Chimps use spears to hunt (the females, that is)

[Mend]

Maggie Fox of Reuters is reporting (see ABC science news) that chimps have been found to be hunting with spears. The females only. The ladies find a branch, strip the leaves off, sharpen the end to a point, and go hunt bush babies. The males don't use tools because "they are so powerful they don't need them". Riiiggghhhht. Bush babies weigh 5-10 ounces. You'd think a female chimp flying around trees with her arms might just be strong enough too. Could be a sensitive issue here: bush=male chimp= too stupid to make a stick.

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Actually, she's probably right.

A male chimpanzee is strong enough to rip a grown man's arm off at the shoulder. There's the same size/strength disparity between male and female chimps as there is with other primates; so the explanation has the ring of credibility.

[Mend]

2. why rip when you can have fun aiming and flinging

which developed into an Olympic sport? And aren't the females strong enough to grab an animal smaller than a squirrel?

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. Humans wouldn't have developed things like spears...

if we'd been both fast enough to catch and strong enough to subdue and significantly cripple or kill game without them. Same thing probably holds true in the case of chimpanzees.

[Richard Steele]

4. But strength is not an issue when hunting the bush babies.

The females use the sticks to spear into holes too small for their
hands to fit.
The males don't do ANYTHING to get the bush babies out of those holes.

[Mend]

5. now the boys will say they don't like the taste of bb's.....

who wants those grapes anyway? It reminds me of a women's lib book back in the 70's called "The Descent of Woman" by Morgan (I think). She claimed all advances were due to the females of the species.

[idgiehkt]

6. is it a grape?

tell me it is a grape and not a littler monkey... :(

re Morgan or whomever's book it's kind of like tomato, tomahto. I think it was in concert between genders the species advanced. Without one another, well, there would have only been one generation. For years we've heard the male did it all. In fact I've read quite a few books that talk about contributions of the female to the ascent of 'man'. I'm open to any new info.

[Mend]

7. it was Elaine Morgan in 1972, updated in the 1980's...still available

from Barnes and Noble....not a grape, I'm sorry, a little furry animal on the food chain.

[Piltdown13]

11. Sadly (for the bush baby), no, not a grape..

Not quite a monkey, either, though. Bush babies belong to a more "primitive" group of primates that are often called prosimians; you have to look at them for a minute to appreciate the primate features.

[Zookeeper]

8. Robin Morgan?

I probably still have a copy of that somewhere along with "Sisterhood is Powerful," something by Andrea Dworkin and the Women's Health Book.

When I think back to those writings and times, it makes me feel like we really haven't made much progress in some areas.

[idgiehkt]

9. I think it's safe to say

we backslid. :(

But I have to think of it as a pendulum that keeps knocking itself forward with each swing to and fro.

There is also Gimbutas, who is an anthropologist who writes the really credible books on that sort of thing. Merlin Stone's "When God Was A Woman" had a huge impact on me, as did a book called "The Women's History of the World" by an author I can't remember right now.

[Zookeeper]

12. You're probably right about the pendulum....

I had hoped to see it all fixed in my lifetime, of course...:+

Think about the first wave of Feminists...some of them didn't live long enough to see women get the right to vote. And those that were younger were probably very discouraged by the backslide in the 1950's.

I remember, "When God Was a Woman." It might be interesting to go back and re-read some of those books.

:hi:

[Piltdown13]

10. Not quite...

Chimps are middle of the road when it comes to sexual dimorphism in primates (less dimorphic than, say, orangutans but more so than gibbons) -- actually, they're fairly similar to humans in that regard. In terms of absolute strength, though, chimps are much stronger than humans; a female chimp would be more than capable of bringing down the sort of prey that male chimps hunt using strength alone, I would think. (That is, if the males would let her do so.)

I'd have to hunt down the journal article to be sure, but this sounds less like spear-hunting in the human sense, and more like using the spear as a probe to roust the prey -- another case of this was reported last year, so it will be interesting to see if this is similar.

On edit -- yes, I see that it is. Actually makes lots of sense; bush babies are nocturnal and therefore you'd need to roust them from their nests to get at them during the day (as a chimp would). It will be interesting to see if other chimps in that social group pick up on the behavior; seems like just the sort of thing that could spread through a population once one lucky/smart individual figures it out.

(Sorry for the pedantry; I'm teaching a primate behavior class this semester, so I've got the info right at my fingertips :-).)

[hickman]

13. Male primates are usually stronger than female primates.

Males use strength and females use finesse. A pregnant female can't quite fly around the trees as well as a male. A pregnant female still carrying last seasons baby on her back just might be a little burdened. Thus the development of tools that females use. There is no moral high ground here.

[LeftyMom]

14. Let's not jump to conclusions about humans based on chimps

Chimps mate in front of their young, think termites are a delicacy, and pick bugs off of each other to socialize. We have a lot in common, but we also diverged a good long time ago and have great dissimilarity as well.

[pokerfan]

15. termites *are* a delicacy

in much of the world.