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Female Chimps Seen Making, Wielding Spears
- Nicholas_C 12y agoFascinating. I wonder if this was learned through invention or through mimicking humans. If only we could simulate evolution millions of years and see how chimps evolve.
- throwaway192301 12y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dweN_7vhhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dweN_7vhhk
- wahsd 12y agoDoes it really matter? Learning is pretty much always mimicking others, whether it is you learning from others before you or our ancestors mimicking their predecessors like Australopithecus, Neanderthal or others. That's essentially what evolution is, adopting characteristics of preceding organisms by various means.
- ZanyProgrammer 12y agoHaven't chimps already been evolving in tandem with our last common ancestor for millions of years? Why should they suddenly fast forward their evolutionary progress now that we are observing them?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y agoPerhaps we can ask them in a couple years.
- semi-extrinsic 12y agoI've heard (think it was from the BBC Life series) that human evolution has sacrificed a lot of jaw muscle and other skull-related ruggedness as compared to monkeys, making room for bigger brains. Since this was obviously not a worthwile tradeoff for chimps etc. in the past, why should it be now?
- _asummers 12y agoMy understanding is that this is due to heating food after early humans learned to control fire. Cooked food is more nutritious, and easier to eat, and can last longer without spoiling. This leads to the ability to allocate resources in the body more effectively (to the larger brains, versus muscles for hunting) and removes the need for extremely powerful jaws.
- cjsthompson 12y agoNot only. We are generally far weaker than chimps. Their muscle fiber allows for much more strength than us. But strength is useless when you're smart enough to work around it.
- Crito 12y agoThis may be what you are driving at, but in case it isn't: The impression that chimps are suddenly rapidly evolving may simply be a consequence of us watching them closely. We may simply be noticing behaviors that have been present for much longer.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoThey may not be, as others have pointed out, but on the other hand, humans have disrupted their environment and put them under extreme selective pressure of various kinds. We have also reduced their population, creating a greater likelihood of inbreeding, which allows new variations to spread very rapidly throughout the remaining population. So it isn't our observing them that is relevant. We may be putting pressure on them that is driving their evolution, and evolutionary change can happen very rapidly when the pressure is high.
- rlpb 12y ago> ...chimps that we can accelerate to near light speeds. Isn't that the wrong way round? The first generation of chimps would return after hundreds of years [have passed on Earth] having barely appeared to have aged at all. If you want to see the future, it is you who has to accelerate to near light speeds and then you will return to an Earth far in the future.
- fchollet 12y agoIf you accelerated your terrarium to a high fraction of c, time inside would appear (from our perspective) to slow down, not the other way around. What you want to do here is accelerate us to near light speed instead.
- Nicholas_C 12y agoYou're right, my mistake.
- dghf 12y agoWouldn't we have to be the ones in the terrarium? Few years pass for the party zipping round at a large percentage of c, many years pass for those left behind on Earth.
- Nicholas_C 12y agoYup. Got that backwards.
- njharman 12y ago> If only we could simulate evolution a few million years and see how chimps evolve. Look around. I see no reason a primate so similar to humans would not continue to evolve along the same lines.
- thisjepisje 12y agoBecause humans already exist, perhaps.
- njharman 12y agoPoint. But in that case ther is no wondering cause they will be exactly how we make them. I assume question was based on no interference.
- Someone 12y agoThat idea is over 70 years old.nhttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmic_God: "A highly secretive and reclusive biochemist named Kidder produces inventions that transform human life, spanning every aspect of science and engineering. Unbeknownst to anyone, Kidder has developed a synthetic life form, which he calls "neoterics." These creatures live at a greatly accelerated rate, and therefore have a very short lifespan and produce many generations over a short period of time. This allows Kidder, by presenting them with a frequently changing environment, to "evolve" them quickly into highly intelligent lifeforms who fear Kidder and worship him like a god. Kidder can control his neoterics' environment, and thus force them into developing technology far beyond that of humans."
- iaw 12y agoThere was a Simpson's halloween homage to this.
- nosuchthing 12y agoFuturama also [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfellas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfellas
- Dn_Ab 12y agoOther excellent stories in this genre: Blood Music by Greg Bear, Permutation City and Crystal Nights (http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/) by Greg Egan. Marooned in Realtime by Vinge had this a bit too—probably closest thematically to the GP's comment. A bunch of people wake up to a world that's been empty of humans for many thousands of years; the book spends some time talking about how some animals evolved.
- xingcoa 12y agoAnd people say that humans are special because we can use our imagination. We need to get over ourselves. We're not the only ones.
