Chimpanzees Use Tools to Help their Sex Lives

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

John Tierney reports for The New York Times, 3 May 2010:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/science/04tier.html

The human ego has never been quite the same since the day in 1960 that Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee feasting on termites near Lake Tanganyika. After carefully trimming a blade of grass, the chimpanzee poked it into a passage in the termite mound to extract his meal. No longer could humans claim to be the only tool-making species.

 

Ms. Goodall?s mentor, Louis Leakey: ?Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.?

 

So what have we actually done now that we?ve had a half-century to pout? In a 50th anniversary essay in the journal Science, the primatologist William C. McGrew begins by hailing the progression of chimpanzee studies from field notes to ?theory-driven, hypothesis-testing ethnology.?

 

He tactfully waits until the third paragraph ? journalists call this ?burying the lead? ? to deliver the most devastating blow yet to human self-esteem. After noting that chimpanzees? ?tool kits? are now known to include 20 items, Dr. McGrew casually mentions that they?re used for ?various functions in daily life, including subsistence, sociality, sex, and self-maintenance.?

 

Sex? Chimpanzees have tools for sex?

No way. If ever there was an intrinsically human behavior, it had to be the manufacture of sex toys.

 

Considering all that evolution had done to make sex second nature, or maybe first nature, I would have expected creatures without access to the Internet to leave well enough alone.

 

Only Homo sapiens seemed blessed with the idle prefrontal cortex and nimble prehensile thumbs necessary to invent erotic paraphernalia. Or perhaps Homo habilis

,

the famous Handy Man of two million years ago, if those ancestors got bored one day with their jobs in the rock-flaking industry:

 

?Flake, flake, flake.?

?There?s gotta be more to life.?

?Nobody ever died wishing he?d spent more time making sharp rocks.?

?What if you could make a tool for... something fun??

 

I couldn?t imagine how chimps managed this evolutionary leap. But then, I couldn?t imagine what they were actually doing. Using blades of grass to tickle one another? Building heart-shaped beds of moss? Using stones for massages, or vines for bondage, or ? well, I really had no idea, so I called Dr. McGrew, who is a professor at the University of Cambridge.

 

The tool for sex, he explained, is a leaf. Ideally a dead leaf, because that makes the most noise when the chimp clips it with his hand or his mouth.

 

?Males basically have to attract and maintain the attention of females,? Dr. McGrew said. ?One way to do this is leaf clipping. It makes a rasping sound. Imagine tearing a piece of paper that?s brittle or dry. The sound is nothing spectacular, but it?s distinctive.?

 

O.K., a distinctive sound. Where does the sex come in?

 

?The male will pluck a leaf, or a set of leaves, and sit so the female can see him. He spreads his legs so the female sees the erection, and he tears the leaf bit by bit down the midvein of the leaf, dropping the pieces as he detaches them. Sometimes he?ll do half a dozen leaves until she notices.?

 

And then?

 

?Presumably she sees the erection and puts two and two together, and if she?s interested, she?ll typically approach and present her back side, and then they?ll mate.?

 

My first reaction, as a chauvinistic human, was to dismiss the technology as laughably primitive ? too crude to even qualify as a proper sex tool. But Dr. McGrew said it met anthropologists? definition of a tool:

?He?s using a portable object to obtain a goal. In this case, the goal is not food but mating.?

 

Put that way, you might see this chimp as the equivalent of a human (wearing pants, one hopes) trying to attract women by driving around with a car thumping out 120-decibel music. But until researchers are able to find a woman who admits to being anything other than annoyed by guys in boom cars, these human tools must be considered evolutionary dead ends.

 

By contrast, the leaf-clipping chimps seem more advanced, practically debonair. But it would be fairer to compare the clipped leaf with the most popular human sex tool, which we can now identify thanks to the academic research described last year by my colleague Michael Winerip. The researchers found that the vibrator, considered taboo a few decades ago, had become one of the most common household appliances in the United States. Slightly more than half of all women, and almost half of men, reported having used one, and they weren?t giving each other platonic massages.

 

Leaf-clipping, meanwhile, has remained a local fetish among chimpanzees. The sexual strategy has been spotted at a colony in Tanzania but not in most other groups. There has been nothing comparable to the evolution observed in distributors of human sex tools: from XXX stores to chains of cutely named boutiques (Pleasure Chest, Good Vibrations) to mass merchants like CVS and Wal-Mart.

