Chimpanzee Culture & Intelligence

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Promiscuous apes make more sperm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/earth/ ... 386608.stm
By Ella Davies
Earth News reporter

Chimpanzees produce 200 times more sperm than gorillas, the world's largest primates, and 14 times more than orangutans, scientists based in Japan reveal.

Promiscuous ape species have bigger testicles, and the latest discovery finally provides evidence that they also produce more sperm.

Scientists previously proposed that chimps have large testicles because several males mate with a single female, and so have to produce more sperm in order to compete.

Our data indicated that a chimpanzee usually produces about two hundred times more sperm than a gorilla
Hideko Fujii-Hanamoto

For their research, published in the American Journal of Primatology, scientists studied chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas from zoos in Japan and Indonesia.

Analysing samples of testicular tissues at a microscopic level, researchers found remarkable variation between the apes.

They found that the sperm-producing tissue lining gorillas' testes was much thinner than that of orangutans and chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees were found to produce 14 times more sperm than orangutans and even more than the world's largest primates.

"Our data indicated that a chimpanzee usually produces about two hundred times more sperm than a gorilla," explained researcher Hideko Fujii-Hanamoto.

For these three species of ape, the scientists have now proven that testes size is proportionate to sperm production.

The researchers claim that these findings also support theories that sperm production relates directly to reproductive competition and mating behaviour.

Previous studies proposed that testes are smaller in polygynous species such as gorillas where one alpha male monopolises mating with multiple females.

In promiscuous species such as chimps however, there is greater competition between males as several copulate with one female.
APE SEX FACTS
# Dominant gorillas are known as "silverbacks" because their coats change colour to highlight their status as alpha male
# Adult male orangutans develop facial flanges and issue long calls to attract females

This competition is thought to be the driving factor for sperm production and larger testes are thought to produce more sperm.

However, practical limitations meant sperm production in apes was difficult to accurately measure.

"It is generally difficult to get semen from the animals even if they [are] kept in zoological gardens," said Ms Fujii-Hanamoto.

"Therefore, the testis weight or the ratio of testis weight [to] body weight was used to estimate the ability of sperm production."

Visual observations confirmed that chimpanzees have larger testes compared to their body size than gorillas but it was not clear whether they actually produced more sperm.
Story from BBC NEWS:

 

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Vid at link.

Peaceful bonobos may have something to teach humans
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-pea ... umans.html
March 8th, 2011 in Biology / Plants & Animals

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, spends several months of the year in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where he studies bonobos. He focuses on their behavior, specifically on how they solve problems and interact with other bonobos. Bonobos are genetically close to humans, yet most people know very little about them.

Humans share 98.7 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, but we share one important similarity with one species of chimp, the common chimpanzee, that we don't share with the other, the bonobo. That similarity is violence. While humans and the common chimpanzee wage war and kill each other, bonobos do not. "There has never been a recorded case in captivity or in the wild of a bonobo killing another bonobo," notes anthropologist Brian Hare.

Hare is an assistant professor in evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he and his wife and colleague, Vanessa Woods, studied bonobo behavior at Lola ya Bonobo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an orphanage for young bonobos whose parents were killed for the bush meat trade. The war-torn Congo is the only place in the world where these endangered apes can be found.

"We go to this sanctuary and we play these fun problem-solving games with them to just try and get inside their heads and figure out exactly how they think," says Woods. "They're wonderful animals to be related to. It's a shame so few people have heard of them."

Woods is author of the book "Bonobo Handshake," a memoir about her experiences with these peaceful, playful primates, and some of the differences she noted between bonobos and common chimpanzees.

"Chimpanzees can be very empathetic, loving but they also have this darker side. They have war, they kill each other, they beat their females. Bonobos don't really have any of that," explains Woods. "They're different because they've managed to live in a society virtually without violence. How do they do that? Humans, for all of our intelligence and all our technology, we haven't managed to live without war, and so I think that's something very important that bonobos can teach us."

One way bonobos deal with conflict and tension is to have sex. Yes, they're the ultimate hippies--they make love, not war. "Whenever things get tense in the bonobo world, they'll usually have some kind of sociosexual activity and this seems to really help everybody get along. But another one of the ways that they sort of have this peaceful society is they're naturally more tolerant. They share more, and if one of them gets upset, it's not just sex but they can also hug and comfort one another."

In one study, Woods and Hare were surprised when a hungry bonobo opened a gate to share prized treats with another bonobo. "The idea that you would give something to someone else at a cost to yourself, we thought this was something only humans would do."

Bonobos' generous nature likely evolved because they live in an area of the Congo where food is plentiful. They never had to compete with gorillas or kill for a meal like common chimps do.

The females stick together, creating a matriarchal society, and when necessary will gang up on threatening males. "Females will work together to protect themselves from male aggression. So male aggression is just simply not tolerated," says Hare.

With chimps, the most aggressive males tend to team up to dominate females and weaker males. In bonobo society, Hare says it's the mother and son relationship that commands the most respect.

"Basically, bonobos are the ultimate 'mama's boys.' Essentially, it's more like a debutante society where mothers have to introduce their sons into polite society and it's through your mother, as a bonobo, that you will gain access to other females," explains Hare.

How did two such similar species, the bonobo and the common chimpanzee, evolve so differently? Hare says understanding that may shed light on human behavior, considering that we are a lot like both of them.

"Humans are probably the most generous species on the planet," notes Hare, which is very bonobo-like. But like chimps, Hare says, we have that dark side. "Bonobos don't have a darker side. So, although they can't fly to the moon, they don't kill each other. I think they challenge your normal notion of what intelligence is. I think we have a lot to learn from them."

Provided by National Science Foundation

 

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Chimp, bonobo study sheds light on the social brain
April 5th, 2011 in Biology / Plants & Animals
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-chi ... brain.html

It's been a puzzle why our two closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have widely different social traits, despite belonging to the same genus. Now, a comparative analysis of their brains shows neuroanatomical differences that may be responsible for these behaviors, from the aggression more typical of chimpanzees to the social tolerance of bonobos.

"What's remarkable is that the data appears to match what we know about the human brain and behavior," says Emory anthropologist James Rilling, who led the analysis. "The neural circuitry that mediates anxiety, empathy and the inhibition of aggression in humans is better developed in bonobos than in chimpanzees."

The journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience published the results April 5, the most comprehensive comparative analysis to date of the neural systems of chimpanzees and bonobos.

"By contributing to our basic understanding of how brain anatomy relates to social behavior, this study may provide clues to the brain dysfunction underlying human social behavioral disorders like psychopathy and autism," Rilling says.

Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged from a common ancestor with humans about six million years ago, and from each other just one-to-two million years ago. Despite this relatively brief separation in evolutionary terms, the two species exhibit significant differences in social behavior. Compared with chimpanzees, bonobos are more anxious, less aggressive, more socially tolerant, more playful, more sexual and perhaps more empathic.

"Chimpanzees tend to resolve conflict by using aggression, while bonobos are more likely to use behavioral mechanisms like sex and play to diffuse tension," Rilling says. "The social behaviors of the two species mirror individual differences within the human population."

Rilling heads Emory's Laboratory for Darwinian Neuroscience, a leader in the use of non-invasive neuro-imaging technology to compare the neurobiology of humans and other primates. The lab draws on resources of Emory's Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

"In addition to exploring links between neuroanatomy and different social behaviors, we're mapping the underlying biology for how species evolve and differentiate," Rilling says.

A range of imaging and analytical techniques were used in the chimpanzee-bonobo study. Voxel-based morphometry compared the gray matter in standard structural scans of the brains. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) captured the white matter connections, to compare the fiber tracts that "wire" the brain.

