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Chimpanzees Exchange Meat For Sex
the_therapist writes "A team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast and discovered that chimpanzees enter into 'deals' whereby they exchange meat for sex. Among the findings are that 'male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts.' They also found this to be 'a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are.'"
We formulized it and called it marriage though.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I need to head to the closest butchers shop!
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
I'd rather use MY meat for sex.
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Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
There is a vegetarian girl that I'm interested in. I wonder if I'd get sex in exchange for an offering of meat?
Butchers get all the chicks.
Task Mangler
This behavior has been quite well documented in bonobos, which until recently were considered chimps or dwarf chimps. I'm not sure what makes this article newsworthy, except that we all like to read about meat and sex...
Try reading a copy of "The Hunting Ape" by Stanford... It's fascinating in covering hunting and culture in apes (including trading food for sex).
From what I've read, I'd also disagree with the article that meat is so valuable to their diet. They LOVE meat, but other research suggests that the amount of energy expended on hunting compared to what they gain in protein/food is a net negative. Hunting is also high risk and includes getting injured in the process.
...at a high rate of give and take.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I can believe this is a new discovery for the Common Chimpanzee. But for their close relatives the Bonobos, I saw documentaries decades ago showing not just the long term pair-bonding/mating-behavior related food-giving described in TFA, but outright prostitution. As in a male chimp comes up to a female with a banana in his hand, kinda tugs on her, she reacts neutrally, he hands her the banana and tugs again, they go off and have sex. And lest you hold on to the notion that this was still mating-related behavior, the sex in question was oral.
Ah, Bonobos. Gotta love those crazy nympho primates. I could be wrong but I think the Common Chimp is closer to us genetically, but I think the Bonobo is closer to us psychologically. I was going to say socially, but I don't know many human societies where genital rubbing is used as a greeting or where orgies break out whenever they acquire food.
The enemies of Democracy are
Damn, we call it the 'oldest profession' and had no idea just how far back it went :P
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
All the hottest chimps get fat. Seems like a bad system to me.
Begin Rhetorical Question>> The thing that confuses me... the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology? Evolutionary Anthropology would be pretty low on my list if I was going to list things associated with Max Plank. Why on earth did they name an Anthropology Institute after a Theoretical Physicist? Don't get me wrong, Plank is one of the great names in physics, and one of the most brilliant men to have lived in the 20th Century... but Anthropology?!? Is there some connection between evolution and Quantumn Mechanics I seem to have missed in all those years in College? End Rhetorical Question
I always wondered where that phrase came from...
about exactly how they word their craigslist ad when they do it.
Not living in their mom's basement.
It seems an objective way to see if a potential mate has the capability of bringing home the bacon (sorry for the pun), thereby being a good indicator on whether the male could provide for a family that would result from copulation (unless they have safe sex ;) ).
If the male chimp doesn't have enough to share, he isn't probably very good at getting food - and you wouldn't want to propagate those genes. Did they check whether the chimps that shared the most also gathered the most?
So why is it being made to sound like prostitution, when it clearly is more like survival of the fittest - the female bangs the best male?
... with apologies to Hustle and Flow.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
There was an article some years ago about monkeys (not sure if chimpanzees or not) being trained to use money.
Researchers taught them that discs of metal could be exchanged for food and such things. They got all sorts of interesting behaviors out of it, including the monkeys attempting to fake the money.
One uncomfortable discovery was discovering that some of them were actually using that money to pay for sex.
This seems even better than this one. Food for sex is a straightforward exchange. Tokens that can be used to obtain food for sex is more complicated, and shows a deeper understanding.
when ppl speak of women putting out so little. Back in my 20s and 30s, most of the women that I dated wanted sex every night (a couple pushed for sex 2-3x a day) and gripped that the guys that they used to date were horrible in bed. They said that they quit putting out because THEY were not getting satisfaction. It was even more so with divorced women. I suspect that more guys need to change.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
For us humans, the key thing (at least for males) is to avoid the marriage trap. Outside of marriage, the resources-for-nookie exchange holds true at market rates. Imbalances are corrected by the laws of microeconomics.
But once locked in a marriage contract, a human male MUST provide resources under penalty of law, while the female is not obligated to do...anything. The predictable result is the epidemic of sexless marriages in the U.S. and other developed countries.
So, just beware the marriage trap. It's like signing an oil futures contract where you're required to deliver oil at $12 a barrel, indefinitely. You'd be a fool to sign either a $12/bbl oil contract, or a marriage contract.
