HUMAN females may get offended at dates who expect a little something extra after they buy a steak dinner, but for chimpanzees, the exchange may be a fair one, German researchers reported yesterday.
They found that female chimpanzees mate more frequently with males who often share meat.
“Our results strongly suggest that wild chimpanzees exchange meat for sex, and do so on a long-term basis,” Cristina Gomes of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany said in a statement.
“Males who shared meat with females doubled their mating success,” she said. Writing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, Ms Gomes and colleague Christophe Boesch said they watched chimps living in the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast.
“Our findings add to the ever-growing evidence suggesting that chimpanzees can think in the past and the future and that this influences their present behaviour,” Mr Boesch said.
“These findings are bound to have an impact on our current knowledge about relationships between men and women; and similar studies will determine if the direct nutritional benefits that women receive from hunters in human hunter-gatherer societies could also be driving the relationship between reproductive success and good hunting skills.” – (Reuters)