Feminists avert your gaze. News that female chimps mate more frequently with male chimps that share their meat with them has prompted a slew of at best corny, at worst downright sexist, even lewd, headlines.
The meat-for-sex hypothesis has already been suggested to explain certain human behaviours, and to explain why male chimps often share meat with females who do not participate in the hunt. Researchers have tried to test the meat-for-sex hypothesis in different groups of chimps previously, with confusing results. Cristina Gomes from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig, Germany suggests that this is because they only looked at behaviour in the short term, when the female chimps were in estrous, or ‘in heat’.
Her study covered a group of chimpanzees in the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire over three years. “Our findings show that females copulated more frequently with those males who shared meat with them over long periods of time,” Gomes says in the paper.
So back to the newshounds, who clearly loved this story.
“Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex” says the BBC. Yes, they do.
But we want more anthropomorphising. Come on Brit Tabloids, you can do better than that! Thank goodness for the Daily Mail, who confuse humans and chimps even in their headline, “Why food is the way to a woman’s heart (if you happen to be a male chimpanzee)”, to open their story with the brilliantly enlightened “As every Romeo knows, laying on a delicious dinner for two is one of the best seduction ploys.”
Seduction is also apparently what the chimps are up to according to Mongabay.com and the Independent.
And how about “Frisky chimps’ female meat market”? over at Blatherskite. Nice.
The Telegraph takes a leap that I’m not sure the author’s would have intended: “Buying a woman presents could help men get them into bed, a new study which shows that chimpanzees have sex for gifts suggests” is how their story begins.
Reuters have a go at linking the study with prostitution in their opening paragraph.
Back to the paper, and the conclusions state that the findings might help shed light on some aspects of human behaviour, “…suggesting that the increased reproductive success of accomplished hunters compared to unsuccessful hunters in forager societies could be driven by female choice and be linked to direct exchanges of meat for sex between men and women.”
In a press release, Gomes’s co-author, Christoph Boesch, explains why he thinks this study is important: “Our findings add to the ever-growing evidence suggesting that chimpanzees can think in the past and the future and that this influences their present behavior.”
Does this mean that if you buy a woman a present she’ll sleep with you? I think not.
If you want to see Nature’s chimp coverage over the years, check out the following:
Girl chimps learn faster than boys
Image: Cristina M. Gomes