Summary
2010 marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. Louis Leakey sending Jane Goodall to Gombe Stream, in Tanzania, to begin her groundbreaking study of chimpanzees in the wild. The chimpanzee behavioral research she pioneered there has produced a wealth of scientific discovery. This significant and vital part of scientific history will be celebrated by The Leakey Foundation, in partnership with the California Academy of Sciences. Anne Pusey, former Director of Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies, will discuss this important project, which spans 50 years and is still running today.
Dr. Pusey reviews how the Gombe study has revealed the basic structure of chimpanzee society, the nature of social relationships within and between the sexes, life history patterns, and how these resemble and differ from those of humans.
Despite 50 years of study, chimpanzees are slow to give up their secrets and continue to surprise us. Pusey will discuss how long-term data, coupled with new technologies, have facilitated investigations of previously intractable questions and how new observations of unexpected behavior continually generate new questions.
The evening is illustrated with rarely seen archival photographs, video and recent stories of the Gombe chimpanzees.
Are we humans simply remodelled apes? Chimps with a tweak? Is the difference between our genomes so minuscule it justifies the argument that our cognition and behaviour must also differ from chimps by barely a whisker? If “chimps are us” should we grant them human rights? Or is this one of the biggest fallacies in the study of evolution? NOT A CHIMP argues that these similarities have been grossly over-exaggerated - we should keep chimps at arm’s length. Are humans cognitively unique after all?
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Sticks appear as “dolls” in hands of chimps
Interesting short piece about a recent publication by Richard Wrangham and his research group in Uganda. It appears that young females - solely in this chimp community (it has never been noticed anywhere else) - carry sticks as young human females carry dolls. The practice ceases when they become pregnant for the first time. Here is the bounce, courtesy of Cell Press and World Science.
"Young chimpanzees, and most often females, at a national park in Uganda some times play with sticks in a way reminiscent of the way children play with dolls, scientists are reporting.
The practice might turn out to be the first case among animals “of a tradition maintained just among the young, like nursery rhymes and some games in human children,” said Harvard University researcher Rich ard Wrangham. “This would suggest that chimpanzee behavioral traditions are even more like those in humans than previously thought.”
But he added that the stick-playing is relatively rare, and undocumented in other chimp communities. The findings, by Wrangham and colleagues, are published in the Dec. 21 issue of the research journal Current Biology.
This is “the first evidence of an animal species in the wild in which object play differs between males and females,” said Wrangham. The gender difference in chimps’ apparent “doll” play also fits the pattern seen across human cultures, he added—suggesting it stems from “biological predilections” rather than socialization.
Although both young male and female chimps play with sticks, females do so more often, and they occasionally treat them like mother chimps tending their infants, the researchers said. Earlier studies of captive monkeys had also suggested a biological influence on toy choice, accord ing to Wrangham and colleagues: when young monkeys are offered sex-stereo typed human toys, females gravitate toward dolls, whereas males tend to go for “boys’ toys” such as trucks.
The new findings are based on 14 years of studies of the Kanyawara chimpanzee community at Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Wrangham and co author Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates College in Maine found that chimpanzees use sticks in four main ways: as probes to investigate holes potentially containing water or honey, as props or weapons in aggressive encounters, during solitary or social play, and in a behavior the re searchers call stick-carrying.
Wrangham said they had seen stick-carrying from time to time over the years and suspected females were doing it the most. Detailed investigation has confirmed that, they added. “We thought that if the sticks are being treated like dolls, females would carry sticks more than males do and should stop carrying sticks when they have their own babies,” Wrangham said. “Both of these points are correct.”
Young females some times took their sticks into day-nests where they rested and some times played with them casually in a manner that evoked maternal play, the researchers reported.
It’s not yet clear whether this form of play is common in chimpanzees, the researchers say. In fact, no one has previously reported stick-carrying as a form of play, despite consider ble interest among chimpanzee researchers in describing object use. “This makes us suspect that stick-carrying is a social tradition that has sprung up in our community and not others,” Wrangham said.
Because stick-carrying is uncommon even in the Kanyawara chimps that Wrang ham and Kahlenberg studied, they said, they won’t be sure until researchers study ing other communities report its absence. They note that chimp play is generally poorly documented because chimp communities are usually small with few youngsters at any one time."
"Young chimpanzees, and most often females, at a national park in Uganda some times play with sticks in a way reminiscent of the way children play with dolls, scientists are reporting.
The practice might turn out to be the first case among animals “of a tradition maintained just among the young, like nursery rhymes and some games in human children,” said Harvard University researcher Rich ard Wrangham. “This would suggest that chimpanzee behavioral traditions are even more like those in humans than previously thought.”
But he added that the stick-playing is relatively rare, and undocumented in other chimp communities. The findings, by Wrangham and colleagues, are published in the Dec. 21 issue of the research journal Current Biology.
This is “the first evidence of an animal species in the wild in which object play differs between males and females,” said Wrangham. The gender difference in chimps’ apparent “doll” play also fits the pattern seen across human cultures, he added—suggesting it stems from “biological predilections” rather than socialization.
