“In a pretty miraculous moment in my life, I was saved from what could have been death from a hostile group of chimpanzees by a single chimp who remembered me as having treated his wounds prior,” she says. She’s seen, first-hand, that chimps can form emotional bonds with other apes - namely, humans like herself. In the other study, scientists showed that chimpanzees will return favors to other chimps who have helped them in the past, even if this means they’ll get less food this time.ĭespite the limited research on the topic, Atencia has reason to believe in chimp altruism. The researchers call this behavior “group augmentation,” which suggets that the chimps understand that a little sacrifice from every individual member result in greater safety and stability for the overall group. This is surprising from a biological point of view, because it isn’t consistent with the idea that an individual only cares about its kin (and therefore the proliferation of its own genes). In one of those studies, scientists found that chimps will work together for the collective good of the group, even if those chimps are not related. Two studies, published as a pair in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in June, also showed that chimpanzees work together in an unexpectedly altruistic way. What’s slightly more well studied is the idea that chimps can be altruistic to each other within populations and form coalitions, as research conducted by the Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania has recently shown. “Chimps very much cooperate with individuals outside their particular kinship group and do build bonds with humans,” Atencia points out, “so it is possible that if two separate great ape species were brought together, they could work together. “What that means is, great apes work together for a common good, goal, or in ways that benefit both parties, and it is not out of the question to think this would extend to other species.”Ītencia admits that there isn’t much documented evidence of chimps working together with other primates - either great apes or non-great apes - but that doesn’t mean the scenario should be ruled out altogether. “Primates are social in nature, and have been documented to be altruistic, especially in a reciprocal situation,” Atencia tells Inverse. Is it realistic to think that different species of apes could work together? According to Rebeca Atencia, the lead veterinarian and head of the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center, founded by the Jane Goodall Institute in the Republic of Congo, that scenario isn’t completely science fiction. To survive, apes across species - chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos, and orangutans - form an alliance, united under a single rallying cry: “Apes together strong.” ![]() Most of the human population has been killed by the simian flu, and those who remain are hell-bent on destroying the intelligent apes that got an evolutionary leg up from the virus. ![]() ![]() In War For the Planet of the Apes, humans and apes alike are living in fear.
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