Introduction to the Special Issue on Savanna Chimpanzees
- PDF / 252,610 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 40 Downloads / 197 Views
Introduction to the Special Issue on Savanna Chimpanzees Linda F. Marchant 1 & Erin G. Wessling 2 & Stacy M. Lindshield 3 Received: 21 October 2020 / Accepted: 22 October 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Zoologists have long been fascinated by nonhuman primates because of their shared evolutionary history with us (Imanishi 1960; Washburn 1951) and for that reason our nearest living relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo (Pan spp.), have long held our attention. Going back further, neither Darwin (1871) nor Huxley (1863) had the benefit of observing the behavior of wild apes, yet both recognized the significance of African apes in explaining human behavior, anatomy, and origins. The molecular revolution of the 1960s (Sarich and Wilson 1967), and recent advances in molecular taxonomy, provided us with persuasive evidence that Pan is our sibling taxon with whom we shared a common ancestor as recently as 4–7 MYA (Langergraber et al. 2012; Mikkelsen et al. 2005). The pioneering work of Goodall (1986) and Nishida (2012) revealed the complexities of chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) socioecology and encouraged other researchers to further document the behavioral biology of the species (e.g., Boesch and Boesch-Achermann 2000; Kano 1992; Matsuzawa et al. 2011). Additionally, anthropologists saw the usefulness of incorporating this taxon into human origins models (Moore 1996). In this special issue we focus on a subset of chimpanzee communities that are collectively referred to as “savanna chimpanzees.” We also are fortunate to have a contribution from Pennec et al. (2020) to provide us with a comparative perspective for the bonobo (Pan paniscus). The descriptor “savanna chimpanzees” is somewhat imprecise yet does suggest that these apes are not found in habitats dominated by some form of forest cover (van Leeuwen et al. 2020). Rather, the habitats they occupy, as implied by the use of “savanna,” are more open; may include woodland, grassland; and are often labeled mosaic habitats (Hunt and McGrew 2002). These habitats also represent some of the extremes of where chimpanzees can persist— occupying the biogeographical edges of the species’ distribution (Wessling et al. 2020).
* Linda F. Marchant [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA
2
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
3
Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Marchant L.F. et al.
In this Introduction, we use four research sites in East and West Africa to illustrate a brief history of scientific investigation of savanna chimpanzees and then introduce the articles in the special issue.
A Brief History of Scientific Investigation of Savanna Chimpanzee What follows is a limited summary of research history at four sites mentioned. We include several noteworthy research findings that highlight what we have learned about savanna chimpanzees and also remind us of how much more there is to learn about these apes tha
Data Loading...