Although both young male and female chimps play with sticks, females do so more often, and they occasionally treat them like mother chimps tending their infants, the researchers said. Earlier studies of captive monkeys had also suggested a biological influence on toy choice, accord ing to Wrangham and colleagues: when young monkeys are offered sex-stereo typed human toys, females gravitate toward dolls, whereas males tend to go for “boys’ toys” such as trucks.
The new findings are based on 14 years of studies of the Kanyawara chimpanzee community at Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Wrangham and co author Sonya Kahlenberg of Bates College in Maine found that chimpanzees use sticks in four main ways: as probes to investigate holes potentially containing water or honey, as props or weapons in aggressive encounters, during solitary or social play, and in a behavior the re searchers call stick-carrying.
Wrangham said they had seen stick-carrying from time to time over the years and suspected females were doing it the most. Detailed investigation has confirmed that, they added. “We thought that if the sticks are being treated like dolls, females would carry sticks more than males do and should stop carrying sticks when they have their own babies,” Wrangham said. “Both of these points are correct.”
Young females some times took their sticks into day-nests where they rested and some times played with them casually in a manner that evoked maternal play, the researchers reported.
It’s not yet clear whether this form of play is common in chimpanzees, the researchers say. In fact, no one has previously reported stick-carrying as a form of play, despite consider ble interest among chimpanzee researchers in describing object use. “This makes us suspect that stick-carrying is a social tradition that has sprung up in our community and not others,” Wrangham said.
Because stick-carrying is uncommon even in the Kanyawara chimps that Wrang ham and Kahlenberg studied, they said, they won’t be sure until researchers study ing other communities report its absence. They note that chimp play is generally poorly documented because chimp communities are usually small with few youngsters at any one time."
Fearless Woman Lacks Key Part of Brain
The role of the amygdala in social intelligence is well known. It is very important in estimating the emotional valency of facial expressions, for instance - are they happy, angry or sad? It is also the low-level receptor area in the brain for sights of disgust like blood, faeces etc. which are eventually processed into moral emotions. It should be very active when a person is presented with animals to which we humans seem to have evolved phobias - like snakes and spiders. In this fascinating case study a woman who was apparently fearless when presented with these stimuli was found to not have functioning amygdalae. It would be interesting, to me at least, to know whether or not she suffered from any moral deficits.
Genetic and ‘cultural’ similarity in wild chimpanzees
Does chimpanzee behaviour, and does chimpanzee cultural variation track differences in the environment - ecological differences - or are they better explained by genetic heterogeneity? Or a combination of both? In this paper a celestial group of ape researchers including Bernhard Langer, Anne Pusey, Richard Wrangham, Christophe Boesch and John Mitani allow the possibility that genetic differences may be very important after all. Here's the abstract:
Abstract
The question of whether animals possess ‘cultures’ or ‘traditions’ continues to generate widespread theoretical and empirical interest. Studies of wild chimpanzees have featured prominently in this discussion, as the dominant approach used to identify culture in wild animals was first applied to them. This procedure, the ‘method of exclusion,’ begins by documenting behavioural differences between groups and then infers the existence of culture by eliminating ecological explanations for their occurrence. The validity of this approach has been questioned because genetic differences between groups have not explicitly been ruled out as a factor contributing to between-group differences in behaviour. Here we investigate this issue directly by analysing genetic and behavioural data from nine groups of wild chimpanzees. We find that the overall levels of genetic and behavioural dissimilarity between groups are highly and statistically significantly correlated. Additional analyses show that only a very small number of behaviours vary between genetically similar groups, and that there is no obvious pattern as to which classes of behaviours (e.g. tool-use versus communicative) have a distribution that matches patterns of between-group genetic dissimilarity. These results indicate that genetic dissimilarity cannot be eliminated as playing a major role in generating group differences in chimpanzee behaviour.
Abstract
The question of whether animals possess ‘cultures’ or ‘traditions’ continues to generate widespread theoretical and empirical interest. Studies of wild chimpanzees have featured prominently in this discussion, as the dominant approach used to identify culture in wild animals was first applied to them. This procedure, the ‘method of exclusion,’ begins by documenting behavioural differences between groups and then infers the existence of culture by eliminating ecological explanations for their occurrence. The validity of this approach has been questioned because genetic differences between groups have not explicitly been ruled out as a factor contributing to between-group differences in behaviour. Here we investigate this issue directly by analysing genetic and behavioural data from nine groups of wild chimpanzees. We find that the overall levels of genetic and behavioural dissimilarity between groups are highly and statistically significantly correlated. Additional analyses show that only a very small number of behaviours vary between genetically similar groups, and that there is no obvious pattern as to which classes of behaviours (e.g. tool-use versus communicative) have a distribution that matches patterns of between-group genetic dissimilarity. These results indicate that genetic dissimilarity cannot be eliminated as playing a major role in generating group differences in chimpanzee behaviour.