Starting very early on in elementary school or maybe even before then, we’re taught about our relation to primates. As a young child, all I could really see was the few physical similarities like the hands, nose and feet. As we grow up, we’re taught more about evolution and how we came to be the humans we know today. Erin Weyman in “what is war good for? Ask a chimpanzee”, talks about how Jane Goodall was observing a pack of chimpanzees in Tanzania when males from a neighboring group of chimps came to their territory and attacked them. There is the obvious violence in the wild; predator/prey and dominance. In lecture we talked about competition in primates and this can be due to food, territory or selection of mates. If violence did occur it was usually between two males or a male and multiple females. But what Jane saw was a deliberate attack on one group until they no longer existed. In the earliest human settlements we saw similar actions taken between different groups of people like the english and the native americans. Erin says “This was the first time scientists had documented “warfare” among chimpanzees.” She suggests that these violent and gruesome characteristics and actions could be inherited from a common ancestor between us and chimps. 

There are many other similarities between us and chimps, for example the female chimps obviously scout out a fit mate with the best characteristics for survival, but female chimps have been known to also choose a mate who is less violent towards other males rather than trying to fight to win her attention. This is called affiliative behavior and I think it’s very closely related to human nature with how we choose a mate. As higher primates, our brains are larger compared to body size and also much more complex. Our fore brain is greatly enlarged and contains something called a cerebrum which is responsible for our memory, language and personality. This is the reason for our great ability to learn from our parents and adapt to our environment. Chimpanzees and other higher primates also contain a similar version of our brain. Much of what we do day to day is because of what we learned as kids, while higher primates are similar in that manor, I think that they are more affected by natural instinct than us. I think that studying the behavior of these other primates gives us great insight to our natural instincts and to what our common ancestors were like. 

I also found the study by Harry Harlow very interesting. He studied infant monkeys right after birth to see how having a mother or not having a mother affects the behavior of the monkey. He found that the baby monkeys chose the fake cloth mother over the metal one that had milk, this proving that their mothers are for more than just food and resources, there is an emotional bond between a mother and her young just as their is with humans. He also found that when these babies, who were raised without mothers, had very abnormal behavior when introduced to other monkeys. This can also show that a lot of the actions of a monkey are controlled by how their raised, not instinctually.