Scientists have long agreed that imitation is a key mechanism for social learning that lets humans quickly acquire skills and solutions to problems by copying others. Since both species imitated actions they were already highly familiar with, this imitation can’t have been a method of learning but rather appeared to be a way of communicating.Ĭhimps in the study imitated visitors’ kissing and clapping actions. The actions copied by the humans and chimps were also surprisingly similar, with both favouring hand claps, knocking on the enclosure window, or kissing. About 10% of the actions of each species were imitations. In total, we recorded 1,579 times when a chimpanzee did something directed at a human, and 2,211 human actions aimed at a chimp. We watched a group of five chimpanzees at the zoo and about 10,000 human visitors that stopped by the chimpanzee enclosure. The research, published in the journal Primates, found that the chimpanzees at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden were just as likely to imitate human visitors as the other way round. But our study suggests it can serve several functions, including for other animals. We typically think that humans evolved imitation as a way of learning. But our latest research, which recently won the Ig Nobel Prize for Anthropology, suggests you are just as likely to see chimpanzees imitating the human visitors.Įstablished in 1991, the Ig Nobel prizes are granted each autumn to ten unusual scientific discoveries that “first make you laugh, and then make you think.” Our findings unravel a form of imitation as communication that has not been previously reported in non-human apes. We might not be able to fight off a chimp, but we can make some pretty amazing needlepoints.How good is your best chimpanzee impression? Go to the zoo and you probably wouldn’t be surprised to see people copying chimps in order to grab their attention. Humans have a lot more fine motor control than chimps: we can do things like play a guitar, paint teeny tiny lines or thread a needle.Ĭhimps can’t, because of the way their neurons activate their muscles-they can’t pick and choose just a few muscle fibers at a time. They say that a big reason chimps can lift heavier things than we can, is that they have less control over how much muscle they use each time they lift. They say chimps are three to five times stronger than humans-something Hawkes would argue isn’t proven-but their explanation for why might still pass muster. But why? Scientific American tries to explain: So apes are definitely stronger than humans, probably around twice as strong. Once he’d corrected the measurement for their smaller body sizes, chimpanzees did turn out to be stronger than humans-but not by a factor of five or anything close to it. An adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult man. In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. … But the “five times” figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman’s experiments. The suspicious claim seems to have originated in a flapper-era study conducted by a biologist named John Bauman. Some say that chimps are five to eight times stronger than humans, but those figures come from an old, poorly designed study, says John Hawkes, an evolutionary biologist: Other, more impressive figures often pop up when chimp attacks happen. A 2006 study found that bonobos can jump one-third higher than top-level human athletes, and bonobo legs generate as much force as humans nearly two times heavier. The apes beat us in leg strength, too, despite our reliance on our legs for locomotion. Slate writes:Ī chimpanzee had, pound for pound, as much as twice the strength of a human when it came to pulling weights. In fact, the unfortunate student probably would have been better off had he been attacked by two humans. This summer, two chimpanzees attacked a graduate student at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden.
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