Chimpanzee News - Biology and Behaviour
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Evolution and Genetics | Conservation and Threats | Captive Chimpanzees | Other Great Apes
Cultured chimps invent and share back-scratching tool
19-08-2010 - LiveScience
By learning an utterly superfluous technique for scratching their backs, wild chimpanzees are displaying even more evidence that humanity's closest living relatives are capable of what might be deemed culture. In recent years, researchers have accumulated many examples of chimpanzees apparently learning relatively complex ideas that get passed down over generations much like in human cultures. For instance, chimps in the wild have developed a variety of specialized tool kits for foraging army ants that differ across regions. |
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Why chimps attack humans
12-08-2010 - Sify News
Increasing encroachment of natural habitat is the reason for conflicts between man and his closest relative, the chimpanzee - says a new study.
Scientists from Kyoto University, Japan have said that chimpanzees in Guinea are attacking humans as wild habitat is increasingly converted for agriculture.
The village of Bossou in southeastern Guinea has been home to both humans and chimps for a long time. And the locals of the village consider chimps as their protectors.
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Frans de Waal on the human primate: Is it "behavioral sink" or resource distribution?
21-07-2010 - Evolution
In the 1960s Jack Calhoun placed an expanding rat population in a crammed room and observed how the animals killed, sexually assaulted and, eventually, cannibalized one another. The magnetism of the crowd and the behavioral deviancy led Calhoun to coin the phrase "behavioral sink."
In no time popularizers were comparing politically motivated street riots with rat packs, inner cities to behavioral sinks, and urban areas to zoos. Warning that society was heading for either anarchy or dictatorship, Robert Ardrey, a popular science journalist and author of African Genesis, remarked in 1970 on the voluntary nature of human crowding and its ill effects. These views entered mainstream thinking: The negative impact of crowding became a central tenet of the voluminous literature on aggression.
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Men are like apes when competing for status
19-07-2010 - LiveScience
Apes are showing themselves to be more and more like humans, as various studies suggest they share much of our DNA, pass on culture and even understand and mourn death.
Now a new study reveals the hormone changes linked to competition in bonobos and chimpanzees mirror those in human guys vying for, say, mates or status.
"These findings suggest that men's psychological and physiological sensitivity to competition is not simply a result of living in a competitive human society," said Victoria Wobber, a Harvard graduate student and first author of the study. "Instead, it appears that when our ancestors diverged from chimpanzees and bonobos, individuals would have been similarly responsive to competitive events, with this evolutionarily inherited in humans."
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Chatting chimps in Uganda, Africa are 'socially aware'
9-07-2010 - BBC
The sound of a pant grunt (shown in the above video, provided courtesy of lead researcher Ms Marion Laporte)
Chimpanzees are aware of the social impact of their communications, primatologists have discovered.
Chimps communicate using a variety of calls and gestures, including making vocalisations known as pant grunts, which signal subordination.
But researchers have found that chimps will change what they "say" depending on who is listening.
That reveals a previously unrecognised social awareness that has implications for the origin of human language.
Details of the discovery are published in the journal Animal Behaviour.
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PhD student Ms Marion Laporte of the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK studied a population of chimps living in the Sonso community of Budongo Forest in Uganda.
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Chimps look up to trend-setters
25-10-2010 - BBC News
| Scientists have found that chimps copy the behaviour of "high-ranking" apes. A new study claims chimpanzees look up to those they consider to be more prestigious. University of St Andrews researchers, along with other experts, found that the animals copied the actions of those they considered to have high status. Chimps are good learners, but it was unclear why learned behaviour did not occur in all colonies.
Through this study, scientists discovered the status of the chimp that introduced the technique was key. The work was a collaboration between Professor Andrew Whiten, of the University of St Andrews, and Dr Victoria Horner and Dr Frans de Waal, at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta. |
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Simian solicitude: like humans, chimpanzees console victims of aggression
14-06-2010 - Scientific America
Chimpanzees may comfort others in distress in ways very similar to how people do, according to what may be the largest study of consolation in animals by far. The new findings in our closest living relatives could help shed light on the roots of empathy in humans.
