Primatology.net

Boing Boing is on fire, first they post on Bill Bass and now they post on a new study from Smithsonian which reviews the,

“traits that [chimpanzees and humans] share, like altruism and vengeance, and those we don’t, like spite and most social learning skills, are shedding light on what it means to be human.”

So check out the article, “Animal Insight.” It is a pretty good review.

Michael Tomasello, one of the biggest and best primatologists out there, recently published a paper in Science on chimpanzee rationality. He and his colleagues setup a game where a human or chimpanzee receives something of value, and is able to share it with another.

He found some interesting results. Generally speaking, humans made offers close to 50 percent of the reward, but chimpanzees almost consistently made offers of substantially less than 50 percent, and accepted offers of any size, no matter how small. Tomasello and crew concluded that chimpanzees do not show a willingness to make fair offers and reject unfair ones. In this way, they protect their self interest and are unwilling to pay a cost to punish someone they perceive as unfair.

Here’s a link to the publication along with the abstract, “Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game,”

“Traditional models of economic decision-making assume that people are self-interested rational maximizers. Empirical research has demonstrated, however, that people will take into account the interests of others and are sensitive to norms of cooperation and fairness. In one of the most robust tests of this finding, the ultimatum game, individuals will reject a proposed division of a monetary windfall, at a cost to themselves, if they perceive it as unfair. Here we show that in an ultimatum game, humans’ closest living relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), are rational maximizers and are not sensitive to fairness. These results support the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences and aversion to inequitable outcomes, which play key roles in human social organization, distinguish us from our closest living relatives.”

Vannessa Woods just broke some awesome news of bonobos using tools. From her blog, Bonobo Handshake,

“The bonobos at Lola use tools. It’s really amazing because no one’s seen tool use in bonobos in the wild before (I don’t think).And everyone’s always going on about chimps using tools and how it’s so amazing because everyone used to think that’s what makes us human, and now bonobos use tools too.

Tool using is important because we think that’s how early humans got their start. We couldn’t run fast like a cheetah, and we weren’t strong like mammoths, so we started using tools like spears to hunt meat and rocks to open nuts. These days we use tools like crazy. In fact, we can’t do anything without tools. But looking at chimps, and now the Lola bonobos, we can catch a glimpse of how it all started.”

Jump on over to the post to see the video of one of the bonobos using a rock to hammer open some nuts.

I just stumbled upon a new-to-me primatology blog that I wanted to share with you. The blog, DNApes, comes from Mimi Arandjelovic, a graduate student at the Max Planck power house of anthropology and is chock full of good posts.

Mimi studies variation in male-transmitted Y-chromosome of gorillas, which is extremely important given that gorillas are on the verge of extinction. She does that thru sampling poop. That’s where the name DNApes comes from. It stands for for DNA Analysts of poop, excrement and scat. As you may know, understanding the genetic variation is useful information when dealing with small populations.

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