In the end however, Frodo wound up as a victim in the study’s final body count. (Despite the headline on this story, chimpanzees are classified as great apes, not monkeys.) However, there were curious exceptions, Wilson said.ĭuring his observations of chimpanzees at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Wilson wrote in his blog that he was twice bowled over and intimidated by a famously aggressive alpha male chimp named Frodo (yes, he was named after the fictional Hobbit).įrodo’s long list of violent deeds included beating famed primatologist Jane Goodall, seizing and killing a human infant, impregnating his mother, attacking filmmakers and researchers, assaulting “Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson and slaying many, many monkeys. The ferociousness of the violence visited upon noncommunity chimps was rarely if ever visited upon members of the same group. Most conflicts between competing male-related communities involved groups of chimpanzees shouting at each other from great distances, and one of the groups eventually deciding to move on. Wilson said that though chimpanzee killings could be brutal, they were relatively rare. They could document only one suspected bonobo killing. ![]() Interestingly, researchers found that even though chimpanzees could be very violent, closely related bonobos, Pan paniscus, were far more easygoing. “Humans are not destined to be warlike because chimpanzees sometimes kill their neighbors,” she wrote. However, Silk cautioned people against jumping to conclusions about what the research says about man. “These results should finally put an end to the idea that lethal aggression in chimpanzees is a non-adaptive by-product of anthropogenic influences - but they will probably not be enough to convince everyone,” wrote Joan Silk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University, in an accompanying News & Views piece. What type of number advantage are we talking? The average was five attackers to one victim, but in some instances, as many as 32 attackers would pile onto one hapless victim, researchers found. killings typically occurred when attackers had an overwhelming numerical advantage.” “Attackers most frequently killed unweaned infants victims were mainly members of other communities (and thus unlikely to be close kin) and. “Male chimpanzees killed more often than females, and killed mainly male victims,” authors wrote. It didn’t take long for the researchers to identify some specific patterns. “It surprised me to learn how many killings there really were,” Wilson said. ![]() Wilson said that while it’s been argued that human warfare is the result of a number of factors occurring in the relatively recent past - the advent of agriculture, the development of weapons and the formation of ideologies - chimpanzee behavior would suggest warfare has “a long evolutionary history.”Īuthors collected decades worth of data from roughly a dozen chimpanzee research sites throughout Africa, collecting eyewitness reports of chimp killings as well as forensic data on suspected slayings. “Because chimpanzees are so closely related to us, it raises the possibility that maybe these patterns are something that we share because we share them from our common ancestor,” Wilson said. Because of this, researchers have scrutinized chimpanzee behavior in hopes of gleaning insights into man’s own use of violence, and particularly his proclivity for warfare. Humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor roughly 7 million years ago. ![]() “We conclude that patterns of lethal aggression in Pan show little correlation with human impacts, but are instead better explained by the adaptive hypothesis that killing is a means to eliminate rivals when the costs of killing are low,” the authors wrote. The authors noted, among other findings, that the most chimp-on-chimp violence occurred at a site that was relatively undisturbed by humans - Uganda’s Kibale National Park - while little to no violence occurred at a site in Guinea that was most heavily impacted by humans.
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