Food habits of chimpanzees8/25/2023 ![]() One of the main goals driving this work is helping characterize the cultural capabilities of the last common ancestor between humans and our two closely related great ape cousins. The researchers believe this paper is only the tip of the iceberg and are already planning the next part of the work: looking at how the bonobo groups learned these behaviors. The paper amounts to what’s believed to be the strongest evidence of cultural behavior in this primate species. They use the exact same places, but, nevertheless, they show these differences.” “These two communities basically live in the same exact forest. He founded and directs the Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project. “It’s the same population, and it’s neighboring communities,” said Surbeck, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the paper’s senior author. Basically, it means all evidence points toward this being a learned social behavior. The researchers make clear in the paper that they didn’t investigate how the bonobo groups learned this hunting preference, but through their analysis they were able to rule out ecological factors or genetic differences between the two groups. In fact, the researchers’ model found that the only variable that could reliably predict prey preference was whether the hunters were team Ekalakala or team Kokoalongo. They also found the preference wasn’t influenced by hunting party size or group cohesion. Using statistical modeling, the scientists found this behavior happens independent of factors like the location of the hunts, their timing, or the season. “Think about two human cultures living very close to each other but having different preferences: one preferring chicken more while the other culture is more of a beef-eating culture. “It’s basically like two cultures exploiting a common resource in different ways,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author. Kokoalongo ate 11 duikers in that time and only three gliding rodents. ![]() Out of 59 hunts between August 2016 and January 2020, the Ekalakala captured and ate 31 anomalure, going after duikers only once. “The idea is that if our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, both have some cultural traits, then our ancestors already had some capacity for culture,” said Samuni. ![]() The Kokoalongo group, on the other hand, favored a small to medium-sized antelope called a duiker that lives on the forest floor. The Ekalakala group almost always went after a type of squirrel-like rodent called an anomalure that is capable of gliding through the air from tree to tree. The groups consistently preferred to hunt and feast on two different types of prey. This, however, is precisely where researchers noticed a striking difference. And, most importantly, both have the access and opportunity to hunt the same kind of prey. Both wake up and fall asleep in the bird-like nests they build after traveling all day. Both roam the same territory, roughly 22 square miles of forest. Four of those years were spent tracking the neighboring groups of great apes using GPS and some old-fashioned leg work to record each time they hunted.Īnalyzing the data, the scientists saw many similarities in the lives of the two bonobo groups, given the names the Ekalakala and the Kokoalongo. They looked at whether ecological and social factors influence those habits. The research, published today in eLife, is the result of a five-year examination of the hunting and feeding habits of two neighboring groups of bonobos at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, according to a new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck, bonobos, one of our closest living relatives, could be the latest addition to the list. Besides humans, many other social animals are believed to exhibit forms of culture in various ways, too. Those predilections were then passed along as part of the set of socially learned behaviors, values, knowledge, and customs that make up culture. Human societies developed food preferences based on a blend of what was available and what the group decided it liked most. Credit: the Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project/Liran Samuni Differing diets of bonobo groups may offer insights into how culture is createdīonobos interacting in tolerant intergroup encounters in Kokolopori bonobos.
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