May 14 (UPI) — New research sheds light on how chimpanzees self-medicate wounds with plants and provide aid to other chimps.
A new report published Tuesday in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution provides fresh clues on the origin of human medical care and how primates — such as chimps, orangutans and gorillas — utilize natural resources as medicine in scores of ways to stay healthy.
“Understanding the cognitive and social foundations of healthcare behaviors in humans requires examining their evolutionary precursors in our closest living relatives,” the report starts.
Chimpanzees and its similar primate species, bonobos monkeys, are known to be the closest genetic relative to the human race.
The team of scientists from Britain’s University of Oxford observed wild chimpanzees for about eight months in Africa at the Budongo Forest in Uganda tend to their wounds with medicinal-like plants and at times on each other.
They filmed and documented the chimps and saw also how they aided others, even by helping one from hunting snares left by humans which “adds to the evidence that wild chimpanzees have the capacity for empathy,” according to the study’s lead researcher Dr. Elodie Freymann.
It builds upon last year’s discovery that chimps seek and eat certain plants in order to heal themselves from various afflictions.
Freymann, meanwhile, spent two physically-demanding four-month periods in the Budongo Forest following wild chimps comfortable enough with human contact.
“There can be days where you’re just sitting at the base of a tree while they eat for eight hours, and there can be days where you’re hacking through vines and crossing rivers and stuck in clay pits,” she added, saying the day was “completely determined by what the group feels like doing.”
She said she stumbled on a logbook dating to the 1990s which outlined similar observations not featured in past research studies.
“One of the things humans have clung onto is that we’re this very special species, because we are capable of altruism and we’re capable of empathy,” said Freymann, a postdoctoral researcher.
According to Freymann, animals help each other out and they’re capable of “identifying others in need and then addressing those specific needs.”
Her logbook documented 41 cases of care in wounded chumps, 34 cases of self-care and seven in the care of other chimps. The study further states there were at least four instances of care for other chimpanzees that were not related.
“The findings show that some types of prosocial behavior towards non-kin may be more widespread than previously thought,” Isabelle Laumer, a primatologist and cognitive biologist at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, told NBC.
“More detailed investigation is needed,” added Laumer, who was not involved in the study.
Freymann added that if scientists hope to hone in on “these amazing medicinal resources,” watching and learning from animals is “an incredibly effective way to do it if it’s done ethically and responsibly.”