The spontaneous consolation of someone in distress with a hug, a pat on the back or other friendly display of physical contact has been studied in human children as a sign of sympathetic concern for others for decades. This kind of demonstrative empathy is often thought to be a large part of what sets humanity apart from other animals.
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Exchange meat for sex? No thank you
27-05-2010 - NewScientist
Prostitution might be the world's oldest profession, but it's not nearly as ancient as some had suggested. It turns out that there is no support for the widespread belief that male chimpanzees trade meat for sex, suggesting that sexual bartering among humans may be an evolutionarily recent phenomenon.
"I kept finding references to 'meat for sex' all over the place, saying this is what chimpanzees do," says Ian Gilby, a primatologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. "Knowing from observation and reading the evidence, they really don't."
Most reports of male chimps trading meat for sex are anecdotal, Gilby says. Only one study has found statistically meaningful, if indirect, support for such swaps, showing that male chimpanzees are more likely to hunt for monkeys when oestrous females are around.
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Why bonobos will save the world
27-05-2010 - Discover
This is a guest post from Vanessa Woods, author of the new book, Bonobo Handshake. Vanessa is a Research Scientist in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and studies the cognition of chimpanzees and bonobos in Congo. When I wake up this morning, someone might try to kill me. I live 10 minutes from a small town called Durham, NC, where according to the last statistics, 22 people were killed, 76 women were raped, and there were 682 cases of aggravated assault. When a chimpanzee wakes up in the morning, they probably have the same thought. In fact, if you’re a male chimpanzee, you’re more likely to be killed by another chimpanzee than anything else. If you’re a female chimpanzee, expect to be beaten by every adolescent male who is making his way up through the ranks. People often ask me why humans are so intelligent, as in, what is it other apes lack that makes us so unique. |
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Chimps prefer to copy others with prestige
21-05-2010 - Discover
| There is no action so stupid that you can’t persuade someone to do it by getting celebrity endorsement. Even the barmiest advice on everything from medical decisions to diets will have happy idiots queuing up to listen, if it comes from the mouth of someone who was once on TV. Such recommendations can be disastrous, but they can be beneficial if the people in question are wise and knowledgeable, from village elders to community leaders. This is all part of the same trend – the human penchant for apeing individuals with high status. And now, it seems that we aren’t the only species that does this. Chimpanzees have the same inclination for apeing those with prestige. |  |
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How do you figure out how chimps learn? Peanuts.
12-05-2010 - Scienceblogs
What is culture? One simple definition might be: a distinctive behavior shared by two or more individuals, which persists over time, and that ignorant individuals acquire through socially-aided learning.
There are at least four different ways to learn a particular behavior or problem-solving strategy. That is to say, there are four different ways to learn. The first is social facilitation, in which one individual does the same thing as the demonstrator at the same time. Essentially this is a situation of on-line matching of motor actions. For example, I might learn the steps to a complicated dance by watching somebody else doing it and replicating the motor actions at the same time. The second is emulation, in which the learner replicates the demonstrator's goal, without replication of the precise motor actions. If you see me climb a tree to retrieve a candy-filled pinata, you might figure out that an easier way to retrieve the candy would be to smack the pinata with a baseball bat.
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Bonobo chimps filmed shaking their head to 'say no'
05-05-2010 - BBC News
Bonobos have been filmed appearing to 'say no' by shaking their heads, report scientists. On a number of occasions, bonobos were filmed using side to side head movements to prevent others from doing something they did not want them to do. In one film a mother is seen shaking her head to stop her infant playing with its food. This may reflect an early precursor to head-shaking behaviour amongst humans in one of our closest relatives. The study has been published in the journal Primates. Disapproving look "In bonobos, our observations are the first reported use of preventive head-shaking," say Ms Christel Schneider from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. Ms Schneider undertook the study with Dr Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute and Dr Katja Liebal from Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany. |
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Chimpanzee tool use is no monkey business
04-05-2010 - Arts Technica
Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives and are constantly challenging our notion of what makes humans unique; the cognitive divide between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes is becoming less and less distinct. Chimpanzees have self-awareness, can beat college students at memory tasks, and react to the deaths of their companions in ways that we would find uncannily familiar. Complex tool use may be the best example of chimpanzees’ advanced cognitive abilities; a review in last week’s issue of Science summarizes some of the most interesting instances of tool use among chimpanzees. |
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When it comes to sex, chimps need help, too
03-05-2010 - the New York Times
The human ego has never been quite the same since the day in 1960 that Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee feasting on termites near Lake Tanganyika. After carefully trimming a blade of grass, the chimpanzee poked it into a passage in the termite mound to extract his meal. No longer could humans claim to be the only tool-making species. The deflating news was summarized by Ms. Goodall’s mentor, Louis Leakey: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
So what have we actually done now that we’ve had a half-century to pout? In a 50th anniversary essay in the journal Science, the primatologist William C. McGrew begins by hailing the progression of chimpanzee studies from field notes to “theory-driven, hypothesis-testing ethnology.”