The results showed that bonobos have more developed circuitry for key nodes within the limbic system, the so-called emotional part of the brain, including the amygdala, the hypothalamus and the anterior insula. The anterior insula and the amygdala are both implicated in human empathy.

"We also found that the pathway connecting the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex is larger in bonobos than chimpanzees," Rilling says. "When our amygdala senses that our actions are causing someone else distress, we may use that pathway to adjust our behavior in a prosocial direction."

Chimpanzees have better developed visual system pathways, according to the analysis. Previous research has suggested that those pathways are important for tool use, a skill which chimpanzees appear better at than bonobos.

Provided by Emory University

 

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Next they will invent a god in their own image...

I control therefore I am: chimps self-aware, says study
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-chi ... aware.html
May 4th, 2011 in Biology / Plants & Animals
Chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them, a study claims


File photo of three female chimpanzees at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney. v

Chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them, an ability once thought to be uniquely human, according to a study released Wednesday.

The findings, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, challenge assumptions about the boundary between human and non-human, and shed light on the evolutionary origins of consciousness, the researchers said.

Earlier research had demonstrated the capacity of several species of primates, as well as dolphins, to recognize themselves in a mirror, suggesting a fairly sophisticated sense of self.

The most common experiment consisted of marking an animal with paint in a place -- such as the face -- that it could only perceive while looking at its reflection.

If the ape sought to touch or wipe off the mark while facing a mirror, it showed that the animal recognised itself.

But even if this test revealed a certain degree self-awareness, many questions remained as to how animals were taking in the information. What, in other words, was the underlying cognitive process?

To probe further, Takaaki Kaneko and Masaki Tomonaga of the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto designed a series of three experiments to see if chimps, our closest cousins genetically, to some extent "think" like humans when they perform certain tasks.

Sule, an 18-month old male Chimpanzee, eats an oatmeal and honey mixture on a stick

Enlarge

Photo illustration. Research has demonstrated the capacity of several species of primates, as well as dolphins, to recognize themselves in a mirror, suggesting a fairly sophisticated sense of self.
In the first, three females initiated a video game by placing a finger on a touch-sensitive screen and then used a trackball, similar to a computer mouse, to move one of two cursors.

The movement of the second cursor, designed to distract or confuse the chimps, was a recording of gestures made earlier by the same animal and set in motion by the computer.

The "game" ended when the animal hit a target, or after a certain lapse of time.

At this point, the chimp had to identify with his finger which of the two cursors he had been manipulating, and received a reward if she chose correctly. All three animals scored above 90 percent.

"This indicates that the chimpanzees were able to distinguish the cursor actions controlled by themselves from those caused by other factors, even when the physical properties of those actions were almost identical," the researchers said.

But it was still not clear whether the good performance was truly due to the ability to discern "self-agency", or to observing visual cues and clues, so the researchers devised another set of conditions.

This time they compared two tests. The first was the same as in the previous experiment.

In the second, however, both cursors moved independently of efforts to control them, one a repeat of movements the chimp had generated in an earlier exercise, and the other a repeat of an "decoy" cursor. The trackball, in essence, was unplugged, and had no connection to the screen.

Two pygmy chimpanzees check for fleas at the zoo in Frankfurt/M., western Germany

Enlarge

Two pygmy chimpanzees check for fleas on April 4, 2011 at the zoo in Frankfurt/M., western Germany. Takaaki Kaneko and Masaki Tomonaga of the Primate Research Institute in Kyoto designed a series of three experiments to see if chimps, our closest cousins genetically, to some extent "think" like humans when they perform certain tasks.
If the animals performed well on the first test but poorly on the second, the scientists reasoned, it would suggest that they were not simply responding to visual properties but knew they were in charge.

The final experiment -- used only for the most talented of the chimps -- introduced a time delay between trackball and cursor, as if the two were out of sync, and a distortion in the direction the cursor moved on the screen.

All the results suggested that "chimpanzees and humans share fundamental cognitive processes underlying the sense of being an independent agent," the researchers concluded.

"We provide the first behavioural evidence that chimpanzees can perform distinctions between self and other for external events on the basis of a self-monitoring process."

 

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Chimpanzees' 66 gestures revealed
By Victoria Gill, Science and nature reporter, BBC News

Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other, according to scientists.
A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in Scotland filmed a group of the animals in order to decipher this "gestural repertoire".
The team then studied 120 hours of footage of the chimps interacting, looking for signs that the animals were intentionally signalling to each other.
The findings are published in the journal Animal Cognition.

Previous studies on captive chimps have suggested the animals have about 30 different gestures.
"So this [result] shows quite a large repertoire," lead researcher Dr Catherine Hobaiter told BBC News.
"We think people previously were only seeing fractions of this, because when you study the animals in captivity you don't see all their behaviour.
"You wouldn't see them hunting for monkeys, taking females away on 'courtships', or encountering neighbouring groups of chimpanzees."

Dr Hobaiter spent 266 days observing and filming a group of chimpanzees in Budongo Conservation Field Station, Uganda.
"I've spent two years studying these animals, so they know me," she said. "I follow them through the forest and they just ignore me completely and get on with their daily lives."

She and her colleague, Professor Richard Byrne, scrutinised the footage and categorised each distinct gesture.
They looked for clear signs that the animals were making deliberate movements that were intended to generate a response from another animal.
"We looked to see if the gesturer was looking at their audience," explained Professor Byrne.
"And we looked for persistence; if their action did not produce a result, they would repeat it."

The team is still studying the footage for the next stage of their project - to figure out what each gesture means.
For some of these gestures, the meaning seems obvious to us, perhaps because - as great apes- we make similar movements. A chimp will often beckon to another group member, or a youngster will hand shake at another juvenile to entice it to play.

[video clip]
In one piece of footage captured by Dr Hobaiter, a mother reaches with her left arm towards her daughter.
"The mother wants to move away and is gesturing to request that her daughter 'climbs on' her," Dr Hobaiter explained.
"She could just grab her daughter, but she doesn't. She reaches and holds the gesture while waiting for a response."
When the youngster starts to approach, the mother repeats the gesture and adds a facial expression - a "bare-teeth grin", at which point the daughter climbs on and they move away.

"But actions often have effects that their maker did not intend," said Professor Byrne.
"So to understand the intended meaning, it's no good just discovering a gesture's typical effect. We have to look for what effect makes the signaller stop gesturing and appear satisfied and content with the outcome, to be sure that that was what they intended."

The results have provided clues about the origins of chimps' gestures, suggesting that they are a common system of communication across the species, rather than each movement being a learned custom or ritual within one social group.

In fact, by comparing these observations with those of gestures made by gorillas and orangutans, the researchers showed there was significant overlap in the signals used throughout the family of great apes.
Dr Hobaiter said: This supports our belief that the gestures that apes use (and maybe some human gestures too) are derived from ancient shared ancestry of all the great ape species alive today."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_ne ... 475408.stm

 

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Chimpanzees are spontaneously generous after all
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-chi ... ously.html
August 8th, 2011 in Biology / Plants & Animals

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have shown chimpanzees have a significant bias for prosocial behavior. This, the study authors report, is in contrast to previous studies that positioned chimpanzees as reluctant altruists and led to the widely held belief that human altruism evolved in the last six million years only after humans split from apes. The current study findings are available in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to Yerkes researchers Victoria Horner, PhD, Frans de Waal, PhD, and their colleagues, chimpanzees may not have shown prosocial behaviors in other studies because of design issues, such as the complexity of the apparatus used to deliver rewards and the distance between the animals.

