![]() "Drawing from the long-term datasets, we were able to investigate patterns within the same mother, examining how she behaved with her sons versus with her daughters," said lead author Carson Murray, an assistant professor at George Washington University, who was a PhD student under Pusey. Duke scholars led by Pusey are now working on digitizing the entire collection of Gombe data in the Goodall archive to enable more longitudinal studies of this kind. The data largely consist of "follows," in which a researcher focuses on one chimpanzee and notes her behaviors and interactions with others throughout the day. Duke University houses all of the data from the famous Kasekela chimpanzee community in the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center, which contains more than 50 years of observational data all the way back to Jane Goodall's first hand-written observations from the early 1960s. The findings are based on an analysis of 37 years of daily observations of East African chimpanzeess from the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. ![]() This gives the youngsters a start on developing the social skills they'll need to thrive in the competitive world of adults. The researchers believe that the mothers are giving the young males the opportunity to observe males in social situations, even while still clinging to their mothers. "It is really intriguing that the sex of her infant influences the mother's behavior right from birth and that the same female is more social when she has a son than when she has a daughter," said Anne Pusey, chair of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke. It would be safer in general to just avoid groups where aggressive males are present, yet the mothers of sons choose to do so anyway. Boy moms were found to spend about two hours more per day with other chimpanzees than the girl moms did.Ĭhimpanzees have a male-dominated society in which rank is a constant struggle and females with infants might face physical violence and even infanticide. Nearly four decades of observations of Tanzanian chimpanzees has revealed that the mothers of sons are about 25 percent more social than the mothers of daughters. view moreĬredit: Should be credited: © the Jane Goodall Institute / Hugo van Lawick, Feb. Image: In this 1965 photo from the Jane Goodall Institute Research Center at Duke, Goliath the alpha male gently interacts with an infant (age and identity unknown) while a female and her male infant sit very nearby at right.
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