Before this week, I really had no idea just beneficial the study of primates is to the study of humans. It’s amazing how much we can learn about our own species ancestral history just by studying other species that are similar to us.

The article about chimpanzee wars really shocked me. It is hard for me to believe that a group of Spider monkeys could just viciously attack each other, for some reason I thought that this kind of violence was special to humans. This makes me wonder whether violence is innate in primates, or if it arises due to environmental changes. Putting the shockingness of the random violence observed in chimpanzees, the article mentions that we are able to use this information to deduce that early hominids lived in fission-fusion societies. The fact that we can deduce this just by observing other primates is very interesting to me.

Watching those videos about how similar we are to other primates was also super interesting. Little things, like the way we walk or run or use tools, are identical to the way that many of our closest primates do it. We can observe the ways that chimpanzees use to hunt for food and by observing them, we can learn about the different ways that early hominids might have used their own tools to hunt for food; with these observations, we can kind of trace the ways that we have evolved as a species. The fact that we can do all of this from observing other animals is amazing. Also, knowing how much we have developed, our tools, for example, makes me wonder if these other non-human primates have developed (or will develop) in similar ways. I’m very curious as to what makes the human brain so special that we were able to develop drastically, while non-human primates have (as far as I know) done things the same way for a long time.

This kind of demonstrates how all species interact with each other. The chimpanzees affect us by teaching us a lot about ourselves through our observation of them, and the Wayman article mentions that humans actually could have played a role in the violence of the chimpanzees. They said that Jane Goodall’s interference with the chimpanzees (as well as many other different ways that humans have impacted the environment) could have disrupted their habitat. This idea that we are all on this earth interacting and affecting each other is very poetic, in a way.

I think that we can learn a lot from studying non-human primates. Observing other primates, such as gorillas or chimpanzees, can give us a glimpse at how our early ancestors might have functioned both as individuals and as a society. Observing how non-human primates interact with each other reflects how our early ancestors might have interacted with each other as well; all of this information can tell us a lot about how we have evolved as well as what kind of environmental factors affected the different ways that we evolved as a species to get to where we are today.