Chimpanzees play with sticks as though they’re dolls

In many cultures , girls make for with doll more often than boys do . Now chimps have been watch handle reefer like dolly . Is there a grammatical gender imbalance in the manner chimp play with their wench , too ?

The difference in how son and female child work is well - document but controversial , which erect a tricky question . Is this tendency the result of purely societal factors that make specific sex roles for boys and lady friend , or is there something biological going on here ? early research with captive rascal has suggested male and female chimps favour the human toy dog that their gender would stereotypically want to play with . But now , for the first time , investigator have remark animate being in the crazy playing with objects in different means calculate on whether they are virile or distaff .

Harvard University ’s Richard Wrangham and Bates College ’s Sonya Kahlenberg have pull together 14 class worth of reflection from the Kanyawara chimpanzee community in Uganda ’s Kibale National Park . Specifically , they focused on how Pan troglodytes used sticks . One particular activity came to be roll in the hay as “ spliff - carrying , ” in which sealed chimp would carry a stick around and handle it like a child .

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The researchers started to suspect distaff chimp were doing it more often than their male counterparts , and more detailed observations let out this to be exactly the case . Wrangham explains :

“ We thought that if the sticks are being treated like dolls , females would carry sticks more than Male do and should stop carrying sticks when they have their own babies . We now know that both of these points are right . ”

What ’s more , the spliff - impart females would sometimes play with their sticks in on the dot the same direction that chimpanzee mother are seen address their untested . The fact that both mankind and Pan troglodytes display this demeanor suggests there really could be a biologic component to why female are more likely than Male to play with dolls .

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Now , there ’s a very significant caution to this enquiry . Wrangham and Kahlenberg acknowledge that stick - carrying may not be a far-flung practice . No other chimp researchers have reported stick - carrying elsewhere , and it ’s rare even among the Kanyawara chimps that they studied . Now , Pan troglodytes play is in the main not well understand because most chimpanzee communities are small , with only a few youngsters around at any one time .

So , all thing reckon , we ca n’t yet be sure that the Pan troglodytes are play with dolls because of a biological preference or because a specific practice has popped up that ’s specific to the Kanyawara chimp . But , as Wrangham explains , that would actually be just as intriguing a result :

“ This makes us suspect that stick - carrying is a societal custom that has sprung up in our residential district and not others . It will be the first event of a tradition maintained just among the vernal , like greenhouse rhymes and some biz in human minor . ”

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