"I have always been skeptical of the previous negative findings and their over-interpretation, says Dr. de Waal. "This study confirms the prosocial nature of chimpanzees with a different test, better adapted to the species," he continues.

In the current study, Dr. Horner and colleagues greatly simplified the test, which focused on offering seven adult female chimpanzees a choice between two similar actions: one that rewards both the "actor," the term used in the paper for the lead study participant, and a partner, and another that rewards only the actor/chooser herself. Examples of the critically important simplified design aspects include allowing the study partners to sit close together and ensuring conspicuous food consumption, which the researchers achieved by wrapping pieces of banana in paper that made a loud noise upon removal.

In each trial, the chooser, which was always tested with her partner in sight, selected between differently colored tokens from a bin. One colored token could be exchanged with an experimenter for treats for both members of the pair (prosocial); the other colored token would result in a treat only for the chooser (selfish). All seven chimpanzees showed an overwhelming preference for the prosocial choice. The study also showed the choosers behaved altruistically especially towards partners who either patiently waited or gently reminded them that they were there by drawing attention to themselves. The chimpanzees making the choices were less likely to reward partners who made a fuss, begged persistently or spat water at them, thus showing their altruism was spontaneous and not subject to intimidation.

"We were excited to find female after female chose the option that gave both her and her partner food," says Dr. Horner. "It was also interesting to me that being overly persistent did not go down well with the choosers. It was far more productive for partners to be calm and remind the choosers they were there from time to time," she continues.

The authors say this study puts to rest a longstanding puzzle surrounding chimpanzee altruism. It is well-known these apes help each other in the wild and show various forms of empathy, such as reassurance of distressed parties. The negative findings of previous studies did not fit this image. These results, however, confirm chimpanzee altruism in a well-controlled experiment, suggesting human altruism is less of an anomaly than previously thought.

The study authors next plan to determine whether the altruistic tendency of the chimpanzees towards their partners is related to social interactions within the group, such as reciprocal exchanges of food or social support.

For eight decades, the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, has been dedicated to conducting essential basic science and translational research to advance scientific understanding and to improve the health and well-being of humans and nonhuman primates. Today, the center, as one of only eight National Institutes of Health–funded national primate research centers, provides leadership, training and resources to foster scientific creativity, collaboration and discoveries. Yerkes-based research is grounded in scientific integrity, expert knowledge, respect for colleagues, an open exchange of ideas and compassionate quality animal care.

Within the fields of microbiology and immunology, neurologic diseases, neuropharmacology, behavioral, cognitive and developmental neuroscience, and psychiatric disorders, the center's research programs are seeking ways to: develop vaccines for infectious and noninfectious diseases; treat drug addiction; interpret brain activity through imaging; increase understanding of progressive illnesses such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases; unlock the secrets of memory; determine how the interaction between genetics and society shape who we are; and advance knowledge about the evolutionary links between biology and behavior.

Provided by Emory University

 

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I wanna be like you: Kanzi, the ape who HAS learned the secret of man's red fire and loves nothing more than a good fry-up
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 9:47 AM on 30th December 2011

Eagerly he collects wood from the ground, snaps the branches into small pieces and carefully balances them in a pile. Then, taking care not to burn himself, he gently strikes a match and gets ready for a fry-up.
Like all red-blooded males, Kanzi loves messing around with a barbecue. But then, as these extraordinary pictures show, Kanzi is no man. He is a bonobo - pygmy chimpanzee - and his love of fire is challenging the way that we think about our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.

For although bonobo apes and larger chimpanzees use twigs and leaves as tools, none has ever shown such skill for cooking food.
Kanzi is one of eight bonobos in the care of Dr Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, one of the world’s leading experts in ape behaviour and language. She believes 31-year-old Kanzi’s fascination with fire reveals a deep intelligence.

Dr Savage-Rumbaugh, of the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa, adds: ‘Kanzi makes fire because he wants to. He used to watch the film Quest For Fire when he was very young which was about early man struggling to control fire. He watched it spellbound over and over hundreds of times.’
He was also fascinated by the camp fires his keepers made to cook food. And he was encouraged to interact with humans and copy them. At the age of five, he was making small piles of bone dry sticks.

He was taught to use matches, a skill he picked up quickly. There’s something eerie about watching Kanzi strike a match. The way he then holds the flame - taking care not to burn himself - is remarkably human.
‘Fire is one of the most important factors in our evolution,’ says Dr Savage-Rumbaugh.
‘When humans learned to control fire and to domesticate dogs we began to feel a new level of safety which freed us to become creative and to create more sophisticated cultures.’
‘Fire enabled us to cook meat, which helped break it down and meant we could eat more of it. Plants we cooked on fires were made more digestible. In short, cooking led us to eating better, which meant we developed large brains.
‘We sat around in communal groups cooking, stoking and simply watching the fire - a situation in which language and conversation started to develop.’

Kanzi - the name means Treasure in Swahili - does not stay close to make sure his fire stays lit. But he does throw on more wood from a distance. And he has learned how to cook. He will take a marshmallow, stick it on the end of a twig and hold it carefully over the flames, ensuring it doesn’t burn.
He can place a grill pan on the fire and cook hamburgers. When he has finished with the fire, Dr Savage-Rumbaugh asks him to put it out using a bottle of water. He will carefully pour the liquid over the flames until it has been extinguished.

Kanzi is now incredibly passing on his skills to other apes. His son Teco, who lives in the same research centre, watches Kanzi as he solves problems. The researchers believe he may learn to make fires, too.

Kanzi, who weighs 12st, is the brightest of the apes at the Great Ape Trust. With two other apes at the centre, he uses paper keyboards to communicate with Dr Savage-Rumbaugh and fellow primatologist Liz Pugh.
In conversation with the researchers he points to symbols, known as lexigrams, on the keyboards representing different words.
He has learnt to ‘say’ around 500 words through the keyboard, and understands 3,000 spoken words.

Bonobos are one of the most endangered species and there are around 10,000 to 50,000 left in the wild, all in Africa’s Democratic Republic of Congo. They share 98 to 99 per cent of their DNA with us.
For Kanzi’s own safety, he is only allowed to make fires under close supervision. But his behaviour raises fascinating questions.
What would happen if he was released into the wild where other bonobos could copy his behaviour? And could wild bonobos learn how to master fire independently just like our own ancestors?

You don’t have to be a fan of the Planet Of The Apes movies - in which intelligent apes threaten mankind’s supremacy on the Earth - to find those questions disturbing.
Or maybe, like King Louie in Disney's The Jungle Book, he just wants to ape us.

[video]

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1i0pTwd7L

 

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But are these bonds worth investing in?

Female bonobos 'advertise' homosexual bonds
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17117661
By Ella Davies
Reporter, BBC Nature

Sex between females is not uncommon for bonobos

Related Stories

Bonobos 'chat' about good foods
Promiscuous apes shout about sex
Bonobos opt to share their food

Female bonobos "advertise" their homosexual activity to important audiences, say scientists.

Researchers studying communication among the apes found that females made the most noise during sex if the "alpha female" was nearby.

Low-ranking females that were invited to have sex with high-ranking females would also call to tell other group members about the bond.

Experts suggest females communicate the encounters to boost their status.

Continue reading the main story
“
Start Quote

It's all about climbing up the social ladder for female bonobos”

Zanna Clay
Emory University
Bonobo videos, news and facts
The species Pan paniscus are referred to as the "erotic" or "promiscuous apes" because they regularly engage in sexual contact with both their own and the opposite sex.

"[Sex] is used to reduce stress and competition, develop affiliations, express and test social relationships and for reconciling conflicts and consoling victims in distress," explained Dr Zanna Clay, from Emory University in Atlanta, who has been studying vocalisations in the species for five years.

