If that’s the case, then our earliest ancestors probably engaged in some violent attacks. What, if anything, do these examples of primate behavior say about the origins of human warfare? Anthropologists suspect that early hominids lived in fission-fusion societies. It’s probably unusual for a group of male spider monkeys to come across a lone individual vulnerable to attack. Aureli and his colleagues predict that, in general, it’s probably rare compared to chimp attacks because spider monkeys live in smaller territories and at higher densities. Since these primates have not been as well studied as chimps, it’s not clear how common spider-monkey raiding is or whether it varies from site to site. Spider-monkey violence is still a bit of an enigma. As a consequence, it’s less likely that a gang of male chimps will find a vulnerable individual to attack. The animals probably stay in closer contact throughout the day because the risk of being eaten by a leopard is higher at Taï than at other field sites, and safety in numbers is their best defense against this predator. Christophe Boesch of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology thinks there are fewer chimp murders at Taï because the chimpanzees have more tight-knit communities. In the Taï Forest of Ivory Coast in Western Africa, chimps are less violent than they are in Eastern Africa. Variation within and between species demonstrates how flexible their behavior is, responding to different circumstances as they arise.Ĭhimpanzees are a good example of this flexibility. That doesn’t mean these primates are programmed to attack. These examples show how similar social and ecological factors may have allowed spider monkeys and chimpanzees to independently evolve a capacity for violence through convergent evolution. Even if harassment seems like a strange courtship strategy, in at least one instance, a female from the western community spent a few hours with the eastern males following an attack (although no mating was observed). Storming into their neighbors’ territory may have been the eastern males’ only chance to find potential new mates. In the case of spider monkeys, Aureli’s team says the raids began after a lonely spell for the males of the eastern community-it was the longest period in at least five years that all of the females in their group had nursing infants, meaning that none of the mothers was ready to get pregnant again. At other sites, deforestation might play a role-and is being blamed for recent wild chimp attacks on humans in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.) For example, Goodall initially lured chimpanzees to her study site with bananas, and the provisioning might have disrupted natural relationships among the chimp groups. Brian Ferguson of Rutgers University, however, argue that chimpanzee violence is actually abnormal behavior that’s a consequence of human interference. As a result, adult males in a group tend to be related, and the ties of kinship help them forge strong bonds and coalitions that work together to patrol the boundaries of their territory. Once females come of age, so to speak, they leave their group to find a new community, while males stay where they were born. Throughout the day, they break into smaller, fluid parties with ever-changing memberships, probably because their food is spread out in such a way that a large group’s needs can’t be satisfied by the same patch of grub. ![]() Group members don’t hang around together all the time. ![]() Spider monkey, chimpanzee, and-debatably-traditional human societies are all examples of fission-fusion social systems. Instead, similar qualities in their social lives may favor violence. But it’s hard to make the case that spider monkeys, chimps, and humans all engage in violent behavior because of common ancestry, given that spider monkeys are separated from chimpanzees and humans by about 35 million years of evolutionary history and plenty of peaceable primate species. These spider-monkey raids sound a lot like chimpanzee attacks.
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