![]() ![]() ![]() The court granted habeas corpus to Cecilia, ruling that Cecilia was a living being with rights and instructing defendants to immediately free her and to relocate her to the Great Ape Project Sanctuary in Brazil. Or as Machanda put it: “They could just be very happy together.“Abogados y Funcionarios de defensa Animal” (AFADA) brought a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of Cecilia, a 30 year old chimpanzee that lived in the Mendoza Zoo alleging that the chimpanzee had been illegitimately and arbitrarily deprived of her right to ambulatory freedom and right to have a dignified life on the part of authorities of the Zoo of the City of Mendoza, Argentina. Given the similar behaviour between chimps and humans, Prof Joan Silk, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, said it may have arisen in humans before they evolved modern cognitive skills and the ability to mull over future events.Īs older males compete less for mates, they may focus on close, reciprocal relationships with trusted partners, she said. “In humans, the decline is due to declining social motivation to get out and meet people combined by lack of opportunity,” he said. Robin Dunbar, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, was rather dismissive of socioemotional selectivity theory, saying it sounded like “naive psychobabble”. But many primatologists argue that chimpanzees lack the human sense of mortality, suggesting something else is driving the behaviour.Īccording to Machanda, the findings – published in Science – show that a sense of future time is not necessary for social circles to shrink with age, and other factors may underpin the behaviour in humans and chimps. According to an idea in psychology known as socioemotional selectivity theory, or SST, older humans prefer more positive relationships because they are aware time is running out. The observations have left the researchers puzzled. “They show a shift towards more positive behaviour,” Machanda said. As the males got older, their levels of aggression tailed off, meaning they started fewer fights and tended to intimidate others in their group less often. ![]() For example, one 40-year-old male had three times as many mutual friendships and a third fewer one-sided friendships than a 15-year-old male.Īnother trait seen in older humans was also spotted in the chimps. When the scientists looked at the patterns of friendships, they found that the older chimps had more mutual friendships and fewer one-sided friendships than younger chimps. They then rated the various pairings as mutual friendships, where both chimps seemed to enjoy the relationship one-sided friendships, where one chimp was more keen to be friends than the other and non-friendships, where neither chimp showed interest in the other. ![]() Working with Alexandra Rosati, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and others, Machanda classified the chimps’ relationships depending on the amount of time they sat with others and groomed them. They focused on males because they have stronger social bonds than females and interact more often. The researchers drew on 78,000 hours of observations made between 19 that followed the social interactions of 21 male chimpanzees between the ages of 15 and 58 years old in Kibale national park in Uganda. “We know that as humans age, their social networks shrink but their social bonds grow stronger, and we see the same thing here in chimpanzees.” “What we’ve shown is that chimpanzees and humans share the same pattern of social ageing,” said Zarin Machanda, a primatologist at Tufts University in Massachusetts. ![]()
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