In order to understand more about communication among the apes, Dr Clay led an international team of researchers to observe a group at the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa.


Building on earlier work, their findings published in the journal Scientific Reports identified a pattern in the calls made by females during homosexual encounters.

"Using vocalisations, females only advertise sexual contacts with important group members," said Dr Clay, "It's all about climbing up the social ladder for female bonobos."

By invitation
The team found that calls were most likely to be made by lower-ranking females, particularly if they were "picked" by a higher-ranking female.

The females also appeared to consider their audience - calling more if the most important group member, the alpha female, was present.

Continue reading the main story
Sex in bonobo society


Female bonobos have forward facing genitalia and often have face-to-face sexual contact with other females
Despite being considerably more sexually active than chimpanzees, bonobos do not have more offspring
Females become sexually mature at 12 years old but will engage in sexual activity from younger ages
After a conflict, males may make genital contact with their rival, in order to defuse the tension
Watch bonobo society in action
"Bonobos appear to be highly aware of the dynamics governing their social worlds," said Dr Clay.

She suggests that the females have adopted the calls, usually associated with reproduction, as a strategic tool.

"As a low-ranked female, advertising [a] social-sexual bonding with another dominant group member may serve to strengthen their social position, and signal this to the alpha."

Unlike their close relatives, the chimpanzees, bonobo societies are not male-dominated. Dr Clay suggests that this may be due to the strong relationships between females.

"In bonobos, sexual interactions represent a powerful means to enable females to develop and maintain social relationships, and it is these bonds which lie at the heart of their raised status in bonobo society."

 

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Have they been corrupted by Murdoch?

Chimpanzees have policemen, too: study
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-chi ... cemen.html
March 7th, 2012 in Biology / Plants & Animals

Mostly high-ranking males or females intervene in a conflict. Credit: Claudia Rudolf von Rohr

Conflict management is crucial for social group cohesion, and while humans may still be working out some of the details, new research shows that some chimpanzees engage in impartial, third-party "policing" activity as well.
Conflicts are inevitable wherever there is cohabitation. This is no different with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Sound conflict management is crucial for group cohesion. Individuals in chimpanzee communities also ensure that there is peace and order in their group. This form of conflict management is called "policing" – the impartial intervention of a third party in a conflict. Until now, this morally motivated behavior in chimpanzees was only ever documented anecdotally. However, primatologists from the University of Zurich can now confirm that chimpanzees intervene impartially in a conflict to guarantee the stability of their group. They therefore exhibit prosocial behavior based on an interest in community concern.

Chimpanzees are interested in social cohesion. Credit: Claudia Rudolf von Rohr

The willingness of the arbitrators to intervene impartially is greatest if several quarrelers are involved in a dispute as such conflicts particularly jeopardize group peace. The researchers observed and compared the behavior of four different captive chimpanzee groups. At Walter Zoo in Gossau, they encountered special circumstances: "We were lucky enough to be able to observe a group of chimpanzees into which new females had recently been introduced and in which the ranking of the males was also being redefined. The stability of the group began to waver. This also occurs in the wild," explains Claudia Rudolf von Rohr, the lead author of the study.
Not every chimpanzee makes a suitable arbitrator. It is primarily high-ranking males or females or animals that are highly respected in the group that intervene in a conflict. Otherwise, the arbitrators are unable to end the conflict successfully. As with humans, there are also authorities among chimpanzees. "The interest in community concern that is highly developed in us humans and forms the basis for our moral behavior is deeply rooted. It can also be observed in our closest relatives," concludes Rudolf von Rohr.

More information: Claudia Rudolf von Rohr, Sonja E. Koski, Judith M. Burkart, Clare Caws, Orlaith N. Fraser, Angela Ziltener, Carel P. van Schaik. Impartial third-party interventions in captive chimpanzees: a reflection of community concern. PLoS ONE, March 7, 2012. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032494

Provided by University of Zurich

 

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Chimpanzee uses innovative foresighted methods to fool humans
http://phys.org/news/2012-05-chimpanzee ... umans.html
May 10th, 2012 in Biology / Plants & Animals

Chimpanzee Santino achieved international fame in 2009 for his habit of gathering stones and manufacturing concrete projectiles to throw at zoo visitors. A new study shows that Santino's innovativeness when he plans his stone-throwing is greater than researchers have previously observed. He not only gathers stones and manufactures projectiles in advance; he also finds innovative ways of fooling the visitors. The study, which was carried out at Lund University, has been published in PLoS One.

The new study looked at the chimpanzee's ability to carry out complex planning. The case study shows how humans' closest relatives in the animal kingdom appear to be able to plan to deceive others, and that they can also plan their deception inventively. The behaviour of the chimpanzee Santino is of particular interest because it is done while the humans to be deceived are out of sight. That means that the chimpanzee can plan without having immediate perceptual feedback of his goal – the visitors to the zoo – to aid in his planning.

The subject of the study is Santino the chimpanzee, who achieved international fame in 2009 for his habit of gathering stones and manufacturing concrete projectiles to throw at visitors from the safety of his enclosure at Furuvik Zoo north of Stockholm. His behaviour was reported as an example of spontaneous planning for a future event, in which his psychological state was visibly quite different from that of his subsequent aggressive displays. Previously, such cognitive abilities had been widely believed to be restricted to humans.

The new study sought to collect more detailed data on Santino's projectile-throwing behaviour over the course of the 2010 zoo season.

In the new study, the chimpanzee continued and extended his previous behaviour of caching projectiles for later use in aggressive throwing displays. The new behaviour involved innovative use of concealments: both naturally occurring ones and ones he manufactured from hay. All were placed near the visitors' area. This allowed Santino to throw his missiles before the crowd had time to back away.

The first hay concealment was made after the zoo guide had repeatedly backed visitors away when the chimpanzee made throwing attempts. All concealments were made when the visitors were out of sight, and the hidden projectiles were used when they returned. In order to make the hay concealments the chimpanzee had bring the hay from the inside enclosure.

Over the course of the season, the researchers observed that the use of concealments became the chimpanzees preferred strategy. Moreover, Santino combined two deception strategies consistently: hiding projectiles and inhibiting the displays of dominance that otherwise preceded his throws.

The new findings suggest that chimpanzees may be able to represent the future behaviour of others while those others are not present. It is also critical that the chimpanzee's initial behaviour produced a future event, rather than merely preparing for one that had reliably occurred before. This in turn, suggest a flexible planning ability which, in humans, relies on creative re-combining of memories, mentally acted out in a 'what if' future scenario.

Provided by Lund University

 

[ramonmercado]

Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives
http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2 ... tml?ref=hp
by Ann Gibbons on 13 June 2012, 1:30 PM | 3 Comments

Family ties. The genome of this bonobo, Ulindi, shows how closely humans, chimps, and bonobos are related.
Credit: Max Planck Society

Chimpanzees now have to share the distinction of being our closest living relative in the animal kingdom. An international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of the bonobo for the first time, confirming that it shares the same percentage of its DNA with us as chimps do. The team also found some small but tantalizing differences in the genomes of the three species—differences that may explain how bonobos and chimpanzees don't look or act like us even though we share about 99% of our DNA.

"We're so closely related genetically, yet our behavior is so different," says team member and computational biologist Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "This will allow us to look for the genetic basis of what makes modern humans different from both bonobos and chimpanzees."

Ever since researchers sequenced the chimp genome in 2005, they have known that humans share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives. But there are actually two species of chimpanzees that are this closely related to humans: bonobos (Pan paniscus) and the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). This has prompted researchers to speculate whether the ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos looked and acted more like a bonobo, a chimpanzee, or something else—and how all three species have evolved differently since the ancestor of humans split with the common ancestor of bonobos and chimps between 5 million and 7 million years ago in Africa.

