Are You Smarter Than a Female Monkey?

Watching Castaway for the thirteenth time last Sunday, I found myself daydreaming about my own heroic survival should I ever get stranded on a deserted island. I remember when I was a kid, I would pretend to be lost in my backyard (disclaimer: I was an only child) and would make fake tools from sticks and build forts with ferns. Of course when it came time to hunt, the best prey always ended up being my rather unimpressed fat cat. Evidently, he didn't think being carried like a hog on a stick was an ideal way to spend his afternoon.

But being both the chief and underlings of your own tribe can get pretty exhausting, and eventually the fun and games transferred into more grown-up things - like watching other people pretend to be stranded on an island in TV shows and movies. But what never ceased to amaze me was how easy those actors made it look to make fire (rubbing sticks together only ever gave me splinters and the occasional cat toy/tie), and the fact that the fat guy on Gilligan's Island never lost any weight. How, I wondered, do people actually survive when we humans have become so dependant on the splendors of technology? I mean really, I don't even know how to keep my indoor plants alive, let alone could I figure out which ones would kill me if I ate 'em. The answer to our great dilemma: follow a monkey.

In a recent Current Biology article written by science scholars Paco Bertolani and Jill Pruetz, chimpanzees from Senegal are aping the advancements of our human ancestors (sorry, I couldn't resist the pun). Four years of following these monkeys in the Fongoli sector of this African landscape showed scientists that chimps are learning how to hunt. Although the act of hunting has been observed my male chimps in other parts of the world (who gang up to kill smaller monkeys for sustenance), this is the first time that female monkeys are the primary breadwinners.