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if we want to understand early hominids, we have to compare ourselves to our closest living relatives today: the chimpanzees and bonobos

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Jill Preutz

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primatologist and professor at Iowa State University

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has been working with chimpanzees for over a dozen years years in Fongoli, Senegal

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living in a unique environment, a Savanna context

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they are dealing with some of the environments that our ancient ancestors were inhabiting

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these chimpanzees exhibit therefore some unique behaviors compared to other chimpanzees

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hunting behavior

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social interactions

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how they use different parts of the landscape as part of their lifestyle

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when she began this research, no one had done extended research with chimps in a Savanna setting before

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one issue: no one had ever habituated Savanna chimps before (getting them accustomed to the presence of human researchers observing their activity)

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therefore difficult to get funding, since the habituation process could be long and expensive

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took four years to habituate them

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not just one person but many different kinds of people involved in the research

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record their behavior

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examine the products and tools that they make

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nutritional content of the food they are eating

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many grad students working on project

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passes on quite a bit of work others on her team, e.g. casts of teeth for dental experts to study

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adds to her approach of behavioral psychology which is observational

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has to limit the number of people who can work at the site because of restrictions for the chimps

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most interesting observed behavior of chimps

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the use water purposefully

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they soak in water

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was surprising because for a long time we thought that chimps were hydrophobic

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but as a human you can related to it completely: it is hot in the Savanna

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230 incidents of using hunting tools

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we have known for a long time that chimpanzees hunt

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meat is a relatively small but important part of their diet

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very male biased in terms of who is hunting and who's getting the meat

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at her site, they found that they not only use tools to hunt

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they hunt bush babies (galagos) with a stick

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the females, mostly the young females, do more of this kind of hunting than the males, while the males hunt in other ways

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now looking at meat sharing or food transfer, out of the top 11 hunters there were six females

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food sharing

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many of the models of human evolution hold food sharing as important

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empathy

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an infant chimpanzee was taken by poachers

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the researchers were able to get her back and put her back in the clan

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the first chimp to find it after the researchers put it back, carried it to the mother, saw that the mother had been injured, and that male helped her carry the infant for a few days, although he was not directly related

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we tend to think of chimps as behaving in one certain way, but they have personalities that are distinct and constant

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aggression

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in more dense forest environments, there are recorded incidents of aggression between groups and patrolling of borders between groups

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in the Savanna, home range is 86 square kilometers

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no acts of lethal aggression in 12 years of observation, e.g. no wars with other clans

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there has been of course aggression within the group

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trying to patrol an area like that doesn't make sense energetically

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in Tanzania where Jane Goodall worked, it's 8 square kilometers

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we've defined chimps according to this East African chimpanzee model, but West African chimps differ in significant ways

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they are a different subspecies, some say they should be a different species

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we do things that are in the behavioral range of primates

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the chimps are often stressed, for instance from the heat, and they have ways of dealing with this stress, such as submerging themselves in water

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how did Jill Pruetz get started

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volunteers with chimps in Texas

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everybody wanted to study chimps, she wanted to study tamarins

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best way to get experience in this field

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volunteer in a different country or culture

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you need to have experience

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it also is the best way to know in a practical sense what you are interested in