Chimpanzee monkey ape8/25/2023 This estrus period characterizes all of the higher primates, except human beings. The females of nearly all mammalian species are reproductively active only during a constricted time period surrounding ovulation. As de Waal states, "The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power the bonobo resolves power issues with sex."Īn even more striking difference between female chimpanzees and bonobos is said to link the bonobos more closely to the human family tree. Relative to chimpanzees, bonobo society appears to be sex oriented and "less dominated" by males. Such same-sex bonding is absent in chimpanzee society. Male bonobos will also engage in same-sex genital rubbing. Bonobos also engage in female-female pairings, in which two females rub their genital swellings together ("GG rubbing" in the lexicon of bonobo researchers) to ease tensions between individuals. Copulation rates recorded by de Waal and Parish for captive bonobos in the San Diego Zoo and at the Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta are sky-high compared with such activities among wild chimpanzees. They mate more often, in more positions and with more recreational than procreational intent than any mammal other than Homo sapiens. Bonobos are often said to be, more than anything else, the sexy ape. Such female coalitions are nearly unknown among chimpanzees, where the male bonds are the cause and consequence of everything from communal hunting of small game to the fierce defense of their territorial borders. They also use meat to entice ovulating females to mate with them-an orgy of meat eating and sex straight out of Tom Jones.įemale bonobos band together in coalitions to dominate males, avoiding the sort of physical domination and sexual coercion that male chimpanzees routinely inflict on their females. The meat is distributed in Machiavellian fashion by high-ranking males who share with allies and kin, but withhold the prize from rivals. Small-bodied juveniles are killed by a bite to the neck, whereas adult monkeys are thrashed against the ground or a tree limb. The hunts often involve hand-to-hand combat between a chimp and a monkey, a match that is usually won by the chimp. Their attacks on their favorite prey, the red colobus monkey, are brutal and dramatic. Such "warfare" has been seen in only two primate species, humans and chimpanzees.Ĭhimpanzees are also efficient and ruthless predators, consuming hundreds of prey animals including monkeys, antelope and wild pigs. Chimpanzees at two study sites in Tanzania (Gombe National Park and Mahale National Park) were observed to fission into two separate communities, after which the larger community in each case systematically exterminated the smaller community. Males patrol the perimeter of their territory, attacking and sometimes murdering their unwary neighbors. Sexual coercion and beating of females who do not submit to male desires are routine. Males strive to ascend a rigid dominance hierarchy and on reaching high rank wield their political power in brutal ways. But as the field data accumulated it became clear that the brutal side of chimpanzees is quite real. Some scholars even alleged that the lethal aggression seen during encounters between neighboring social groups was aberrant behavior, occurring only in animals disturbed by human contact. That chimpanzees are not vegetarian pacifists came as a surprise in anthropological circles when Goodall first reported the chimps' omnivorous appetites. In the decades that followed, field researchers observed other "human qualities" in wild chimpanzees: intercommunity warfare and lethal territorial aggression, cooperative hunting for other mammals (with the spoils of the hunt ritually shared and used as the bargaining chips of political and sexual barter), and the manufacture and use of tools made of plant products and, at some sites, of stone! These studies turned our view of chimpanzees (and of ourselves) on its head. What Goodall found shocked us: Chimpanzees were not only extremely clever, they also had complex societies and adept tool-using abilities, and they loved raw meat. Until the 1960s, however, when Jane Goodall first set out for Tanzania, we didn't know much about wild chimpanzees. Among the four species of great apes, the chimpanzees have received the lion's share of attention as models of early humanity. For hundreds of years the apes have served as funhouse mirrors for what the human species once was, or perhaps might have been had evolution taken a different course.
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