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Chimpanzee mothers carry their mummified dead infants
27-04-2010 - Discovery News
Recently at Discovery News we told you how chimpanzees confront death. They do so in ways that are very similar to our behavior toward dying friends and relatives. On the surface, it might at first seem that chimpanzee mothers break from those noted similarities. When their offspring die as infants, the mothers will continue to carry and groom the dead bodies until the mothers are able to gradually let go of them. By that time, the infant's body has usually mummified. The behavior likely mirrors, at least to some extent, the biophysical reaction of human mothers when they too lose young sons or daughters. Right after birth, the mother's body is hormonally, and in many other ways, ready to care for the infant. Even after a baby dies, the physical connection can take time to adjust. This isn't even taking into account the emotional bond. Chimpanzees go through this adjustment period in a very literal way, by continuing to provide care for their deceased infants. |
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Chimps confront death in human-like ways
26-04-2010 - Discovery News
From sitting quietly by terminally ill fellow chimps to tossing and turning at night, chimpanzees exhibit familiar responses to death, observations show. From holding deathbed vigils to comforting the dying, chimpanzees face death in human-like ways that indicate their awareness of death is probably much more developed than previously thought, suggest two new studies. The papers, both published in the journal Current Biology, provide rare, intimate glimpses of chimpanzees dealing with death. For the first study, scientists observed how three adult chimpanzees reacted when an elderly female, named Pansy, gradually passed away in an indoor enclosure at Blair Drummond Safari Park in Stirling, Scotland. The over 50-year-old Pansy had grown increasingly lethargic before lying down on the floor one day after eating. |
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Humans have a lot to learn from bonobos, scientist says
23-04-2010 - Livescience
Primatologist Brian Hare wishes more people could discover what bonobos can teach us about human nature. "I really think they are the smartest ape in the world," he said. "We have a lot to learn from them." Bonobos are genetically close to humans, yet most people know very little about them. Through his ongoing research, Hare hopes to change that. "Bonobos really are our less familiar cousin that we have kept at arm's length," Hare said. "The general public is so unfamiliar with them that even many reporters who have interviewed me have written in their stories that they are bonobo 'monkeys,' not realizing they are apes — like us. So it is great when the bonobos can have some attention." |
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Chimps reject unfairness to their fellows
12-04-2010 - NewScientist
Chimps recognise unfairness, even when it involves individuals other than themselves. This sense of unfairness towards others may be a rudimentary form of the social justice that characterises human societies.
In earlier studies several apes, monkeys and even dogs responded negatively when they received a meagre reward for the same task that earned others a more lavish pay-off. But none of these animals apparently recognised unfairness directed at others.