I find it interesting that the author of the BBC article is assuming that the male chimps are trading meat for sex. The original article goes on to state that female chimps don't hunt, so they can't obtain meat on their own. When the male chimps donate meat to the female chimps, they don't just get more sex, they also increase the chances that the female chimp will take in enough protein and calories to bear a healthy baby.
Humans look at the male chimp's giving the female chimp meat as "trading" meat for sex, but there are a lot of other constructions that could be put on that behavior. He could just as easily be trying to assure that his offspring will be healthy. Or trying to assure the health and well-being of a female that he's come to care about.
The original article says that people had tried to find meat-for-sex exchanges in chimps before and failed, because they didn't give the animals enough credit for long-term planning. They looked to see if Chimp A gave meat to Chimp B, then had sex with her two minutes later, and they didn't find that. The current researchers succeeded because they took a longer-term view and counted meat-giving and sexual activity over time. But it's possible that they're still not giving the animals enough credit -- what if the meat-giving isn't trading meat for sex but is something else entirely?
Observations of primate behavior will never tell us anything until we learn to just report what we see the animals doing, then think of every plausible reason why they might be doing that, rather than assuming that the animals aren't capable of doing what we do.
Middle-aged professional woman still plays computer games. Film at 11.
For the last time, kid, that was a charity worker not a hooker in a nurse outfit!
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Having a good marriage is probably 25% likely.
But here's the problem....
Hubby or Wife asks spouse for sex and is rejected. Ego hit. And unavoidable.
Enough ego hits, and you just don't WANT to risk another rejection. Deadly Embrace condition.
Meanwhile, the guy or lady you see on the sly only at lunchtime on thursdays is there for *one* thing. If you are not feeling well, you cancel it in advance and no rejection. That sex is *incredible* over a long enough period. No rejections, no ego damage to your sex drive. And then the idiots split up with their spouse and go into a "real" relationship with their sex partner and over 75% are split up within 12 months.
Sometimes I think we should marry our spouse and then we and our spouse find other sex partners. Maybe not the first child bearing marriage but any second or third marriages.
Women and men lose their sex drives for a particular person (re: Calvin Coolidge's famous rooster discussion with his wife).
However- if you are a man and lost your sex drive big time- GET YOUR HORMONES checked. A lot of men find they are down in the 200's to 300's and should be in the 500's . As a testicular cancer survivor (16 years! Woo woo! would have been dead 2 years earlier because no cure), this hit me when I was 43. I got treated and turned back the clock to like I was a mid 30 year old again.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The point of TFA is that outright prostitution does NOT exist. Giving meat does not produce results there and then and does not guarantee them in the future. It's not a pay-to-play deal.
What is observed with chimps is something far more interesting, as it shows an awareness of delayed gratification on the part of the males and of long-term strategies by the females.
Basically, meat is nutritionally high-value food compared to anything the females can get otherwise. This means that giving meat to the females improves the health and strength of the females. The female doesn't reward the male for the meat, but rather rewards the male for superior long-term care and support.
In other words, it's not an exchange, nothing is being bartered, and no individual gift by either side is connected in any way to any individual gift by the other. Instead, it looks much closer to long-term strategies by both sides where a move might be planned weeks or months in advance.
To compare chimps with bonobos is like comparing (theoretically intelligent) economists with stock market day-traders. I'd argue the chimps are actually smarter than economists, as chimps have fewer housing bubbles and the meat supply doesn't go bankrupt as often.
For all the primitiveness of the exchange, this indicates an extremely high level of intelligence that is beyond a fairly large percent of the human population. Humans do NOT do well on delayed gratification.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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What they did find was that, "amazingly", chimps who were generous with their food, and shared it whether a female was up for sex or not, ended up getting laid twice as often. ... and so on.
There's a whole range of possible reasons for this: it might be that females with high-meat diets get horny more often than those with dietary deficiencies, it might be that males who tend to share tend to be the better hunters, and therefore more physically fit and perhaps more attractive, it might be that by sharing, a chimp gives the impression of being more successful at hunting whether they are or not, it might be that males who show themselves to be more interested in long-term nurturing relationships are seen as better ones to have children with than the unreliable stingey ones
If we're going to anthropomorphise for a moment, I guess it means that wealthy, generous, "playboy" chimps who enjoy sharing their wealth with those around them and invest in long-term friendships have less trouble mating than those who don't have spare meat to share, or who hoard what they have for themselves.
I think that the anthopologists might like to make a study of two interesting concepts that appear to be relevant, here, but which seem to have eluded them:
It's possible that the chimps might be more adept in these social skills than the anthropologists watching them.
Eric Baird