Researchers also questioned the nutritional value of the baby's body, as Darwin had severe diarrhea right after consuming it. The researchers were not able to obtain DNA samples from Darwin and the baby to determine if they were related. The unexpected cannibalism event left several questions unanswered. A female with a someone else's baby won't be willing to mate, meaning she'll spend time raising someone else's offspring instead of yours. A male might want to kill an infant in his own group to make the female ready to mate again. Yet eating one's own species can have some survival-driven motives, Schutt says. He explained that chimpanzees have been occasionally observed cannibalizing infants of other groups, but not their own. "Cannibalism is extremely widespread across nature, but it's pretty rare in primates, chimps notwithstanding," Bill Schutt, author of Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, tells Newsweek. Nishie was one of the authors of the study.Īnd such behavior is extremely rare among these animals. "Infanticide and cannibalism impose large reproductive costs on females and fathers of infants, so theoretically, effective counterstrategies should evolve to avoid such costs," says Hitonaru Nishie, an anthropology researcher at Kyoto University, in an email to Newsweek. The researchers found that females who take a break from the group for reasons other than pregnancy spend less time away than those who leave specifically to deliver.Ĭannibalizing an infant is a bad idea. Typically, female chimps leave their family group when they are ready to give birth, and they deliver alone. The researchers were studying the lengths of "maternity leaves" among chimps. The observation appeared in a case study published in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology in September. Either way, he then climbed a tree and consumed most of the infant's body. The researchers weren't able to see if the baby had been born dead or if Darwin killed it when he ate it. The male ran away from the group, clutching the infant. It was so sudden that the mother didn't even have a chance to hold her infant. In a flash, an older male named Darwin ran to her and snatched the baby away. Until that moment, the scientists didn't even know that she was pregnant. On a rainy day in the mountains, one chimpanzee named Devota suddenly gave birth in front of the group. In December 2014, scientists were studying a group of chimpanzees at Mahale Mountains in Tanzania. This behavior has never before been documented by scientists, who say it could explain why female chimpanzees normally hide themselves away during the late stages of pregnancy. A male chimpanzee has been observed snatching a seconds-old newborn, then eating it.
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