A new study shows that chimpanzees are like humans in another important way — their natural capacity for violence.
Data collected from 18 chimpanzee research sites and four focused on bonobos show not only that the two groups are different, but that chimps engage in violent and sometimes lethal behavior regardless of human effects on local ecology. The study is described in a Sept. 18 paper in Nature.
“When all the collaborators rated each site in a systematic way according to the degree of human impact, none of those measures proved to be associated with violence,” said Richard Wrangham, the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and a senior author of the study. “In fact, we found that the site with the least violence had the largest human impact, and the site with the most violence was one of the least impacted. There is no overall pattern, statistically.”
The conclusion, Wrangham said, comes after several years of collecting information on virtually every incident of violence at the African research sites.
“We systematically recorded a number of years of observations — including the number of chimps in the community in a year, the rate of violence, and how confident we felt about the evidence in each case,” Wrangham said. “We categorized incidents based on whether they were observed, suspected, or inferred.”
The hope, Wrangham said, is that the study will settle the long-simmering debate about violence in chimpanzee society.READ MORE-http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/09/deadly-violence-a-natural-tendency-in-chimps-study-finds/
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