Female chimps treat sticks as dolls
The must-have gift for young female chimpanzees this holiday season might be part of the Christmas tree, not under it. That’s the finding of scientists at Harvard University and Bates College, who say female chimpanzees appear to treat sticks as dolls, carrying them around until they have offspring of their own. Young males engage in such behavior much less frequently. The new work by Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, described in the journal Current Biology and released Monday (Dec. 20), provides the first suggestive evidence of a wild nonhuman species playing with rudimentary dolls, as well as the first known sex difference in a wild animal’s choice of playthings. The two researchers say their work adds to a growing body of evidence that human children are probably born with their own ideas of how they want to behave, rather than simply mirroring other girls who play with dolls or boys who...