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Many men think of little else besides sex and meat, but male chimpanzees will sometimes exchange one for the other. Chimps are mostly vegetarian but they will occasionally supplement their diet by hunting other animals, especially monkeys. Males do most of the hunting, but they don’t eat their spoils alone – often, they will share the fresh meat with females, even those who are unrelated to them. Some scientists have suggested that this apparently selfless act is a trade – the males are giving up their nutritious catch in exchange for sex.
Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have found new evidence to support this idea. They spent four years in the Tai National Park in Cote d’Ivoire watching a group of 49 chimps, including 5 adult males and 14 females. They recorded a huge amount of data on the group’s behaviour, and across 3,000 hours of observation, they were privy to 262 bouts of chimp sex.
These years of voyeurism told them that meat was a big factor in separating the Casanovas...
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