- qiqing 12y agoExcerpt from the article, "The researchers noted that female adult chimps made and used spears more often than adult males. The males relied more on their size and strength for hunting. Female chimps are almost always hindered by infants that ride on their backs or bellies, so spear hunting is far more effective for them than attempting to chase down prey."
- duaneb 12y agoInteresting. I wonder if female child ~~bearing~~ holding contributed to our move to bipedalism.
- JulianMorrison 12y agoThere is speculation that the baby sling did. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/prehistoric-baby-sling-made-our-brains-bigger-2071291.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/prehistoric-...
- qiqing 12y agoTIL how long baby slings have been around. "Before the invention of the baby sling, dated by Dr Taylor to at least 2.2 million years ago, when human ancestor head size suddenly began to increase, physically mature infants were more likely to survive, because caring for slower-developing immature ones was difficult, uneconomic and often dangerous. Mothers holding their infants were more vulnerable to attack from predators or other humans than those using baby slings. They were also less able to perform other more economically productive tasks. Most importantly, the invention of the baby sling artificially lengthened human gestation, said Dr Taylor."
- malandrew 12y agoThat all makes sense as a theory, but is this fact based on hard evidence or merely academic speculation? 2.2 million years is an awful long time ago, and I didn't think we had that much evidence about humans habits and culture dating back that long ago. Exactly what happened roughly 2.2 million years a to explain this evolutionary change?
- pXMzR2A 12y agoIt's 2015. We have seen again and again the Black Rights Movement, Women's Rights Movement, various Third Word Rights movements, and the Animal Rights Movement interrogate and challenge, again and again, the ways in which human cultures assign value to various categories of living beings. And here we are, saying > OMG monkeys using "tools" as defined by humans! Golden ponies and red chameleons!! Get over it already.
- tsotha 12y agoThis isn't really news. I remember seeing an article about chimps hunting bushbabies with spears at least five years ago.
- dalke 12y agoEg, from 2007: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11234-spearwielding-chimps-snack-on-skewered-bushbabies.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11234-spearwielding-ch...
- tsotha 12y agoGah. Time keeps speeding up as I get older.
- jonlucc 12y agoI think what's happening is that the news is reported to be that chimps make and use tools to hunt, when in fact, the new data seems to be about female chimps being much more likely to make and use spears than males.
- iamcurious 12y agoThat isn't new either. From dalke's reference: Intriguingly, the behaviour is mostly confined to females and immature chimps.
- jonlucc 12y agoThis isn't my field, but as far as I can tell, they've done a more systematic study of which chimps are making the spears to confirm the previous observation that it was often females.
- rickdale 12y agoI was watching a show about Orangutans recently and one of the things I thought was interesting was that orangutans in the wild are independent in the sense that they usually eat by themselves. But when they are put in captivity and they are around other orangutans they start to learn from each other and build off of each others concepts. In the wild when alone they stick with what they know, but when around other orangutans they learn from each other. Chimps on the other hand eat and do other stuff with each other and are usually(if not always) part of a group and so they have more complex actions in nature just from learning from one another, picking up tips and building upon what they know.
- tjradcliffe 12y agoIf you ever want to have real fun, point this out to a doctrinaire feminist who is heavily invested in the idea that men are more violent than women because in the primordial landscape men did most of the hunting. I did this to a freind once, quite innocently, and she ended up so angry she could--in her own description--barely speak. There is a whole literature in a particular brand of feminism (mostly associated with the radicals) that simply takes the association of hunting and interpersonal violence on faith, whereas in fact we're pretty sure men are more violent than women because of mate competition. The fact that we observe hunting behaviour amongst female chimps (who are less violent than male chimps) and female bonobos (who are far less violent than chimps, and no more violent than male bonobos, who also hunt) makes it clear that hunting behavior has nothing much to do with interpersonal violence. This makes good sense from an evolutionary perpsective: killing a member of another species is a profoundly different kind of selective event than killing a member of your own species, particularly in a social primate like proto-humans where the individual you kill is likely to be closely related to you. The selective pressures on the two behaviours are almost completely disjoint, but to believe the feminist myth--or the equally silly pseudo-evolutionary anti-feminist myths that preceded it--you have to believe they are somehow related.
- michaelkeenan 12y agoYou make some interesting points, but there should be a norm against introducing a political topic on a non-political thread. There's a way to get to a political point from most non-political topics, but then every thread leads to a political fight. I think it's especially important not to criticize a political point that no-one has brought up in the thread already. It's always tempting to address the worst arguments rather than the best ones, and there's more leeway to do that we we're not constrained by replying to something someone's actually said.
- peteretep 12y ago> there should be a norm against introducing a political > topic on a non-political thread No there shouldn't. You're welcome to use those little grey arrows to vote about what you want to see, but you are one voice amongst many.
