National Geographic: The New Chimpanzees Page #3

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to extract every last drop of juice.

But the calls of colobus monkeys

whet another appetite

not so easily satisfied.

When a monkey troop is spotted nearby,

the most avid hunter recruits other

males to join forces in a hunting party

Red colobus monkeys nervously watch

the gathering of bodies below.

Craig Stanford studies the relationship

between colobus and chimps.

He hopes to shed light on the origins

of human hunting.

We know that, at some point early

in human evolution,

meat became an important part

of the diet.

We don't understand exactly

how that happened

was it scavenging meat or hunting meat

Well, we know that the earliest stage

of human evolution happened

in a habitat just like this.

East African woodland that's got

open areas

onto which our ancestors eventually

moved and adapted to.

So, to be able to study hunting here

is the best way

to give us some kind of window

onto the earliest origins

of meat eating in our ancestors,

four or more million years ago.

Frodo is the best of the Gombe hunters

He's 17 years old and yet he's killed

in the last three years.

It's really quite an incredible animal

and a great hunter.

That was Frodo.

All the hunters, including Frodo,

will try to catch a monkey for himself

By joining forces, the chimps hope

to strand some monkeys

in an isolated treetop,

with no route of escape except

into the clutches of a chimp.

Although we see elements

of cooperation at Gombe,

what we thing we're seeing mainly

is individual,

selfish behavior by male hunters,

done within a communal setting.

It's a little bit like a baseball game

in that baseball is a communal game

in which individual players are

doing their piece and in the end,

the end result is going

to be success or a failure.

The more hunters there are,

the greater the odds

of success and, yet,

each individual hunter

is performing selfishly.

As the chimps climb up,

the colobus retreat to

the highest branches

too slender to bear a chimp's weight.

The male colobus stand their

ground against chimps up

to four times their size.

They will even take the offensive

momentarily driving the chimps back.

Holding his tail out of

the chimp's reach,

this male buys precious time for

the escape of the females and young.

Excited by the cries of hunter

and prey, females appear below.

Eighty feet above the ground,

Frodo displays his daring technique.

But this time, he misses.

With chimps climbing everywhere,

one monkey leaps

into the arms of death.

Even a rear attack by

the defending colobus cannot save him.

The young hunter displays

with his kill,

but his triumph is short liver.

Freud simply confiscates the carcass.

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