Sarah Brosnan, a primate behaviourist at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and her colleagues trained captive chimps to exchange tokens for a food reward, then tested how same-sex pairs of chimps reacted to various levels of reward. As expected, chimps were more likely to reject a boring carrot when their partner got a yummy grape for the same token. Surprisingly, the chimps were also more likely to reject a grape if their partner only got a carrot
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Talking chimp to chimp
02-04-2010 - Science
BUDONGO FOREST RESERVE, UGANDA—As Cathy Crockford wound her way through the dense trees to observe chimpanzees here, she bore more than a little resemblance to a young Jane Goodall. Crockford, who specializes in chimpanzee communication and is based at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, has Goodall's lanky build and, like Goodall, wore her long, blonde hair pulled back. She is also a native of England and speaks with a purposeful British accent. But Goodall for many months walked around Gombe alone with little more than a note-pad, binoculars, and a satchel over her shoulder. Crockford works with her husband, Roman Wittig, and in addition to their binoculars and hip packs, they each have their own field assistants. They often cover adjacent terrain and communicate using walkie-talkies. They tap in their locations and observations on palm-held electronic devices. And most important, each of them totes a state-of-the-art Marantz digital tape recorder strapped around their neck with a high-end microphone covered by a foam windscreen.
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Chimps read lips
02-04-2010 - Science
In 1862, French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne published The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, which linked specific facial muscles to emotional states such as aggression, surprise, and lasciviousness. More than 150 years later, comparative psychologist Lisa Parr of Yerkes National Primate Research Center is trying to make the same connections to the puckered lips, raised eyebrows, and grins of chimpanzees. "It's just been a really ignored area," Parr says.
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Female chimpanzees drive the culture
25-10-2010 - Wired Sicence
Chimpanzee culture is driven by its females, suggests a new analysis of six long-term chimp studies. The number of cultural traits in each colony is linked to the number of females. How many males there are makes no difference. “Our results suggest that females are the carriers of chimpanzee culture,” wrote study co-authors Johan Lind and Patrik Lindenfors, both evolutionary biologists at Stockholm University’s Center for the Study of Cultural Evolution. Lind and Lindenfors’ paper, published March 24 in Public Library of Science ONE, was prompted by two sets of observations. First, as becomes more evident with each passing month, chimpanzees possess complex learned behaviors that vary between colony and region. They have culture. |
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Study: Apes have metacognitive ability
24-03-2010 - UPI.com
German scientists say they have determined great apes realize they can make mistakes when making choices.
The study, led by Josep Call at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, consisted of three experiments involving gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.
Each animal was presented with two hollow tubes, one baited with a food reward, the other empty.
In the first experiment, the apes were prevented from watching the baiting, but the tubes were shaken to give them auditory information.
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Study suggests environment may impact apes' ability to understand declarative communication
15-03-2010 - Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
When we notice somebody pointing at something, we automatically look in the direction of the gesture. In humans, the ability to understand this type of gesturing (known as declarative communication) may seem to be an automatic response, but it is actually a sign of sophisticated communication behavior. Numerous studies have tried to determine if great apes (for example, chimpanzees and bonobos) are able to understand declarative communication, but results have been mixed. Psychological scientists Heidi Lyn and William Hopkins from Agnes Scott College and Jamie Russell from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center examined if exposure to different human communicative environments would affect understanding of declarative signals in chimpanzees and bonobos. Three groups of apes were tested in this study. One group consisted of chimpanzees that had been raised in standard laboratory housing; although they had regular contact with humans, these interactions were limited to basic animal-care contexts such as feeding. |
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Uncovering the "chimpanzee stone age"
01-03-2010
The discovery of stone tools from places like Brixham Cave in England and France's Somme Valley confirmed that industry was a very old human enterprise, and so some scholars naturally felt quite comfortable in giving out species the honorary title of "Man the Toolmaker." The ability of our species to make and use tools clearly separated us from all other organisms, at least until it was discovered that chimpanzees, too, made and used tools. More than that, studies since the 1960's have confirmed that different populations of chimpanzees have distinctive tool cultures affected by the contingencies of their surroundings, and a recent study published two years ago in PNAS illustrates that these cultures of tool use among non-human primates stretch back at least 4,300 years. |
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If bonobo Kanzi can point as humans do, what other similarities can rearing reveal?
01-03-2010
Pointing study supports and expands on Great Ape Trust assertion that the success of language studies with bonobos is tied to rearing You may have more in common with Kanzi, Panbanisha and Nyota, three language-competent bonobos living at Great Ape Trust, than you thought. And those similarities, right at your fingertip, might one day tell scientists more about the effect of culture on neurological disorders that limit human expression.
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