by Playfuls Staff |
21st November 2006
Unlike Humans, Chimps prefer mating with older females. Now that is certainly a thing that separates us from them and makes us superior…[more]
It’s not only the genetic code that differentiates us from chimpanzees, it’s also our preferences for our feminine partners. According to a new study from US researchers, male chimps not only prefer older females, but also fight more aggressively for the oldest female in the group.
Anthropologist Martin Muller and colleagues at Boston University discovered that young women in the group have to literally beg for males’ attention, while the older females are the most favored and generate the majority the fights between “admirers”.
"It's really dramatic because it's not just that the old chimps are avoiding the youngest adult females. They actually have a strong preference for the older mothers," Muller says.
Muller and colleagues say they studied chimpanzees living in the Kanyawara community of Kibale National Park in Uganda because it is easy to observe their mating behavior in the wild.
"Chimpanzee copulations are frequently preceded by a series of male courtship signals (eg, glancing with erect penis and branch shaking), after which either the male or the female approaches the other to mate," the researchers write.
In human society, younger women are valued more than older ones, due partially to their better reproductive potential.
But in chimps’ world, the males not only approached older females more often to mate in the fertile female cycles, but even the high-ranking males sought older female chimps, the report said.
Muller and his team said one possibility for the difference was the lifelong mating, common among human beings, where a woman's "sexual attractiveness generally peaks before motherhood and declines with age", according to a synopsis of the article.
The researchers found that, compared to younger females, older females were more likely to be approached for copulation, were more often in association with males during estrous periods, copulated more frequently with high-ranking males, and gave rise to higher rates of male-on-male aggression in mating contests.
Chimpanzee, often shortened to chimp, is the common name for the two extant species in the genus Pan. The better known chimpanzee is Pan troglodytes, the Common Chimpanzee, living primarily in West, and Central Africa. Its cousin, the Bonobo or "Pygmy Chimpanzee" as it is known archaically, Pan paniscus, is found in the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Congo River forms the boundary between the two species.