The international sequencing effort led from Max Planck chose a bonobo named Ulindi from the Leipzig Zoo as its subject, partly because she was a female (the chimp genome was of a male). The analysis of Ulindi's complete genome, reported online today in Nature, reveals that bonobos and chimpanzees share 99.6% of their DNA. This confirms that these two species of African apes are still highly similar to each other genetically, even though their populations split apart in Africa about 1 million years ago, perhaps after the Congo River formed and divided an ancestral population into two groups. Today, bonobos are found in only the Democratic Republic of Congo and there is no evidence that they have interbred with chimpanzees in equatorial Africa since they diverged, perhaps because the Congo River acted as a barrier to prevent the groups from mixing. The researchers also found that bonobos share about 98.7% of their DNA with humans—about the same amount that chimps share with us.

Live Chat: The Science of Fatherhood Thursday 3 p.m. EDT
When the Max Planck scientists compared the bonobo genome directly with that of chimps and humans, however, they found that a small bit of our DNA, about 1.6%, is shared with only the bonobo, but not chimpanzees. And we share about the same amount of our DNA with only chimps, but not bonobos. These differences suggest that the ancestral population of apes that gave rise to humans, chimps, and bonobos was quite large and diverse genetically—numbering about 27,000 breeding individuals. Once the ancestors of humans split from this population more than 5 million years ago, the common ancestor of bonobos and chimps retained this diversity until their population completely split into two groups 1 million years ago. The groups that evolved into bonobos, chimps, and humans all retained slightly different subsets of this ancestral population's diverse gene pool—and those differences now offer clues today to the size and range of diversity in that ancestral group.

While the function of the small differences in DNA in the three lineages today is not yet known, the Max Planck team sees clues that some may be involved in parts of the genome that regulate immune responses, tumor suppression genes, and perception of social cues. The common chimpanzee, for example, shows selection for a version of a gene that may be involved in fighting retroviruses, such as HIV—a genetic variant not found in humans or bonobos, which may explain why chimps get a milder strain of HIV (called simian immunodeficiency virus) than humans do. Another difference is that bonobos and humans, but not chimps, have a version of a protein found in urine that may have similar function in apes as it does in mice, which detect differences in scent to pick up social cues.

"This paper is a significant benchmark achievement that lays the groundwork for other types of investigations into Homo-Pan differences," says molecular anthropologist Maryellen Ruvolo of Harvard University, who was not involved in the work. As researchers study the genome in more depth, they hope to find the genetic differences that make bonobos more playful than chimps, for example, or humans more cerebral. The bonobo genome also should put to rest arguments that humans are more closely related to chimps, says primatologist Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta. "The story that the bonobo can be safely ignored or marginalized from debates about human origins is now off the table," says de Waal.

This item has been updated to reflect that chimps and bonobos are two species of chimpanzees that are close enough to humans to share 99.6% of their DNA. The international sequencing effort was led by Max Planck composed of multiple teams including 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut.

 

[Loquaciousness]

I wanna be like you: Kanzi, the ape who HAS learned the secret of man's red fire and loves nothing more than a good fry-up
By David Derbyshire
Last updated at 9:47 AM on 30th December 2011

Kanzi is getting a bit old hat these days, so old hat that he has been a mainstay of A level Psychology for over a decade.
The basic story is that a bonobo raised liked a human child, in a language rich environment, will pick up language skills and eventually use language in the same way as a 2-3 year old would.
Washoe, a chimp, who was raised with american sign lanuage, also appeared to master the basics of human language, and passed some of her signs onto her own baby and other members of the ape colony she eventually lived in.
Apes have been known to pass on knowledge of tool use and can successfully problem solve. Chimps seem to have been shown to mourn the passing of one of their own, and can also remember who acted altruistically towards them in the past, and will do the same for that individual in the future.
My main concerns with such research are as follows :
1. Should we be raising apes in human type environments ? Kanzi for instance, is allowed to watch TV, eats M&Ms and other human foods, etc.
2. If apes are capable of rudimentary human language, should we perhaps gain consent from them and give them the right to withdraw if they no longer wish to participate in experiments.
3. What do we do with these apes once research grants dry up and/or research is complete ? Kanzi will be ok, as Savage-Rumbaugh has a very strong attachment to him and has indeed called him "my best friend". Poor old Washo on the other hand, got shunted to an ape colony in ONE ROOM of a university building once she had outlived her usefulness, where by all accounts life was pretty miserable. One anecdote has her signing "get me out" to one of her ex researchers that came to visit her.

 

[Loquaciousness]

And 'coz it's cute, and shows cultural transmission here is a clip of Kanzi playing/interacting with his infant son Teco.

 

[Mythopoeika]

And 'coz it's cute, and shows cultural transmission here is a clip of Kanzi playing/interacting with his infant son Teco.

Where's the clip?

 

[Loquaciousness]

Erm..... here.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIpKfg5JJ4s

 

[ramonmercado]

Erm..... here.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIpKfg5JJ4s

Thanks. I thought we would have to give you a banana to get it.

 

[ramonmercado]

Researchers link wild chimpanzee gestures to language evolution
July 15th, 2012 in Biology / Plants & Animals

Enlarge
(Phys.org) -- A Stirling researcher has identified between 20 and 30 manual gestures used by a community of wild chimpanzees, used to communicate with others in a range of activities including nursing, feeding, sex, aggression and defence. At least a third of these gestures may be shared with humans and these similarities may help us to discover how humans evolved language.

Postgraduate researcher, Dr Anna Roberts, found that chimpanzees use arm beckoning gestures to make another approach them, flail their arms to make another leave, use begging gestures to make others pass food and clap their hands to express excitement.

The study is the first to show that wild chimpanzees are so close to humans in terms of their communicative abilities and these gestures suggest that the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees must have used similar manual gestures.

Dr Roberts said: “Chimpanzees use these gestures intentionally to elicit a desired response from other chimpanzees and they may be the missing link between ape and human communication”.

“We now know that these gestures must have been in the repertoire of our common ancestor and might have been the starting point for language evolution. Manual gesture in chimpanzees is controlled by the same brain structures as speech in the human brain.”

Dr Roberts discovered that chimpanzees not only communicate using manual gestures, but they are able to work out what the signaller means from both gesture and accompanying context.

“Chimpanzees not only use similar manual gestures to humans,” says Dr Roberts, “but the way they use these gestures is also very similar to the way humans gesture and use language. The defining way that people understand communication with others is by figuring out what someone really means by ‘mind-reading’ their intentions and we have discovered that chimpanzees may have a similar ability.

“We are all interested in what distinguishes us from animals and the defining feature of humans is language. Language allows us to co-operate, to learn from each other and to create cohesive society. No other species has been found to have such a complex and flexible system of communication but we know very little about how we came to have language.”

Dr Roberts concludes: “The ability to co-operate and learn from others paved the way for language evolution. If chimpanzees learn the precise structure of their gestures from others, this means that the fundamental cognitive skills required for language evolution are already present in our closest living relatives.”

Provided by University of Stirling
"Researchers link wild chimpanzee gestures to language evolution." July 15th, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-07-link-wild- ... guage.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Is this a guerrilla war?

Chimps attack people after habitat loss
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... -loss.html
14:39 11 October 2012 by Curtis Abraham and Tiffany O'Callaghan

Habitat loss may be to blame for an apparent spate of violent attacks by chimpanzees on humans in the war-torn eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

According to officials at Virunga National Park, located on the border between the DRC, Uganda and Rwanda, at least one person – a child – has been killed in recent months, in a chimpanzee attack just south of the park in the area around the city of Goma.

