2021-11-01 19:28:42
Looking back to try to glimpse the past of our species is an impressive challenge because of our most distant ancestors, only a few, scarce and scattered fossils have been found. However, a living creature known as a savannah chimpanzee is now facing challenges similar to those faced by our earliest ancestors. That is the reason why these apes have become living models that allow us to understand human evolution. This is deduced from the content of the work co-directed by our guest in Hablando con Científicos, Adriana Hernandez Aguilar and published in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology.
Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor that lived in Africa about 6 million years ago. The two branches that followed different evolutionary paths broke off from that creature. One branch spawned creatures that became bipedal, left the forest, began to inhabit open spaces, and began an evolutionary path that allowed them to develop larger brains and dominate the entire planet. The other branch, made up of creatures that retained and improved their abilities to survive in forested and jungle regions, with abundant vegetation, undertook an evolutionary path to the current chimpanzees.
Those first hominins, which is how apes that adopted the bipedal position are identified, forced by the continuous retreat of the African forests, were forced to survive in open spaces, with few trees, large tracts of grass and plagued by predators, similar to the current sheets.
Scientists are trying to imagine what life was like for those distant ancestors of ours, and luckily for us, populations of chimpanzees do exist in certain places throughout central Africa and are facing the same challenge today. They have learned to survive on the African savannahs and have become in a model of incalculable value to learn how the life of the ancestors of the current human being must have been.
The study of savannah chimpanzees began in 1958, when Japanese primatologists Kinji Imanishi and Junichiro Itani first studied these apes in regions of eastern and western Africa. Those first studies revealed how difficult it was to observe these groups because the animals were few in number, moved through vast spaces and did not allow the approach of humans interested in observing them. This coexistence between chimpanzees and researchers is essential to observe them and, although it has been achieved relatively frequently with forest and jungle chimpanzees, coexistence with savannah chimpanzees is very difficult.
From those early investigations until now, the study of savannah chimpanzees has grown, especially thanks to new remote observation techniques and the use of technologies such as camera traps and analysis of their remains using typical archeology methods. This acquired knowledge has led Mexican researcher Adriana Hernández Aguilar, Serra Hunter Professor at the University of Barcelona, together with Stacy Lindshield, from Purdue University (USA), to publish a review of what is currently known about the behavior and ecology of savannah-dwelling chimpanzees.
Adriana Hernández Aguilar comments today in Hablando con Científicos that there are no differences between savannah chimpanzees and those that inhabit forested or jungle regions, they are animals of the same species but they differ in the way they face the challenges to which they are subjected. the environment. The savannahs are open environments, with a very marked seasonal variation, and chimpanzees are forced to establish behavioral strategies, both individual and social, that allow them to survive.
Early research has already shown that chimpanzees form stable groups that temporarily divide into smaller subgroups when performing different tasks. Thus it was found that, like their forest counterparts, savannah chimpanzees hunt and eat mammals and use tools to capture ants and termites. However, in the savannahs the climate is more extreme and chimpanzees have to develop strategies to protect themselves from the heat, some look for caves or caverns where they can protect themselves in the shade during the hottest hours of the day and, if they have a stream nearby, they submerge. in the water to cool off. If water is scarce, they dig holes in the ground to search for it.
These environmental conditions are the same as those that the first hominins had to endure, so savannah chimpanzees have become a living example that allows us to explore our own origins. On the other hand, given the process of climate change in which we are immersed, these investigations allow us to know how chimpanzees that live in forests and jungles could adapt to drier and more extreme climates, essential knowledge to save a species that is losing their habitats and whose survival is seriously threatened.
I invite you to listen to Adriana Hernández Aguilar, Serra Hunter Professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Barcelona and Co-Director of Research at the Jane Goodall Institute Spain.
References:
Lindshield S, Hernandez-Aguilar RA, Korstjens AH, Marchant LF, Narat V, Ndiaye PI, et al. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in savanna landscapes. Evolutionary Anthropology. Rev. 2021;1–2 https://doi.org/10.
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