A group of international scientists have captured on video a male chimpanzee giving a papaya fruit as a gift to a female chimp too woo her before mating. This is the first time evidence has been found to suggest that humans are not the only primates to give gifts to each other. Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, and the team of international zoologists filmed the chimps recently in Guinea, West Africa. The team has been observing the activity of the chimpanzees in the wild in Guinea since 1976. Over the past two years, they observed 786 occasions when chimps looted agricultural products. In most of the cases, the chimps ate the stolen fruit and vegetables by themselves. But around 58 times, they shared the loot between parents and baby chimps or between male chimps and female chimps. And of these, 25 times, the team observed males sharing their loot with young female chimps, in an attempt to seduce them. On most occasions, the male chimps mated with or were caressed by the female chimps after they shared the fruit, according to the observations made by the scientists. The research has been published in the scientific journal "Plos One".
Rating: User: trigirl 2007-09-13T23:48:43.853Z
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