A woman attempted to scare the chimp away to protect the child, says Alison Mollon of the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) in Germany, which works in partnership with the park. Unfortunately, the chimp reacted aggressively. "It generally seems that where people react aggressively, the result is aggressive behaviour in return," she says.

Mistrust of chimpanzees has been heightened by local media reports, which suggest that as many as 10 people have been killed and 17 injured by chimps, in acts that were reported as "revenge attacks" for people encroaching on their territory.

Such reports highlight the urgent need to defuse the situation – both by educating locals in behaviours that will minimise the chances of violent confrontations, and by habituating chimps to humans. But efforts are being thwarted by the armed conflict between M23 rebels and the DRC government, which began in April.

"As soon as we can return, we will distribute information flyers in Swahili and French," Mollon says. But putting out clear, useful information becomes more difficult once rumours of violence have spread.

Mistrust and antagonism

Klaus Zuberbuhler, a psychologist at the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, and scientific director of the Budongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda, says restricting the chimps' habitat can certainly affect their behaviour, though it is debatable whether the chimps' aggression towards humans is a form of revenge. "It may be a more general sign of mistrust and antagonism, which is regularly seen in chimp sanctuaries and other captive facilities," he says.

Reports of the scale and number of attacks are probably exaggerated, says Richard Wrangham of Harvard University, but he concedes that there has been an increase in tension between humans and chimps in that corner of the DRC – although only in areas where chimp habitat has been lost.

"Human-wildlife conflict is an extremely serious issue in Virunga, as it is across Africa and elsewhere," says Emmanuel de Merode, chief warden at Virunga. There is an ongoing surge in human population in the area, he says, and wherever the park's land is illegally used for farming, park authorities are obliged to uphold laws to protect it.

Even if the chimp attacks subside, they may well erupt again in future because of the ongoing pressure from humans. Vernon Reynolds, a biological anthropologist at the University of Oxford, and author of The Chimpanzees of Budongo Forest, says he is aware of a few past incidents around Kasowka Forest in Uganda in which chimps have attacked humans after losing much of their food supply to farming.

"There is undoubtedly a lot of exaggeration, and stories abound," he says. "But the reality is bad enough."

 

[rynner2]

Apes have midlife crises too
Apes have midlife crises too, according to a new study which suggests middle-aged men cannot blame their career or family life for motorbike-buying meltdowns.
By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent
8:00PM GMT 19 Nov 2012

Human behaviour studies have revealed the well-established trend that our level of happiness declines after childhood until middle age, when we gradually begin to feel more content again.
Now researchers have found that the same "u-shaped" pattern is also seen among chimpanzees and orang-utans, who are most satisfied with life in their earliest and latest years but reach a "nadir" in middle age.

While it may be tempting for balding Ferrari drivers to blame their affliction on the stresses of modern life, their findings suggest that the midlife crisis may be ingrained in our genes.
Prof Andrew Oswald of Warwick University said: "We hoped to understand a famous scientific puzzle: why does human happiness follow an approximate U-shape through life?
"We ended up showing that it cannot be because of mortgages, marital break-up, mobile phones, or any of the other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of those."

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, they reported that the animals' happiness was generally high in youth, declined in middle age and rose again into old age.
While the study does not rule out the influence of cultural forces on our mood, it suggests biological factors could partly explain the distinctive u-shaped pattern.

Possible explanations could be that happiness is linked to longevity – meaning that the humans and apes who live longest are likely to be the happiest – or that brain changes as we age influence our well-being.

A third explanation could be that older humans and apes spend more time doing things that they enjoy, or set themselves more attainable goals in order to feel more satisfied, researchers said.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scie ... s-too.html

 

[ramonmercado]

Sharing: Chimp study reveals origins of human fair play
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20973753
By Victoria Gill
BBC reporter

Sharing plays an important role in a co-operative chimp society

The human tendency to share may have more ancient evolutionary routes than previously thought.

This is according to a study of the performance of chimpanzees in a test called the "ultimatum game".

Traditionally, the game is employed as a test of economics; two people decide how to divide a sum of money.

This modified game, in which two chimps decided how to divide a portion of banana slices, seems to have revealed the primates' generous side.


The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was part of an effort to uncover the evolutionary routes of why we share, even when it does not make economic sense.

Scientists say this innate fairness is an important foundation of co-operative societies like ours.


When the first chimp takes a token and passes it to its partner, this represents an "offer"
Fair game
Lead researcher Darby Proctor from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, US, explained why she and her colleagues chose to use the ultimatum game, which has been used in the past to illustrate the human tendency to share.

During the game, one participant is given an amount of money and asked to "make an offer" to the second player. If that second player accepts the offer, the money is divided accordingly.

Continue reading the main story
Playing fair?
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But, if the second player refuses that offer, both players receive nothing. This is the basis of the fairness versus economics quandary; if the first player proposes a selfish, unequal offer, the affronted recipient might refuse.

And this is exactly what happens in humans. Although it makes economic sense to give away as little as possible and accept any offer that's proposed, people usually make roughly equal, or "fair" offers, and tend to refuse unequal or "unfair" offers.

Dr Proctor and her colleagues trained their chimp participants to play a similar game, using coloured tokens to represent a reward.

"We tried to abstract it a little - to make it a bit like money," Dr Proctor explained.

Continue reading the main story
Close cousins

A previous attempt to test merit-based sharing among our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, was published in a 2007 study published in the journal Science. Researchers using the ultimatum game found that chimps would take any reward - no matter what share they were offered. But the authors of this study say this may have been because the chimps were directly offered food which they found "difficult to resist".
While children appear to be prepared to share with a new playmate, non-human primates seem to limit their altruism to close kin and mates. But it is not simply the case that the more intelligent the species the more altruistic they are. Recent research on sharing published in PNAS in social primates revealed that capuchins and marmosets were some of the most "giving" primates - commonly offering food rewards to other group members
Before we feel too superior to our primate cousins, our capacity to be spiteful appears to be ours alone. A 2007 published in PNAS study found chimpanzees, unlike humans, do not retaliate against personally harmful actions. Being spiteful is a human trait
Discover how chimpanzees communicate
"We trained them with two different tokens.

"If they took [a white token], they would be able to split the food equally, and taking the other [blue] token meant that the first chimp would get more food than the partner."

The researchers presented both tokens to the first chimp, which would then choose one and offer it to its partner.

As with the human version of the game, if the partner accepted the token, both animals received their reward.

Three pairs of chimps played this game, and the results revealed that the animals had a tendency to offer a fair and equal share of the food reward.

In another experiment, the team repeated the test with 20 children between the ages of two and seven. They discovered that both young children and chimps "responded like humans typically do" - tending to opt for an equal division of the prize.

"What we're trying to get at is the evolutionary route of why humans share," explained Dr Proctor.

"Both chimps and people are hugely cooperative; they engage in cooperative hunting, they share food, they care for each other's offspring.

"So it's likely that this [fairness] was needed in the evolution of cooperation.

"It seems to me that the human sense of fairness has been around in primates for at least as long as humans and chimps have been separated."

Continue reading the main story
Class clips: Teaching children fair play
Respect yourself: Class clip: Representatives from the sports world discuss the need to have respect for yourself and others
Just not cricket: Deputy Head Dorian Brooksby believes cricket has always promoted fair play

Dr Susanne Schultz from the University of Manchester said the study was very interesting and showed "the potential for chimps to be aware of fair offers".

"It is interesting that changing the study design - primarily by not using food rewards it seems - one can elicit fairness behaviour in chimps," she told the BBC.

