All rights reserved. Wild male chimps that share their monkey meat with females double their chances of having sex with those females, a new study says. Wild male chimps that share meat with females double their chances of having sex with those females, a new study says. The findings support a long-held hypothesis that food sharing improves male chimpanzees' chances of mating.

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These apes supposedly have inordinate amounts of sex and never fight. Can this appealing story really be true? Reputation: Bonobos are miniature, sharing, caring chimps, living in hippie communes with no aggression and lots of sex. Reality: Not really. Bonobos are roughly the same size as chimps, can be aggressive and use sex in very specific contexts. Bonobos Pan paniscus used to be known as "pygmy chimpanzees", a designation that served to distinguish them from regular chimps Pan troglodytes. But the difference in body size is small — only a matter of a few kilograms — and it certainly is not the most interesting difference between the species. Takayoshi Kano was one of the first to document the central position of females in bonobo society. But their appearance is not the thing that really sets bonobos apart from chimps. The most striking difference is the status and dominance of females.
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Men working in the nearby palm oil farm in Borneo would come into the brothel and could pay a couple of quid to have sex with a prostitute, or, shockingly, with her. Knowing what was expected, Pony would gyrate her hips when a punter came to the door before being raped by men twice the size of her who paid her owner for the experience. No one knows exactly how long Pony was forced to work as a prostitute before being rescued from a brothel in Indonesia. Chained to a bed, men could choose to pay to have sex with her - and she was shaved and made to wear perfume and jewellery. She was a sex slave - it was grotesque. She was covered in abscesses, and they put make-up and earrings on her. It was horrible to think about how terrified she must have been.
By Colin Barras. Humans, meanwhile, show a variety of mating behaviours but often form monogamous couples. Michael Jensen-Seaman and Scott Hergenrother at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania think that it is the chimps — not humans — that have experimented with new sexual behaviours since our lineages diverged. But did male chimps inherit their mating plugs from the last common ancestor they shared with us or did they evolve it later? They found that the enzyme is four times as abundant in human semen as it is in chimp semen. The change is related to the way the ACPP gene is turned on and off. For clues about whether the human-chimp ancestor had similar levels of the enzyme to humans or chimps, the team turned to gorillas. The gorilla lineage separated from the human-chimp ancestor a few million years earlier, so offers a perspective on mating habits in the human-chimp ancestor. The analysis showed gorillas regulate ACPP in the same way as humans, suggesting that the human-chimp ancestor did as well. It is possible that the human-chimp ancestor had chimp-like behaviour and that our lineage has since reverted to a gorilla-like condition.