Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Studying culture in the wild
- 2 From human culture to wild culture
- 3 Shaping nature into home
- 4 One for all and all for one
- 5 I want to have sex with you
- 6 Learning culture
- 7 Dead or alive? Towards a notion of death and empathy
- 8 Wild culture – wild intelligence
- 9 Uniquely chimpanzee – uniquely human
- Epilogue: Will we have the time to study chimpanzee culture?
- References
- Index
4 - One for all and all for one
About social culture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Studying culture in the wild
- 2 From human culture to wild culture
- 3 Shaping nature into home
- 4 One for all and all for one
- 5 I want to have sex with you
- 6 Learning culture
- 7 Dead or alive? Towards a notion of death and empathy
- 8 Wild culture – wild intelligence
- 9 Uniquely chimpanzee – uniquely human
- Epilogue: Will we have the time to study chimpanzee culture?
- References
- Index
Summary
Le singe est capable tout au plus de combattre avec les grues, tandis que l’Homme fait dompter l’éléphant et vaincre le lion
George de Buffon, Histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes (1762, p. 38)Taï Forest, September 1976
As a total newcomer during my first stay in the Taï forest, I am not sure where I should start my study and so I have been exploring different locations that could be of interest. This brought me so far into the middle of the park today that I was a two-day walk from any human settlement. While searching for chimpanzees in the pouring rain, I hear loud chimpanzee screams not too far away. I immediately move in the direction I think the screams are coming from, although I am not confident because of the noisy downpour. Luckily, the chimpanzees are constantly calling and eventually I locate them behind an area that had been cleared by a fallen tree. Hiding behind a tree trunk, I cannot believe my eyes: high up in a tree, an adult male chimpanzee is holding a large, still alive red colobus monkey by the leg and around him, two screaming adults are moving to get access to the meat. I move forward to get a better view but I am immediately spotted by the chimpanzees, who flee, dragging their prey along with them. I remain alone in the rain, upset that I had been stupid enough to expose myself and trying to make sense of the completely unexpected scene I had just witnessed!
This was the first observation by a scientist of hunting in West Africa chimpanzees, contradicting a published report suggesting that chimpanzees in that region did not hunt! This was just one in a series of observations that showed me how hasty conclusions can be in the scientific literature. It was another seven years before I saw an actual hunt, but with time I was able to gain a better understanding of the complexity of the hunts in Taï chimpanzees.
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- Information
- Wild CulturesA Comparison between Chimpanzee and Human Cultures, pp. 81 - 107Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012