 

So let us, as Louis Leakey suggested, salvage some dignity by redefining humanity. We may not be the only tool-making species, but no one else possesses our genius for marketing. We reign supreme, indeed unrivaled, as the planet?s only tool-retailing species.

 

Now let?s see how long we hold on to that title.

 

[Kyra.Graves 23779]

Thanks for sharing that link I hadn't seen it yet. :)

 

This is one of my favorite talks by Jane Goodall, in the beginning she talks about the Chimpanzees use of tools (though not for sex).

 

 

Of course the sex life of the Bonobo can make many humans look downright proper! ;)

 

http://brembs.net/bonobos.html

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

Next time 'round, I want to be reincarnated as a Bonobo. Less need for tiresome clipping of dead leaves!

[Kyra.Graves 23779]

Next time 'round, I want to be reincarnated as a Bonobo. Less need for tiresome clipping of dead leaves!

 

Lots of girl on girl action too! ;)

[Guest s******ecan****]

Well someone should tell them to enjoy it while they can, I understand certain religious groups are already planning a series of protests and campaigns to discourage chimps from engaging in such "animal like" and perverted behaviour. Not to mention the alarm these groups see in the rising levels of "Chimp promiscuity" and healthy attitudes about their own chimp bodies. Laws and "abstinence only" programs are in the works I believe.

[Kyra.Graves 23779]

Well someone should tell them to enjoy it while they can, I understand certain religious groups are already planning a series of protests and campaigns to discourage chimps from engaging in such "animal like" and perverted behaviour. Not to mention the alarm these groups see in the rising levels of "Chimp promiscuity" and healthy attitudes about their own chimp bodies. Laws and "abstinence only" programs are in the works I believe.

 

Just as well I hear they've been indulging in some pretty unsavory behavior, these primates have no morals at all. Someone has to stop the monkeys from stealing, drinking and whoring!

 

http://thefinanser.co.uk/fsclub/2009/10/money-and-sex-the-twin-engines-of-life.html

 

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1700821,00.html

 

[Guest s******ecan****]

Kyra its worse than we thought

 

apparently Monkey Moral Decline may already be irreversible

 

 

Gambling

[omehgosh 736]

If we were half as smart as we think we are we'd stop taking it so personally every time we discover another animal on the planet with a brain.

 

There are lots of other animals displaying different sorts of "intelligence" that science, IMHO, too readily disregards as being purely instinctive.

 

It sure seems to me that the crows I pass on the road every day as I drive to work are fully aware that I'm not going to swerve to hit them, as they casually work out how long they have until I'm close them, then calmly step aside only as little as they need to be out of harms way...

 

I've admired crows for many years, I've always had this feeling there was more going on in their heads than we were aware of (no wonder people used to be afraid of them!), but I recently saw an interesting David Suzuki documentary about them - crows use tools too (although I don't think any one has documented any sexual tools yet!).

 

I'll post a whole list of links on the subject of crow intelligence below, but check this one out with a tool (you see it make the tool even) -

 

 

google results

 

Seems to me, us humans aren't nearly as special as we like to believe.

 

Again, thanks WiT for sharing the interesting read!

[Kyra.Graves 23779]

Kyra its worse than we thought

 

apparently Monkey Moral Decline may already be irreversible

 

 

Gambling

 

It's a good thing that Christianity has Primates in high places, perhaps they can help quell this disturbing trend!

 

 

Omehgosh, I agree I think it's just common sense that animals have emotional lives and are thinking beings, the fact that some people think that humans are unique in this type of cognition always surprises me. I cannot imagine a species would survive and adapt to our changing environment without some sort of emotional drive to do so.

 

Cognitive ethology...

[Guest W***ledi*Time]

The journal Public Library of Science One has published an article entitled ?Fellatio By Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time?. The paper documents a rare example of oral sex in a non-human animal, the short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx. These beasts are quite flexible -- check out the video in the "Supporting Information" section of the article!

 

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007595

Abstract:

 

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos

Pan paniscus

, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat

Cynopterus sphinx

exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation.

The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate's penis than if fellatio was absent.

Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in

C. sphinx

.