz now reports that chimpanzees from her Fongoli research site in Senegal also frequently share food and hunting tools with other chimps. Adult female Nickel and adolescent male Jumkin share plant food at ISU anthropology professor Jill Pruetz' Fongoli research site in Senegal. Pruetz and ISU graduate student Stacy Lindshield authored the first study to document non-meat sharing behavior among chimps. Photo provide by Jill Pruetz (download print quality photo) Co-authored by ISU anthropology graduate student Stacy Lindshield, their study is posted online in Primates and will be published in a future issue of the journal. |
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Chimps play like humans: Playful behavior of young chimps develops like that of children
16-11-2011 -Eurekalert
Playful behavior is widespread in mammals, and has important developmental consequences. A recent study of young chimpanzees shows that these animals play and develop much the same way as human children. The work, to be published in the Nov. 16 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE, can therefore also shed light on the role of human play behavior. The authors of the study, Elisabetta Palagi and Giada Cordoni, of the University of Pisa in Italy, found that chimpanzee solitary play peaks in infancy, while the time spent in social play was relatively constant between infants and juveniles. However, the type of social play changed quite a bit as the animals grew up, in terms of measures like complexity and playmate choice. In comparing these behaviors to previous work conducted with humans, they found that both species show significant quantitative and qualitative development in play behavior from infancy to juvenility. |
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Baby apes' arm waving hints at origins of language
10-11-2011 - NewScientist
Actions speak louder than words. Baby chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – our four closest living relatives – quickly learn to use visual gestures to get their message across, providing the latest evidence that hand waving may have been a vital first step in the development of human language.
After a long search for the origins of language in animal vocalisations, some evolutionary biologists have begun to change tack. The emerging "gesture theory" of language evolution has it that our ancestors' linguistic abilities may have begun with their hands rather than their vocal cords.
Katja Liebal and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have found new evidence for the theory by studying how communication develops in our closest living relatives. They discovered that all four great apes – chimps, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans – develop a complex repertoire of gestures during the first 20 months of life.
Word: Like a human, smart chimp understands speech
31-10-2011 - Science
A 25-year-old chimpanzee named "Panzee" has just demonstrated that speech perception is not a uniquely human trait. Well-educated Panzee understands more than 130 English language words and even recognizes words in sine-wave form, a type of synthetic speech that reduces language to three whistle-like tones. This shows that she isn't just responding to a particular person's voice or emotions, but instead she is processing and perceiving speech as humans do. "The results suggest that the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans may have had the capability to perceive speech-like sounds before the evolution of speech, and that early humans were taking advantage of this latent ability when speech did eventually emerge," said Lisa Heimbauer, who presented a talk today on the chimp at the 162nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego. |
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