A comparison of bonobo and chimpanzee tool use: evidence for a female bias in the Pan lineage
Thibaud Gruber, Zanna Clay & Klaus Zuberbühler
Résumé |
Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, are the most sophisticated tool-users
among all nonhuman primates. From an evolutionary perspective, it
is therefore puzzling that the tool use behaviour of their closest
living primate relative, the bonobo, Pan paniscus, has been
described as particularly poor. However, only a small number of
bonobo groups have been studied in the wild and only over
comparably short periods. Here, we show that captive bonobos and
chimpanzees are equally diverse tool-users inmost contexts. Our
observations illustrate that tool use in bonobos can be highly
complex and no different from what has been described for
chimpanzees. The only major difference in the chimpanzee and bonobo
data was that bonobos of all age-sex classes used tools in a play
context, a possible manifestation of their neotenous nature. We
also found that female bonobos displayed a larger range of tool use
behaviours than males, a pattern previously described for
chimpanzees but not for other great apes. Our results are
consistent with the hypothesis that the female-biased tool use
evolved prior to the split between bonobos and chimpanzees. (C)
2010 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published
by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
Citation | Gruber, T., Clay, Z., & Zuberbühler, K. (2010). A comparison of bonobo and chimpanzee tool use: evidence for a female bias in the Pan lineage. Animal Behaviour, 80(6), 1023-1033. |
Type | Article de périodique (Anglais) |
Date de publication | 2010 |
Nom du périodique | Animal Behaviour |
Volume | 80 |
Numéro | 6 |
Pages | 1023-1033 |