She added though that is was not clear that the chimps completely understood the design of the game and that, with just six chimps involved in the study, further evidence would be needed to show clearly that chimps had a natural tendency towards fairness.

 

[ramonmercado]

Vid at link.

Trend-setting chimp teaches friend to use a straw
10:23 31 January 2013
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/ ... straw.html
Sandrine Ceurstemont, editor, New Scientist TV



If your friend has a more efficient way of getting food, it makes sense to copy them. Now an experiment is showing for the first time that chimps also come to the same conclusion.

Captured by Shinya Yamamoto from Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues, this video shows how a chimp improves its use of a straw after observing a more proficient companion. At first, it uses the tool almost like an eye-dropper, dipping it in a box to sop up juice. But after it watches its friend drink faster by sucking on the straw, it learns to adopt this new approach. According to the team, which studied nine chimps, once an ape switched to straw-sucking, it never went back to the less efficient dipping technique.

Although it's well known that chimps learn socially, it's the first time they've been shown to improve the way they use a tool, which is a comparatively sophisticated ability. It requires a chimp to differentiate between two techniques involving the same instrument to achieve an identical goal.

The experiment shows that these apes have the mental capacity to evolve their cultural learning. "The limitations might be due to ecological, social and motivational factors rather than cognitive abilities," write the researchers.

If you enjoyed this clip, see how chimps carry corpses to mourn their dead or watch a bonobo genius make stone tools.

 

[ramonmercado]

Chimpanzees eat smart when it comes to mealtime
March 21st, 2013 in Biology / Plants & Animals

Bryce Carlson, a Purdue assistant professor of anthropology who studies primate ecology and nutrition in human evolution, found that chimpanzees watch what they eat and when, which may show that these primates are giving some thought to the quality of their food. Data regarding the chimpanzees and two species of saplings were collected from Ngogo in Uganda's Kibale National Park. Carlson's findings are published in the American Journal of Primatology. Credit: Bryce Carlson

Chimpanzees watch what they eat and when, which may show that these primates are giving some thought to the quality of their food, according to Purdue University research.

"There is an association between the time of day primates eat certain resources and the nutritional quality of those resources, suggesting consumption may track nutrient content," said Bryce Carlson, an assistant professor of anthropology who studies primate ecology and nutrition in human evolution. "We can't say for sure if chimpanzees are consciously selecting the leaves when nutritional content is greatest, but this correlation presents an intriguing hypothesis to explain feeding behavior in this primate species and mechanisms for ingestive behavior in general."

The study's results are published in the April American Journal of Primatology, and this work was funded by the National Science Foundation and L.S.B. Leakey Foundation. Carlson, who is a member of Purdue's Ingestive Behavior Research Center, is studying the dietary habits of wild chimpanzees as part of his research on the history of diet in human evolution. These primates, which live in forest areas of Africa, are part of the hominidae family that also includes humans, gorillas and orangutans. It is estimated there are 300,000 chimpanzees in the wild.

Chimpanzees, whose diet is composed of fruit, leaves, plant stalks, roots, insects and other vertebrate animals, frequently consume various leaves at the end of the day. Other researchers have proposed the animals prefer eating leaves at that time to feel full and facilitate greater nutrient absorption overnight, or that this daily eating pattern results from social dynamics, where chimpanzees typically spend late afternoons in smaller foraging groups on the ground where these leaves are found.

The Celtis africana is a smaller tree common throughout the Ngogo chimpanzee habitat, and it is among primate's food sources. Credit: Bryce Carlson

"But we know there is a correlation between nutritional quality and daily feeding patterns for other animals, such as domesticated sheep," Carlson said. "So we wanted to take a closer look at chimpanzees by comparing the primates' feeding habits to the nutritional composition of these leaves throughout the day."

Data regarding the chimpanzees and two species of saplings, Pterygota mildbraedii and Celtis africana, were collected from Ngogo in Uganda's Kibale National Park. The Ngogo chimpanzee community is the largest observed in the world - more than 180 animals - and has been actively studied since 1995.

Daily feeding observations from 2002-2011, made primarily during the dry season months of June through August, of 41 adult male chimpanzees were analyzed for eating patterns. These were compared to nutrition samples from Pterygota mildbraedii and Celtis africana. Leaf samples were taken from different saplings and at various feeding times during the day.

Pterygota mildbraedii is a very large tree, common throughout the Ngogo chimpanzee habitat. The chimpanzees, however, eat young leaves of the saplings found near the forest floor. This study found that the leaves' hemicellulose - a more digestible fiber - and nonstructural carbohydrates - simple sugars and starch - increased 15 percent to 100 percent, respectively, from morning to evening. Cellulose and lignin, which make the leaves more difficult to digest, also decreased by day's end. Celtis africana is a smaller tree than Pterygota, the saplings of which contain many thin branches and small leaves. The sugars in this plant's leaves were found to double from morning to late afternoon.

"If these sugars or total non-structural carbohydrates are increasing, then the leaves are returning more calories late in the day," Carlson said. "At this time, they may taste sweeter, and the chimpanzees may then learn and adjust their feeding behavior accordingly. We know they use vision, texture, taste and smell to gauge when to eat fruit, so it's understandable to think they may do the same with leaves."

Carlson's research will continue to focus on diet for wild chimpanzees and human ancestors.

"Questions about what humans are eating today and why are important as our growing world population increasingly struggles with malnutrition tightly linked with quality of life, morbidity and mortality," Carlson said. "Evolution for any species is related to, and even driven by, food availability and quality, so the more we learn about our long history with food, the better able we are to make individual and population level recommendations for consumer behavior today and years to come."

More information: Diurnal Variation in Nutrients and Chimpanzee Foraging Behavior, i>American Journal of Primatology, 2013.

ABSTRACT
Primate feeding behavior varies over long (e.g. weekly, seasonally, yearly) and short (e.g. hourly) scales of times due to changes in resources availability and the nutritional composition of foods. While the factors that affect long-term changes in feeding behavior have received considerable attention, few data exist regarding what drives variability in feeding behavior over the course of a single day. To address this problem, we investigated diurnal variation in chimpanzee feeding on the leaves of two species of saplings, Pterygota mildbraedii, and Celtis africana, at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda. Specifically, we related short-term changes in chimpanzee feeding behavior on these leaves to diurnal variation in their nutrition composition. Results showed that chimpanzees fed on the leaves of both saplings more in the evening than they did in the morning. The nutritional quality of leaves also improved over the course of the day.

Concentration of cellulose and lignin were lower and total non-structural carbohydrates (including sugars and starch) were higher in the evening for P. mildbraedii, and sugars were higher in the evening for C. africana. These data suggest that chimpanzees consume these resources when their quality is highest, and consequently, may track the nutrient composition of their foods over very short periods that span only a few hours. In the future, foods collected for analyses must control for time of sampling to ensure biologically meaningful assays of nutrient composition.
Provided by Purdue University

"Chimpanzees eat smart when it comes to mealtime." March 21st, 2013. http://phys.org/news/2013-03-chimpanzee ... ltime.html

 

[GNC]

That reminds me, the superb documentary Project Nim is on BBC Two this weekend:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p0gtf

Nine thirty, Saturday. Please make a point of watching it, it's fascinating and heartbreaking and thought provoking, all great things for a documentary to be.

 

[ramonmercado]

Do they hold grudges?

