There was lots of information in the videos and links that surprised me. for example, the thing that surprised me the most by the chimps eating monkeys and even their own infants. I wasn’t aware tat they did this. I knew that they showed behavior that was close to humans but never heard of them eating animals that were so closely related to them. I thought they were like humans in that respect. I still don’t exactly understand why this happens though. Is it because meat is scarce? Is it because it convenient? Or do they just do it even when there may be other sources available?
Another thing I found interesting was that different chimps in different parts of the world have different ways of doing things. For some reason, I always thought that they would be the same but I guess it is a lot like humans. People living in two different areas are going to do things differently. I just never thought that chimps would be the same. I was surprised to see how useful and resourceful they are. They are very much adapted tot heir areas and use things that are around the to help them do simple tasks.
The last thing I find interesting is how similar we truly are to chimps and other non human primates. I obviously know that is what we evolved from but that was so long ago I wasn’t sure that we would still even have that many similarities but it turns out that we do. They have a very human way of life, if that’s the correct way to put it. For example, there are so many languages amongst humans that we use to communicate that are mostly dependent on location in the world and it is the same for non human primates. They have different forms of communication in different areas and I thought that was really cool.
Studying non human primates allows us to understand ourselves better. By studying these animals, we can begin to understand how we are different and similar to these no human primates and how we evolved. These can be things like body size, amount of muscles, head size, behavioral recognition, emotional processing and so much more. For me, the most interesting part is to see the evolution of non physical things like our communication skills and emotional skills and how that came to be. Of course we still have a lot to learn from them.
Hi Kress,
Before this week, I also was not aware that chimpanzees eat monkeys and even their own infants. This was surprising information to me too because like you stated, I knew of some of their similar behavior to humans but not that they would eat animals in such close relations to them especially infants. However, from this week, I understood that they eat infants that they have not fathered not their own children. They do this so they do not have to provide for someone else’s children and so they can have the mother’s full attention for their own kids.
I agree that it is pretty surprising that we have so many similarities with chimps to this day. I remember reading an article from a previous week about how we share 98% of our genes.
I also found the fact that chimps sometimes eat their own infants and other monkeys to be a surprising and disturbing fact. I think it happens not because of food shortage but rather as a dominance thing. I think it even mentioned that killing of the infant was a message to the mother that it was time to produce more off spring that is fathered by the dominant chimp. I think being surprised that humans and chimps are so closely related and share similar traits is a reasonable reaction. The process of evolution is actually something that is really slow but when you think of the millions of years that has gone by it hard to imagine any similarities between us and non-human primates.