Pan paniscus 1973 to 1996: Twenty-three years of field research
✍ Scribed by Frances J. White
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 892 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1060-1538
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Although the pygmy chimpanzee is not smaller than a chimpanzee, it has long intrigued anthropologists with its more gracile build and greater arboreality. The social organization of the pygmy chimpanzee is unique among primates in showing female-bonding among nonrelatives, little male bonding despite male residence, and relative inability of males to outrank females. The crucial ecological basis for this differences from the male-bonded system of chimpanzees is that pygmy chimpanzees do not go through an extended season of low food availability during which party sizes fall to low levels.
For many anthropologists, the 1984 book, The Pygmy Chimpanzee, edited by Randall Susman, which came from the 1982 IXth Congress of the International Primatology Society in Atlanta, was a long-waited introduction to what had been an elusive but intriguing species.] With its close affinity to humans, the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee is of great interest to primatologists and anthropologists studying earlier human evolution and the pongid-hominid divergence. As with the study of any new species, the attention of scientists was first drawn to the drastic differences between the pygmy chimpanzee and the better-studied chimpanzee. As time and data on this Frances J. White has studied the Lomako pygmy chimpanzees since 1983 and lemurs at Duke and in Madagascar since 1987. Her recent research on he behavioral ecology of the pygmy chimpanzee focuses on using modern molecular methods of DNA fingerprinting for noninvasive samples collected from the Lomako study population to examine questions of female relatedness, mother-son bounds, and the success of male mating strategies. She chaired a symposium on the importance of seasonality in the great apes at the meetings of the International Primatology Society and the American Society of Primatologists in 1996.