Backstage in the Wild: Yale Insights into Chimpanzee – David Watts (2012)

This short but densely informative interview is a must-see resource about our closest primate cousins, the chimpanzees. Yale University Anthropologist Dr. David Watts educates us about social interactions and behavior of chimpanzees based on what has been learned from long-term non-Human primate observations. Observation of his and his co-workers at the University of Michigan from the Kibale National Park and Ugandan national park Ngogo formed the basis for feature films such as the Chimpanzee made by the veteran BBC filmmaker Alastair Fothergill for Disney’s Nature series.

A striking phenomenon about Chimpanzee social behavior is that males are unusually sociable more than any other mammal males. Male chimpanzees’ cooperative behavior such as forming alliances is disturbingly similar to that of Humans especially in aggressive warfare situations where one chimpanzee group can launch a coordinated attack employing military tactics. Another striking male chimpanzee behavior is hunting for meat. It has been well documented that they particularly go after the Red Colobus monkeys. Moreover, cannibalistic behavior has been reported among chimpanzees.

“Synthetic” populations formed from unrelated individuals that have been rehabilitated and re-introduced into the wild provides a lot of information about how social structures form from scratch. The documentary produced by the Belgium TV A Chimpanzee’s Tale is one such project providing an account of chimpanzee behavior.

As the observations from the wild accumulate we are beginning to get a more detailed picture of the nature of non-Human primate behavior. The video above is a section taken from the “Jungles” episode of hugely successful 2006 BBC TV series Planet Earth. It documents an incidence of intraspecific competition where a Chimpanzee troop attacks a neighboring group.

The dark side of our primate cousins appear in many forms including female led infanticide and homicide of a deposed leader. In a chimpanzee group that had been studied in Senegal since 2005, an individual alpha male named as Foudouko was overthrown by a group of younger males. For two years Foudouko lived on the fringes of the group. In 2013, he was killed by his former followers, a rare instance in which a chimp was killed within its own community.

Our knowledge in the area is still very incomplete. Reports are coming from the forests of Congo is that there’s an undescribed species of chimpanzee called Bili apes apparently different from other chimpanzees in size and behavior. Perhaps this is not very surprising. Humans and non-Human primates lived side by side for millions of years, but our scientific understanding of non-Human primates is still rather rudimentary. Gorilla for instance was not known to science until the explorer Paul Du Chaillu reported its existence in 1860. Long term studies on orangutans span only a few decades. Chimpanzees are in a privileged position together with Bonobos since they are the closest evolutionary relatives to us and thus we will continue to watch this space for new exciting discoveries.