![]() Does the matrix matter? A forest primate in a complex agricultural landscape. American Journal of Primatology, 15, 213–221.Īnderson, J., Rowcliffe, J. Differences in daily life between semiprovisioned and wild‐feeding baboons. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.Īltmann, J., & Muruthi, P. Salkind (Ed.), Encyclopedia of research design (pp. Whether cultivated habitats can support threatened but flexible primates such as chimpanzees in the long term hinges on local people’s willingness to share their landscape and resources with them.Ībdi, H. Nonnutritional factors, e.g., similarity to wild foods, probably also influence crop selection. ![]() We found little evidence that crops ignored by the chimpanzees were less nutritious than those that they did eat. Our data support the assumption that eating cultivated foods confers energetic advantages for primates, although crops in our sample were low in protein and lipids compared to some wild foods. Cultivated fruits were relatively nutritious throughout the ripening process. Compared to wild food equivalents, crops eaten by the chimpanzees contained higher levels of digestible carbohydrates (mainly sugars) coupled with lower amounts of insoluble fiber and antifeedants. Our analysis of their wild plant diet (fruit, leaves, and pith) corresponds with previous chemical analyses of primate plant foods. In addition, we analyzed 13 crops not eaten at Bulindi but that are consumed by chimpanzees elsewhere to assess whether nutritional aspects explain why chimpanzees in Bulindi ignored them. We measured the macronutrient and antifeedant content of 44 wild and 21 crop foods eaten by chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) in a mosaic habitat at Bulindi, Uganda, to evaluate the common assertion that crops offer high nutritional returns compared to wild forage for primates. Many wild primates include cultivated foods (crops) in their diets, calling for an improved understanding of the costs and benefits of crop feeding. This extra time and calories likely had a large impact on the evolution of modern humans, and even the evolution of language and social lives, since you can't eat with your mouth full, and processing food can be a social activity, the researchers said.Primate habitats are being transformed by human activities such as agriculture. "We stuck our flag in the sand with Homo erectus, because that's when we really start to see modern human-like feeding times, but it very well could have evolved earlier than that." We are a little less sure about those two species," Organ said. "The time they spent eating was on the high range of what we see in human cultures. While these numbers are much smaller than the modern chimpanzee eating times, they fall on the border of the modern human spectrum, so the researchers couldn't definitively say that their changes in molar size were due to different feeding behaviors. habilis spent about 7.2 percent of its time eating and H. Looking back more than 2 million years to a more distant relative, the team found H. Statistical analyses placed these chew times within the range of time spent chewing for humans. neanderthalensis spent 7 percent of the day feeding. erectus (which lived 1.9 million years ago ) spent 6.1 percent of its day feeding, while the more recent H. But our extinct relatives seemed to fall closer to us than to chimps regarding chewing. Humans are definite outliers in primate chew time, because we eat cooked and processed food. Chimpanzees, they found, spend 10 times longer chewing and eating than humans do, 48 percent vs. The researchers measured the tooth sizes and body masses of four extinct hominids, modern humans, chimpanzees and other modern apes, using this information from modern animals to estimate time spent chewing in the extinct species. The only snag to their cooking hypothesis is that they haven't found evidence of hearths or fire pits for cooking that long ago. The result means more available calories per serving and less gut time needed to digest those calories. Processed food is much easier to chew and digest and since chewing breaks up the food it means more surface area is available from which the gut can absorb nutrients, Organ said.
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