Women may have invented weapons - Mark Henderson
- February 24, 2007
THE survival techniques of West African chimpanzees have revealed that the first human weapons may have been developed by women.
The use of spears and axes to hunt and kill is commonly thought to havebeen pioneered among humanity's ancestors by males, but research hasindicated weapons may have been a female invention that compensated fortheir lesser size and strength.Anthropologists' observations of chimpanzees in Senegal haverevealed they gnaw the ends of sticks to create rudimentary spears,which they use to hunt bushbabies, a small primate.
The findings are the first evidence of the systematic use of weaponsin a species other than humans - and they are intriguing because allbut one of the chimps using the spears were females or immature males.
This gender imbalance has led scientists to theorise that femalechimps pioneered hunting with weapons as the only way in which theycould compete with the physically stronger males to add animal proteinto their diets. While males can hunt with their bare hands, femalesneed weapons to help them.
"Females have to come up with creative ways at getting at a problem,whereas males have brawn," said Jill Pruetz, of Iowa State University,who led the research.
The findings support a hypothesis that women played an integral partin the development of weapons for hunting, and other kinds of tools.
"The observation that individuals hunting with tools include femalesand immature chimpanzees suggests that we should rethink traditionalexplanations for the evolution of such behaviour in our own lineage,"Dr Pruetz said.
"Learning more about the behaviours of chimpanzees in such anenvironment can provide important clues about the challenges facing ourearliest ancestors.
"This new information has important implications for the evolutionof tool use and construction for hunting in the earliest hominids,especially given our observations that females and immature chimpanzeesexhibited this behaviour more frequently than adult males."
Dr Pruetz said the discovery had been unexpected. "I talked to myproject manager and he told me that he saw a female hunt with tools.When he looked through original data ... we realised he had otherevidence and observations of them probably doing the same thing.
"While in Senegal, I saw about 13 different hunting bouts. So it really is habitual."
In the work, published in the journal Current Biology, scientists studied chimps in the Fongoli savannah, southeast Senegal.
They observed chimps using sharpened sticks to hunt bushbabies on 22 occasions, although only one was successful.
Chimps have long been known to use tools such as stones, to cracknuts, but this is the first evidence for the systematic use of tools asweapons.
In other regions, male chimps hunt red colobus monkeys and tend to share any meat with females, often in return for sex.
The Fongoli males, however, kept bushbaby meat for themselves,because it was scarce. This may have led the females and immature malesto adopt weapons as a way of obtaining meat.
There is only one other observed instance of any animal using a toolto hunt - a female chimp that used a stick to rouse a squirrel from abranch.
Dr Pruetz said the findings suggested that chimps, the closestanimal relatives of humans, were more similar to humans in behaviourthan previously thought.
The Times
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Post time 25-2-2007 10:43 PM
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