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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.
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I'd rather use MY meat for sex.
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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.
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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.
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.
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