"One of the best ways we have of understanding early hominids is using chimps as a model," Pruetz says. The species that led to early hominids started eating more meat, Gilby says, and his study suggests that a need for fat may have been the motivation. (Read: " Chimps Can't Cook, But Maybe They'd Like To.") Whatever the reason, studying meat in the diet of chimpanzees, with whom we likely share a common ancestor, could shed light on human evolution. She suspects that cultural traditions and learned traditions among populations may be more at play. And at Fongoli, when preying on baboons, chimps mysteriously sometimes give the heads away, and guts are often discarded. He was killed by his former followers, a rare instance in which a chimp was killed within its own community.įor example, some chimps eat eggs while others don't. He lived on the outskirts of the group for years before attempting to return in mid-2013. Two years later he fell from power, overthrown by a group of younger males. They identified one chimp, Foudouko, as the alpha leader. Researchers had been observing a group of chimpanzees in Senegal since 2005. Rare video captures the deadly end to a tale of chimpanzee social politics. 30, 2017 - It was a grisly sight: a murdered chimpanzee, his body beaten, bloodied-and partially cannibalized-by the community he used to lead. Pruetz supports the hypothesis that chimps are seeking nutrition, but she says it can’t explain all differences across study sites. There's also debate about why the omnivorous apes hunt at all, considering meat isn't a diet staple. ( Read about a rare case of chimpanzee cannibalism that Pruetz observed in Senegal.) Pruetz has seen similar behavior at her study site in Senegal, where she studies hunting as part of the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project and has observed chimps eating bushbabies' heads first. "It might be one of the first quantitative studies about how exactly a prey item is eaten by chimps," says Jill Pruetz, a biological anthropologist specializing in primatology at Texas State University and a National Geographic explorer. Instead, when killing adult monkeys, chimps might find it more efficient to start with nutrient-rich organs like livers: Likely why the Gombe chimps sometimes targeted adult monkeys' torsos first.
Taking the time to try might cause the chimp to lose its kill to competitors.
Chimpanzee and monkey crack#
Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īnd while a chimp might be able to crack a young monkey's skull with a bite, the brains of adult monkeys aren't as easy to access. "The whole carcass is valuable, but the brain is especially valuable."īrains are high in fat and a source of long-chain fatty acids, which aid in neurological development. “We tend to just say meat is meat, but we know that the nutrient composition varies," says Gilby, whose study appeared recently in the International Journal of Primatology. Gilby thinks it has to do with nutrition. This left him with a little-studied question that's relevant to how humans evolved: Why would the apes prefer to eat a particular body part first? Brain Food Chimps consuming adult prey show less of a pattern, he found. Reviewing the videos later, he noticed that chimps eat subadult prey-infants, juveniles, and adolescents-heads first. Ian Gilby, an anthropologist at Arizona State University and leader of a new study on the subject, originally filmed members of the habituated Kasekela chimp community in Gombe to learn more about how they share meat. Chaos ensues as monkeys fall from trees to the screams of chimps as they make their kill-all of it caught on video. They come upon red colobus monkeys.Ĭhimps survey their prey. A group of chimpanzees travels through the woodlands of Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where Jane Goodall first began studying their kind back in 1960.
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