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Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption

In recent years, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Support for this proposal seemingly came from experimental studies on captive chimpanzees that showed that individuals were limited in the ways they shared or cooper...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Boesch, Christophe, Bolé, Camille, Eckhardt, Nadin, Boesch, Hedwige
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2010
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2811728/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20111704
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008901
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author Boesch, Christophe
Bolé, Camille
Eckhardt, Nadin
Boesch, Hedwige
author_facet Boesch, Christophe
Bolé, Camille
Eckhardt, Nadin
Boesch, Hedwige
author_sort Boesch, Christophe
collection PubMed
description In recent years, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Support for this proposal seemingly came from experimental studies on captive chimpanzees that showed that individuals were limited in the ways they shared or cooperated with others. This dichotomy between humans and chimpanzees was proposed to indicate an important difference between the two species, and one study concluded that “chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members”. In strong contrast with these captive studies, consistent observations of potentially altruistic behaviors in different populations of wild chimpanzees have been reported in such different domains as food sharing, regular use of coalitions, cooperative hunting and border patrolling. This begs the question of what socio-ecological factors favor the evolution of altruism. Here we report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the adoptions were done by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father. Such adoptions by adults can last for years and thus imply extensive care towards the orphans. These observations reveal that, under the appropriate socio-ecologic conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of other unrelated group members and that altruism is more extensive in wild populations than was suggested by captive studies.
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spelling pubmed-28117282010-01-29 Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption Boesch, Christophe Bolé, Camille Eckhardt, Nadin Boesch, Hedwige PLoS One Research Article In recent years, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Support for this proposal seemingly came from experimental studies on captive chimpanzees that showed that individuals were limited in the ways they shared or cooperated with others. This dichotomy between humans and chimpanzees was proposed to indicate an important difference between the two species, and one study concluded that “chimpanzees are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members”. In strong contrast with these captive studies, consistent observations of potentially altruistic behaviors in different populations of wild chimpanzees have been reported in such different domains as food sharing, regular use of coalitions, cooperative hunting and border patrolling. This begs the question of what socio-ecological factors favor the evolution of altruism. Here we report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the adoptions were done by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father. Such adoptions by adults can last for years and thus imply extensive care towards the orphans. These observations reveal that, under the appropriate socio-ecologic conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of other unrelated group members and that altruism is more extensive in wild populations than was suggested by captive studies. Public Library of Science 2010-01-27 /pmc/articles/PMC2811728/ /pubmed/20111704 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008901 Text en Boesch et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Boesch, Christophe
Bolé, Camille
Eckhardt, Nadin
Boesch, Hedwige
Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
title Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
title_full Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
title_fullStr Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
title_full_unstemmed Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
title_short Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption
title_sort altruism in forest chimpanzees: the case of adoption
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2811728/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20111704
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0008901
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