Chimpanzees and Orangutans Remember Distant Past Events
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 130613.htm

Humans can remember events that happened years ago, with those memories often surfacing unexpectedly in response to sensory triggers like flavor or scent. Now, new evidence suggests that chimpanzees and orangutans have similar capacities. (Credit: © mrahmo / Fotolia)

July 18, 2013 — We humans can remember events in our lives that happened years ago, with those memories often surfacing unexpectedly in response to sensory triggers: perhaps a unique flavor or scent. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, on July 18 have evidence to suggest that chimpanzees and orangutans have similar capacities. In laboratory tests, both primate species were clearly able to recollect a tool-finding event that they had experienced just four times three years earlier and a singular event from two weeks before, the researchers show.

It seems we have more in common with our primate cousins than we thought, specifically when it comes to our autobiographical memories, the researchers say.

"Our data and other emerging evidence keep challenging the idea of non-human animals being stuck in time," says Gema Martin-Ordas of Aarhus University in Denmark. "We show not only that chimpanzees and orangutans remember events that happened two weeks or three years ago, but also that they can remember them even when they are not expecting to have to recall those events at a later time."

The chimpanzees and orangutans in the study could also distinguish between similar past events in which the same tasks, locations, and people were involved, she adds. "This is a crucial finding since it implies that our subjects were able to bind the different elements of very similar events -- including task, tool, experimenter. This idea of 'binding' has been considered to be a crucial component of autobiographical memories."

When presented with a particular setup, chimpanzees and orangutans instantaneously remembered where to search for tools and the location of a tool they had seen only once. The researchers note in particular the complexity and speed of the primates' recall ability.

"I was surprised to find out not only that they remembered the event that took place three years ago, but also that they did it so fast!" Martin-Ordas says. "On average it took them five seconds to go and find the tools. Again this is very telling because it shows that they were not just walking around the rooms and suddenly saw the boxes and searched for the tools inside them. More probably, it was the recalled event that enabled them to find the tools directly."

She says the new findings are just the beginning of a completely new line of research on memories for past events in non-human animals.

Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Gema Martin-Ordas, Dorthe Berntsen, Josep Call. Memory for Distant Past Events in Chimpanzees and Orangutans. Current Biology, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.017

 

[GNC]

Don't know how new that research is, in the film Project Nim the chimp in question remembers people he hasn't seen in years, and I've seen some other doc which slips my mind where a chimp could remember his old carers while he sat in a cage waiting to be experimented on, even exhibiting crushing disappointment when he realised he wasn't going with them when they left.

 

[ramonmercado]

Chimpanzee gestures deciphered in 'world first' after scientists decode foot stomps and hand flings

Researchers at St Andrews University studied 80 wild apes in Ugandan rainforest

Scientists have deciphered as many as 66 chimpanzee gestures, which they say are used intentionally by the apes and which provide a potential link with the early development of the human language.

From simple requests to complex social negotiation, the chimps were found to use a number of hand and body gestures to get their intentions across.

Eighty wild chimpanzees in the Budongo rainforest, Uganda, were analysed in an attempt to interpret what the ground slaps, foot stomps and arm raises really mean.

Researchers from St Andrew’s University say that they have shown in unprecedented detail what our closest living relatives are trying to convey, after looking at over 4,500 gestures using secret recordings.

“Although it has been known for over 30 years that apes use gestures to communicate, until now no one has worked out what they are actually trying to say,” the team, led by primatologists Dr Catherine Hobaiter and Professor Richard Byrne, said.

They have now created a sort of dictionary or lexicon of 19 different meanings, publishing the results in the journal Current Biology this week after concentrating on the apes’ non-playful uses of their gestures.

Professor Byrne said: “There is abundant evidence that chimpanzees and other apes gesture with purpose. ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 83455.html

 

[ramonmercado]

The study co-authored by Leo Polansky, an associate researcher in the UC Davis anthropology department, reveals that chimpanzees will find a place to sleep en route to breakfast sites and risk travel in the dark when predators are active to obtain more desired, less abundant fruits such as figs. The study is being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"As humans we are familiar with the race against birds for our cherries, or against squirrels for our walnuts and pecans," Polansky said, "but this race is carried out amongst competitors of all kinds of species in locations all over the world." ...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 101607.htm

 

[ramonmercado]

Researchers Challenge Accepted Theory on Tool Use Among Primates

Alternative view has implications for development of tool use among early human ancestors.

Researchers Challenge Accepted Theory on Tool Use Among Primates
Whether you are a human being or an orangutan, tools can be a big help in getting what you need to survive. However, a review of current research into the use of tools by non-human primates suggests that ecological opportunity, rather than necessity, is the main driver behind primates such as chimpanzees picking up a stone to crack open nuts.

An opinion piece by Dr Kathelijne Koops of the University of Cambridge and others, published today (12 November 2014) in Biology Letters, challenges the assumption that necessity is the mother of invention. She and her colleagues argue that research into tool use by primates should look at the opportunities for tool use provided by the local environment.

Koops and colleagues reviewed studies on tool use among the three habitual tool-using primates - chimpanzees, orangutans and bearded capuchins.

Chimpanzees use a variety of tools in a range of contexts, including stones to crack open nuts, and sticks to harvest aggressive army ants. Orangutans also use stick tools to prey on insects, as well as to extract seeds from fruits. Bearded capuchin monkeys living in savannah-like environments also use a variety of tools, including stones to crack open nuts and sticks to dig for tubers. ...

http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/fa ... g-primates

 

[ramonmercado]

A chimpanzee is not entitled to the same rights as people and does not have be freed from captivity by its owner, a US court has ruled. The appeals court in New York state said caged chimpanzee Tommy could not be recognised as a "legal person" as it "cannot bear any legal duties".

The Nonhuman Rights Project had argued that chimps who had such similar characteristics to the humans deserved basic rights, including freedom. The rights group said it would appeal.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30338231

 

[ramonmercado]

What can chimpanzees teach us about human nature?
Chris Knight of the Radical Anthropology Group explores the relationship between sex, language and culture

... I noted just now that, for Engels, theories about human origins made no sense if they ignored sexual differences and treated everyone as male. While it is true that we still get one-sided theories about ‘man, the hunter’, ‘man, the toolmaker’ and so forth, this fundamental point is today widely acknowledged. If we take a book like Primate social systems by Robin Dunbar - one of the most authoritative primatologists - it essentially uses a methodology that Marxists would recognise. Reflecting a widespread scientific consensus, Dunbar argues that changes within primate social systems always stem initially from choices made by females.

Why is that? It is because the females alone have responsibility for offspring, so they choose where to move, according to where the food is. Meanwhile, the males have quite different priorities, since they want to find fertile females. This means it is the females whose choices determine everything else.

To take an example, one can look at bonobos and chimps. Chimp societies are male-dominated, but one species of chimp, the bonobo, lives in female-dominated groups. How do you explain that? There is a materialist explanation, with a focus on the digestive system. If you can eat grass, which grows everywhere, the females can clump together; if you eat fruit, which is more dispersed, the females will be more dispersed. Depending on the distribution of females, male apes will or will not be able to monopolise a group of them. In the case of bonobos, females in the same area form a sexual bond through rubbing each other’s genitals and, if faced with competition for food by male bonobos, they will jointly chase off that male. Bonobo females have even been known to hunt together, fighting off any males who seek to steal the meat.

Bonobos live near a bend on the south side of the Congo river - north of the river are male-dominated chimpanzees. How has this come about? One materialist theory says that the chimps on the north side have to compete with gorillas for food, meaning the chimpanzee females disperse and therefore lack solidarity, so the males can dominate them. Bonobo females south of the river, where there are no gorillas, can afford to live more closely together, allowing them to form coalitions that prevent male dominance. This explanation sees chimp behaviour driven not by the mind or by genes (which follow behaviour rather than lead it), but by the means through which these apes forage and sustain themselves. ...

http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1044/what-can-chimpanzees-teach-us-about-human-nature/