Book contents
- Chimpanzee
- Reviews
- Chimpanzee
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Sister’s Keeper
- 2 Wild Lesson
- 3 A Most Surprising Creature
- 4 Kin
- 5 Scratching Out a Living in an Unforgiving World
- 6 Guts, Glorious Guts, Large Stomach, and Colon
- 7 Thews, Sinews, and Bone
- 8 Arboreal Gathering, Terrestrial Traveling
- 9 Forged in Nature’s Cauldron
- 10 Up from the Protoape
- 11 Building a Natural Wonder
- 12 The Source of Similarity
- 13 Making Your Way in the Great Wild World
- 14 The Grim Reaper in the Forest Primeval
- 15 Powering Life
- 16 Shelter from the Storm
- 17 Meat-Seeking Missiles
- 18 The Mind of the Chimpanzee
- 19 The Brain of the Chimpanzee
- 20 Tired Nature’s Sweet Restorer
- 21 Chimpanzee Thought Transfer
- 22 Ape Implements
- 23 Wisdom of the Ages
- 24 The Daily Grind
- 25 A Nation at War with Itself
- 26 The Sporting Chimpanzee
- 27 The Passion of Pan
- 28 Into the Light
- 29 The Other Sister, Bonobos
- 30 Sister Species
- Book part
- Index
- Plate Section (PDF Only)
- References
17 - Meat-Seeking Missiles
Chimpanzees as Hunters
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2020
- Chimpanzee
- Reviews
- Chimpanzee
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Sister’s Keeper
- 2 Wild Lesson
- 3 A Most Surprising Creature
- 4 Kin
- 5 Scratching Out a Living in an Unforgiving World
- 6 Guts, Glorious Guts, Large Stomach, and Colon
- 7 Thews, Sinews, and Bone
- 8 Arboreal Gathering, Terrestrial Traveling
- 9 Forged in Nature’s Cauldron
- 10 Up from the Protoape
- 11 Building a Natural Wonder
- 12 The Source of Similarity
- 13 Making Your Way in the Great Wild World
- 14 The Grim Reaper in the Forest Primeval
- 15 Powering Life
- 16 Shelter from the Storm
- 17 Meat-Seeking Missiles
- 18 The Mind of the Chimpanzee
- 19 The Brain of the Chimpanzee
- 20 Tired Nature’s Sweet Restorer
- 21 Chimpanzee Thought Transfer
- 22 Ape Implements
- 23 Wisdom of the Ages
- 24 The Daily Grind
- 25 A Nation at War with Itself
- 26 The Sporting Chimpanzee
- 27 The Passion of Pan
- 28 Into the Light
- 29 The Other Sister, Bonobos
- 30 Sister Species
- Book part
- Index
- Plate Section (PDF Only)
- References
Summary
Jane Goodall had hardly been at Gombe for a year when, in 1961, she made perhaps the most stunning revelation in the history of primatology (Goodall, 1968, 1971): that chimpanzees hunt and eat meat. It had been assumed that hunting and meat-eating were unique to humans, and indeed many scholars felt the demands of hunting were the unique selective pressure that led to the evolution of humanity, a viewpoint definitively articulated in the influential book Man the Hunter (Lee & DeVore, 1968). Speech, these researchers maintained, was critical for coordinating the swarm of hunters as they pursued herd animals; stalking prey was thought to require keen logic and a thorough knowledge of animal behavior, including the ability to make complex calculations about the escape routes of fleeing game and how best to overtake them as they maneuvered across a complex landscape. The use of tools, a critical cultural practice for humans (it was thought), emerged to enhance the ability of humans to dispatch and then butcher prey. The distribution of meat after a successful hunting foray was assumed to draw on every unique human intellectual resource, since it was governed by a complicated set of rules balancing social obligations, needs, friendship, kinship, and the responsibility of discharging debts from previous meat distributions. The extra calories from animal protein hypothetically allowed large social groupings. The large human brain could not exist without the abundant protein and fat in meat, otherwise extremely rare in nature. Human-style predation, Man the Hunter reasoning went, was the ecological niche for which nearly every unusual aspect of humanity was evolved.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- ChimpanzeeLessons from our Sister Species, pp. 312 - 322Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020