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Chimps' 'girl talk' uses more negative gestures

The study analysed the different gesturing strategies used by a group of females at Chester Zoo.

In female-female interactions, the chimps used more aggressive signals and "apologised" less often with gestures of reassurance. But they employed a more positive strategy around males, with more expressions of greeting and submission.

"When communicating with males, females sort of 'suck up' to them," said PhD student Nicole Scott from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, US, whose findings are published in the American Journal of Primatology...

Well, male Chimpanzees are significantly larger, stronger, and more violent than females.  Kind of like humans...

While females in the group adopted a different gesture strategy depending on the sex of a partner, the males did not. Ms Scott suggests this indicates that female chimpanzees are more sensitive to the sex of their partner than males, and cater their gesture use accordingly.

In modern human society, a man who treated the sexes differently than women would be branded as sexist, while a woman who treated them differently would be labeled as "sensitive."

According to the biologist, different "social pressures" on the sexes could explain the difference in communication strategies. For example, males might have more positive relationships with other males because of the importance of male-male alliances and maintaining high social rank in a group.

But there may be less focus on female chimpanzees maintaining multiple, positive relationships with other females, and instead more pressure on them to form positive relationships with males.

You mean like the fact that male Chimps occasionally share the highly nutritional meat they hunt for with favored females, and that they compete with the other females of their group for food and mates.

Ms Scott suggests the complex social behaviour seen in chimps, and highlighted in her study, may hint at our own actions:

"To speak anthropomorphically, I can certainly see some parallels in my own life: women are generally more aggressive and competitive with each other... [and] men do not change their behaviour outside the context of social rank," she said, referring to studies of gesture differences in humans.

An anthropologist who acknowledges a difference between mane and women!  How did she get tenure? 

"Perhaps we inherited these traits from our ancestors, traits which were adaptive for their social pressures, but I'll leave that argument for the anthropologists." She added that her analysis of female aggression could be controversial because "there is a belief in the field that males are more aggressive than females."

"Some researchers likely will have trouble accepting my results since I show that females are also aggressive," she said.

"It's not that they are more aggressive, just different from males in their use of aggression."

 Wombat-Socho at The Other McCain was right on schedule this week with "Rule 5 Sunday: This time It's for Real."