Researchers analysed a wide range of environmental samples from Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire, to construct an isotopic baseline of the chimpanzee habitat.
These new results support previous behavioural observations of chimpanzees in Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire. An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has now compared stable isotope data of wild chimpanzee hair keratin and bone collagen with behavioural observations and found that, in chimpanzees, hunting and meat-eating is male-dominated. Constraints on continual direct observation throughout the entire hunting season mean that behavioural observations are limited in their ability to accurately quantify meat consumption. Wild chimpanzees are known to consume vertebrate meat, but its actual dietary contribution is often unknown.
() -Observations of hunting and meat eating in our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, suggest that regular inclusion of meat in the diet is not a characteristic unique to Homo.
Credit: MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology/Christophe Boesch Gifted adult male hunter Brutus holds out meat for the less successful, and uninterested, hunter Kendo while a female looks on.
