Allie Hughes – July 26th, 2019
Reading, learning and reflecting about Primatology this week was not only fascinating, but challenged my current assumptions. As a business major, I am relearning majority of this information from foundational knowledge I gained in middle and high school. For me, it’s been an interesting journey to find that most of what I read is surprising information. In my blog post today, I am focusing on my key learnings and surprises I encountered from the Primatology readings and videos.
From “What is War Good For? As a Chimpanzee”, I found Richard Wrangham, a Harvard Anthropologist, perspective on non-primates violence engaging. “Because communities subdivide during the day, it’s likely that a subgroup from one community will encounter a smaller subgroup from another community near their border. Given this imbalance of power, the risk of getting injured in an attack is low for members of the larger subgroup, and a successful assault is possible.” To me, this statement is very different than what happened during the “four-year war”. It’s interesting to me in how depending on how the group divides, dictates their level of violence. Additionally, how he uses the phrase “this imbalance of power” made me reflect on how we are as humans. How would other species define our violence?
Another component I found enlightening was the “Four-year war”. The similarity between the methods of violence between chimpanzees and humans was something I had never read about before. Compared to humans, the aspect of community and warfare is similar to how we still “go to war” today.
From another perspective, I found the idea that violence from Chimpanzees is not consistent for each region. This to me, reminds me of how humans use violence depending on where they live and came from. Specifically in this section, I learned that Chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast in Western Africa are less violent than ones in Eastern Africa. Anthropologists believe this is because of their close-knit communities. Mostly due to their environments, the Chimps less violent are closer in their groups because of their fear of getting eaten by Leopards.
I believe the first step in better understanding our own biology behavior is by continuing to learn from our relationships with the six major branches of primates: lemuroidea, lorisoidea, ceboidea, cercopithecoidea and hominoidea. When reading the article, Primate Classification and Phylogeny, I learned about the importance of studying both the similarities and differences among primates. This pattern is what breaks the species into particular groups (superfamilies). One key component of these groups that I find interesting is that hominoids, cercopithecoids and ceboids share a common ancestor living before 55 million years ago.
Within this same article, the story referencing how primates must have reached South America by an ocean crossing on rafting vegetation is striking. Once these monkeys reached South America, they went through major diversification: there are now five living subfamilies of New World monkeys. To me, I find it intriguing that because of a particular location shift that happened in an unconventional manner – the evolution of these monkeys adapted.
Hi Allie! I liked your discussion of violence and war as a comparison between chimpanzees and humans. Both you and the author of the article laid out the power dynamics within and between groups. It makes sense that individual chimpanzees would want to form a larger group to have better chances of survival than the example (from the movie) of the paramilitary group coming across a lone individual. Power is a really interesting concept because of the way that different fields and topics view its use. In one of my majors, there is a theory called realism, where (raw, in some instances) power is the central focus for why groups (or in my case, states and entities) act. They want the most power so that they are the most secure because they never truly know what another group may do. A critique of that theory is that those who promote it do not take culture, ideas, and other more humanistic approaches into consideration. This makes me wonder whether we can attribute ideas of culture and emotion to chimpanzees, but also is violence and war for chimpanzees simply a security and power issue? Lastly, I agree in that I learned, but also found very fascinating, that certain regions that chimpanzees live in are less violent/prone to violence than others and makes me wonder the impact of close-knit communities for not only chimpanzees but humans as well.
Hey Allie,
Great Post! I thought it was interesting to see how you used examples from this weeks lecture to show the similarities we have with other non-primates. I agree, violence is practiced differently world wide and seeing how these animals did too.
Additionally, I had used the 6 major branches in my post to help understand and show that we have been grouped together with primates. Even then we had so correlation with other non-primates which you had shared in your post.
I did, however, find it grotesque to see a baby chimp be eaten by their own kind. It did have me wonder about the fact that there are a/ few tribes around the world that do eat humans. Do you think this is a similairities we as a human species carry with non-primates?