National Geographic: The New Chimpanzees Page #2

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a little flourish,

by incorporating me,

but it's not directed at me.

He, if he wants to hurt somebody,

he could have done it.

Females and their young are dominated

by this threat of force.

But when the fruit crop is ample,

everyone feasts.

A mother's care is the primary

influence on a young chimp's life.

Orphans find life hard.

Mel was orphaned

at the tender age of three.

Only the generosity of

others has allowed him to survive

for six more years.

Still, he seems to miss

the affection he

would have known within his mother's

arms something this little baby

seems to understand.

A temporary respite

from a life of loneliness.

Beyond the bond between mother

and child,

political relationships

are the life's blood of chimp society.

Even while relaxing,

chimps are jockeying for status.

Grooming is, quite literally,

currying favor.

Alliances become apparent

by observing who grooms whom.

Dominant animals and

their allies get the best pickings.

Food is a precious commodity.

They often compress fruit

into a pulpy "wodge,"

something like a tobacco chaw,

to extract every last drop of juice.

But the calls of colobus monkeys

whet another appetite

not so easily satisfied.

When a monkey troop is spotted nearby,

the most avid hunter recruits other

males to join forces in a hunting party

Red colobus monkeys nervously watch

the gathering of bodies below.

Craig Stanford studies the relationship

between colobus and chimps.

He hopes to shed light on the origins

of human hunting.

We know that, at some point early

in human evolution,

meat became an important part

of the diet.

We don't understand exactly

how that happened

was it scavenging meat or hunting meat

Well, we know that the earliest stage

of human evolution happened

in a habitat just like this.

East African woodland that's got

open areas

onto which our ancestors eventually

moved and adapted to.

So, to be able to study hunting here

is the best way

to give us some kind of window

onto the earliest origins

of meat eating in our ancestors,

four or more million years ago.

Frodo is the best of the Gombe hunters

He's 17 years old and yet he's killed

in the last three years.

It's really quite an incredible animal

and a great hunter.

That was Frodo.

All the hunters, including Frodo,

will try to catch a monkey for himself

By joining forces, the chimps hope

to strand some monkeys

in an isolated treetop,

with no route of escape except

into the clutches of a chimp.

Although we see elements

of cooperation at Gombe,

what we thing we're seeing mainly

is individual,

selfish behavior by male hunters,

done within a communal setting.

It's a little bit like a baseball game

in that baseball is a communal game

in which individual players are

doing their piece and in the end,

the end result is going

to be success or a failure.

The more hunters there are,

the greater the odds

of success and, yet,

each individual hunter

is performing selfishly.

As the chimps climb up,

the colobus retreat to

the highest branches

too slender to bear a chimp's weight.

The male colobus stand their

ground against chimps up

to four times their size.

They will even take the offensive

momentarily driving the chimps back.

Holding his tail out of

the chimp's reach,

this male buys precious time for

the escape of the females and young.

Excited by the cries of hunter

and prey, females appear below.

Eighty feet above the ground,

Frodo displays his daring technique.

But this time, he misses.

With chimps climbing everywhere,

one monkey leaps

into the arms of death.

Even a rear attack by

the defending colobus cannot save him.

The young hunter displays

with his kill,

but his triumph is short liver.

Freud simply confiscates the carcass.

Freud settles down to share

with his allies.

Meat is a valuable currency

, a payment for favors.

Females come begging for a taste.

The orphan, Mel, searches for scraps

but he's soon sent packing.

Frodo, frustrated and hungry,

tries to muscle his way

to a place at the table.

But Freud will have none of

it leaving Frodo to rage.

His friends rush in to placate him

to little effect.

With up to 11 males hunting together,

multiple kills are common at Gombe.

As many as seven monkeys

have been taken on a single hunt.

Chimps like a little salad

with their entree.

They often eat leaves

when they eat meat,

sometimes eating kinds

they never touch otherwise.

On average, the Gombe chimps consume

in their range each year.

A taste for meat begins early.

The free for all approach to

hunting works well in Gombe's low

and relatively open woodland.

Catching monkeys high in the treetops

requires a different strategy elsewhere

Christophe Boesch studies chimps

in the Tai forest of the Cote d'Ivoire

prime African rainforest.

Most chimps live in green

and shadowy depths like these.

The forest canopy an interwoven web

floats over a hundred feet above its

reflection in tea colored pools below.

Following his chimps,

he's discovered that they're capable of

an extraordinary level of cooperation.

I mean, the chimps of the Tai forest

or the tropical rainforest.

The canopy layer is continuous,

the biggest mammal they hunt,

the red colobus, they are about

a third the weight of the chimps,

what means that when colobus sit

on a thin branch,

the chimps can't go there,

if he go there,

he fall down on the ground.

So, there is a big problem,

they have to use,

solve it and the only way to

solve it here is by hunting in group.

So that a chimp will drive

the prey away in a given direction,

so that the colobus are constantly

moving in this direction,

and the driver is really just

pushing them in a direction,

he's not trying to capture them,

that is, he's not running,

you see that he's just walking

in a constant direction.

This gives them the constant direction

of flight,

where the chimps on the ground can

then organize them and,

if they see that the group splits

too much in different directions,

you would have blockers,

individuals that come up in specific

trees where colobus might escape,

sort of keep them

in constant direction.

And so that, gives them the possibility

for them to make the kind of a trap.

So that, by having a driver behind,

some blockers on the side,

they just need somebody actually

to come in front of them,

ahead of the movement, and to

then close the trap, if you want.

Only the most experienced hunters play

this role.

They have to race ahead then climb

almost a hundred feet above the canopy

into the crowns of the tallest trees

to ambush their prey.

And when they are

successful it's incredible

because you can have suddenly

all the forest is screaming.

All the chimps know

there have been a capture.

The chimps have made a capture call,

everybody knows 'meat'

that meat is so rare,

it's so difficult to acquire

and it's only because, uh,

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