Chimpanzees play an important role in making hunting tools

For the first time, research experts conducted observations of chimpanzees to make and use tools for hunting. Furthermore, it shows that almost all of the immature females and juveniles prefer to use smaller tools to attack and eat carnivores.

Anthropologist Jill D. Pruetz of Iowa State University in Ames and Professor Paco Bertolani of the University of Cambridge, UK, have discovered tools hunting in chimpanzees including females and immature children. controversy with the idea that such actions only evolved with males like humans and ancestors.

Professor Bertolani and Pruetz conducted research on 35 chimpanzees at Fongoli in the southeastern Senegal steppe. Between March 2005 and July 2006, the researchers recorded 22 cases of hunting using tools. Most chimpanzees make their tops from branches, and use them to stab holes in the trunk and branches where the long-tailed, large-eyed apes are sleeping.

A female chimpanzee Fongoli looks very peaceful but it was turned by the researcher while using a sharp branch to attack the long-eyed, large-eyed apes.(Photo: sciencenews.org)

Although it was not possible to shoot large sized animals, the investigators still recorded the case of a chimp who was immobilizing a long-eyed, large-eyed ape by jabbing a sharp branch. , pull the animal out of the nest and start the meal.

According to the report of Professor Pruetz and Bertolani on March 6 in Current Biology magazine, the Fongoli chimpanzees followed 5 steps to create their weapons. After scattering the tree compartments and breaking a branch about 0.6m long, the chimpanzees stripped out all the leaves and branches, then peeled and used their teeth to sharpen one end. Of the 10 chimpanzees who use large-eyed tools, only one is an adult male.

In another study site, the researchers said a group of males used only their mouth and hands to hunt and kill red Colobus monkeys a long-tailed species that eat leaves in Africa and then together split section. According to Pruetz, the male Fongoli chimpanzees hunt similarly to the Vervet monkey, also known as the Blue monkey, which lives nearby.

Scientists confirmed the predictability and intelligence of the Fongoli chimpanzee in using sharp branches to attack prey that could relate to human ancestors more than 3 million years ago . However, the primitive human wood tools at excavation sites were not preserved for so long. And the oldest wooden spearhead found in Germany is only 400,000 years old.

Anthropologist Linda F. Marchant of the University of Miami at Oxford, Ohio said that the hunting with the rudimentary spears of Fongoli chimpanzees represents another type of chimp culture. And the chimpanzee community develops these special behavioral practices similar to that of humans forming typical practices.

In the late 1970s, Professor Marchant and her colleagues discovered the bones of large-eyed gibbons in chimpanzees' feces and knew that they ate large-eyed gibbons even though they could not record them.

Pruetz said they wanted to compare this strange behavior of the Fongoli chimpanzees with those elsewhere.

According to Adrienne Zihlman of the University of California, humanity, new evidence reinforces her view that children play an important role in the evolution of tool use. And research at Fongoli shows that new children are the center of society, creating initiatives and maintaining tradition because they nurture and educate their children.

Anh Phuong