- gamblorrr 12y agoSo, might this not indicate that chimps are slowly but surely evolving toward a higher intellect, as a harsh environment selects against the dumb? If there were no matriarchs capable of grasping a concept like hunting with weapons, instead of bare hands, 100 years ago, does that mean that they might unravel stone sharpening in 500 years? The idea that human civilization might witness the true, literal evolution and flourishing of a second earthly intellect in species outside of humans is really exciting. Maybe it's not evolution in action. Maybe chimpanzees of today are no smarter than 100 years ago. Maybe it takes 50 years of trial and error amongst social groups to learn such a skill, and then retain it across generations by teaching. Maybe tools like this have been invented and lost many times by various chimpanzee social groups over the past few centuries. But it would still be really cool if this were representative of the emergence of a generation of apes, palpably smarter than those of, say, the 19th century.
- resdirector 12y agoI wonder if humans could, or should, help this evolutionary process along.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoWe've probably hindered it multiple times in the past. We weren't the only apes to master tool making, we were just really good at it and out competed others that tried filling the same niche.
- KamiCrit 12y agoWell one line of chimps seemed to grasp the tool making concept and you can see how they tuned out. Who's to say it can't happen twice?
- venomsnake 12y agoWith the speed we are wrecking the planet they won't have enough time :(
- charlieflowers 12y ago
- hyperpallium 12y ago\tangents Are these chimps evolving intelligence? What conditions caused humans to evolve intelligence? Was it a rare, unusual event, or was it inevitable? I want to guard against the {anthro,ego,geo}centric-like view that we are the pinnacle of creation. For our intelligence to evolve, there must have been an advantage to it, each step of the way, that offset the costs of gestating, growing, training and fuelling a larger brain. Looking at other animals, especially higher mammals, greater brain size and intelligence can have survival advantages. Although, considering the whole of life, most of it is not highly intelligent - bacteria, insects, fish etc still thrive as the majority. There's a fascinating speculation applying Moore's law to the increasing complexity of life (see graph here http://io9.com/moores-law-predicts-life-originated-billions-of-years-476129496 http://io9.com/moores-law-predicts-life-originated-billions-...). This shows that it takes longer to evolve more complexity, though not that more complexity is necessarily better. I think it's fair to claim that humans are the most complex animals that have evolved so far... and that we are the ones to speculate on it because we just happened to be first (as in the Fermi paradox and fine-tuned universe). Therefore, we should expect other intelligent life to evolve on earth (perhaps from corvids, cetaceans - or even arachnids, some having extraordinary brain/body ratios); but it might take several million years, as that's what it took us. Complexity takes time. Another view is that another intelligent species would have been the most dangerous threat to us possible. Humans certainly seem to have no problem killing other humans. We may have eradicated neanderthals, and other species in the human evolutionary line are also curiously missing today. Possibly, mammoths and mega-fauna were also increasing in intelligence? Perhaps we also set out to kill the most cunning and therefore most dangerous wild animals in general? Thus, delaying intelligence in competing species.
- venomsnake 12y agoI should start writing the script of "skynet vs the planet of the apes" with the last day's news. On a serious note - a recent theory that in a heat sink ocean and energy source life evolving is inevitable, and we have multiple species able to get to intelligence ... the fermi paradox becomes more urgent to be solved.
- vladtaltos 12y agoI wonder what would happen if a 'village' of chimps attack humans with spears :) hellfire ? or automated drone strikes on them ?
- marcosdumay 12y agoGuns, probably.
- fredrivett 12y agoAm I the only one expecting to see photos rather than '6 Shocking Things About Chimps'?
- chisleu 12y agoI've read of theories that ancient man's brain development came so quickly because we learned to throw spears at prey. We nearly doubled our brain size in a very short time period (anthropologically speaking.) It was thought that it resulted from developing a sense of lay calculus by throwing the spears. One anthropologist I heard speak said he thought that would mean major league pitchers are the pinnacle of human evolution. :) Of course, that gentleman consumed more psychedelics than anyone I've ever known, so I'm not so sure. More to the point, what if this is the beginning of a very fast evolutionary change?
- humanarity 12y agoFor some reason this reminded me of female primates using violence to get male interest and sex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82GUjPConiE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82GUjPConiE The Bonobo society also exhibits female alphas and uses extensive sexual activities (including hetero/homo and "group") to maintain social bonds. However, even despite the apparent "similarities" I question our anthropomorphic instinct to assign to or infer too much meaning from the behaviour of our primate genetic relatives. One reason contributing to that choice is because how humans behave in societies is shaped by centuries of social, cultural and political discourse on the ways in which we behave.