October 8, 2024 • 23 mins
Are humans the only animals that practice medicine? In this episode, two scientists share surprising observations of orangutans and chimpanzees treating wounds–their own and others'–with plants and insects. These discoveries challenge ideas about uniquely human behaviors and offer insights into animal intelligence, empathy, and the evolutionary roots of medicine.
Origin Stories is a project of The Leakey Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and outreach. Sign up for our monthly newsletter to learn more about our work!
Videos
Rakus doing a long call after being wounded
Chimp applying insect to wound
Caroline Schuppli on Lunch Break Science
Links to learn more
Ozouga Chimpanzees (where Alessandra studies chimpanzee behavior)
Research papers
Application of insects to wounds of self and others by chimpanzees in the wild (pdf)
Credits
Origin Stories is a listener-supported show. Additional support comes from Jeanne Newman, , Camilla and George Smith, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
Origin Stories is produced by Ray Pang. Our editor is Audrey Quinn. Theme music by Henry Nagle. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions and Lee Roservere.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
This is Origin Stories, the LeakeyFoundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson.
Before we get to the episode,
I wanted to say thank you so much forall of your support with our matching
fundraiser for Origin Stories.
We were blown away by your generosity,
(00:25):
and we're thrilled to tell you thatthanks to you, we met our goal.
So thank you to Jean Bainbridge,Richard Blanchette, Bernadette Brenkus,
Chinzia De Santis, Robert
(00:48):
Jonas, Amie Kaufmann, Luzie Lenzner,Cahail Mc, Kevin Miller, Charles Musiba,
and 31 other donors whowanted to stay anonymous.
Today on the show we have twostories about medicine. As humans,
we have a vast toolkit of remediesto help ourselves and each other when
we're sick or injured.
(01:08):
We don't know exactly how longwe've been practicing medicine or
what medical care was likefor our ancient ancestors,
but there's plenty of prehistoricevidence of individuals who
survived accidents, bluntforce injuries, broken bones,
and trauma of many kinds.
The earliest evidence is fromabout 1.7 million years ago,
(01:31):
a Homo erectus individualwho had periodontal disease
and infections at the jaw.They lost all their teeth,
but they somehow survived. How? we don'tknow, but in biological anthropology,
when we want to understandthe roots of human behavior,
we look to our ape cousins and it turnsout that our cousins are using medicine.
Origin Stories ProducerRay Pang has our stories.
(01:55):
A
few
months
ago
I
heard
about
a
sumatran
Orangutan
named
Rakus
-
who
was
seen
making
and
smearing
a
peculiar
plant
paste
into
a
fresh
wound
on
his
face.
While
chimps
have
been
documented
using
plant
medicine,
this
is
the
first
known
instance
of
an
orangutan
treating
a
wound
with
plants.
To
learn
more
about
Rakus,
I
called
up
Caroline
Schuppli
-
an
evolutionary
biologist
at
the
Max
Planck
Institute.
(02:19):
Yeah,
rakus is one of the orangutans we haveobserved for many years at our study
site.
(02:41):
Caroline's a Leakey Foundation granteeand director of the SUAQ Balimping
Orangutan Research Project in Sumatra,where she studies how orangutans learn.
The peat swamp forest there has thehighest density of orangutans on earth,
A typical day starts before sunrise sothey can reach the apes before they wake
up.
So we follow the orangutansfrom their morning nests,
so when they leave theirnest in the morning to the point in time when they make
a new nest in the evening.
We have some individuals that like tosnack late into the evenings and those go
to bed at around eight, butmostly it's around six or seven.
(03:03):
I think most of us can relate toan orangutan that likes to snack at
night.
Absolutely.
From morning till night.
Every two minutes they writedown the orangutans asactivities.
How far away it is from otherindividuals. If it's eating,
we write down what it is eating andwhat species, which part of the species.
(03:24):
We usually follow individualsup to 10 days in a row,
and then we give themat least a month break.
Caroline's team was out inthe field conducting their everyday observations when
they saw an orangutan named Rakus doingsomething they'd never seen before.
He's a fully flanged male nowfor three years. Before that,
he was an unflanged male.
(03:45):
In orangutans, males canbe flanged and unflanged.
Flanges are these wide thick fleshypads that grow around a male's face when
they reach full adulthood.
These pads are used to attract matesand to amplify their loud long calls,
a kind of hybrid signal thatmeans, welcome to my land,
and no males allowed
(04:11):
.
One day.
Shortly after he has become a flangedmale and he started to kind of claim a
dominance position in SUAQ.
One day we found him with a big wound inhis face or several wounds in his face.
(04:34):
Ulil
Azhari
and
Armas
Safruddin
are
two
field
assistants
who
work
with
Caroline.
They
were
the
ones
who
first
noticed
Rakus
looked
hurt.
They hardly ever get injured.
They're surprisingly good atpreventing injuries and wounds,
but with this case,
we had actually some signs that Rakuswas kind of challenging the current
(04:58):
dominant male and claiminga dominance position.
And so we believed that the wound stemmedfrom a fight with another flanged male.
Just under his right eye, a large chunkof flesh was missing from his cheek.
The wound was a couple inches wide,but as they kept watching him,
they saw him do something surprising.
And shortly after that he wasseen to chew a plant and smear
(05:21):
the resulting mash of thatplant onto his wounds.
He seemed to deliberately picksome leaves, chew them up,
spit the plant mush into his handand rub it onto his hurt cheek.
The researchers later took a few leavesfrom the plant and brought it back to
camp.
And we realized that this is actuallya plant that's very well known for its
medical properties.
(06:06):
Akar Kuning - a fast growing floweringvine that has long been used in
traditional medicine across Indonesiaand is known to have anti-bacterial,
anti-inflammatory,
anti-fungal and antioxidant properties.Andthe mushed up Akar Kuning leaves
seemed to have a healing effecton Rakus' face. Day by day,
the researchers watched hiswound get smaller and smaller.
And then kind of the significanceof the events started to sink in.
Because we hardly ever find woundedorangutans in our study site it it's
difficult for us to compare thiswound healing to other wound healing,
but from what we can tell,from what we have observed,
there was no signs of infection.
Wow. What was most exciting to youabout this finding and observation?
(06:29):
It was kind of an escalatingexcitement because first of all,
we hardly ever haveinjured orangutans then.
I've never heard of an orangutan walkchewing up a plant and smearing it onto
his wound and then realizing that thisis a plant with medical properties.
It was this gradual but quitequick increase of excitement and
(06:51):
realizing that we're onto something here.
This was the first time a primate hadbeen seen using a medicinal plant that
humans also use.
And for Caroline as an evolutionarybiologist studying how orangutans learn,
she wondered how didRakus learn to do this?
That was of course the firstburning question for us.
(07:13):
The thing that's most interestingfor us, given our research area,
animals can either learn somethingby individual exploration,
so figuring it out themselves or theycan learn it from other individuals.
So that's what we call sociallearning. The question is, which one?
But the problem with the social learningtheory is that orangutans are hardly
(07:33):
ever wounded.
So the likelihood that he observedanother individual being wounded,
which would've most likely been anotherflinched male with him being close by
and observing and realizingwhat he's doing is quite low.
So it's unlikely that Rakuslearned this from mom.
(07:53):
I wouldn't exclude the possibility.
It's just given how rarelyorangutans are injured,
especially mothers or infants,
it's quite unlikely that it happensfrequently enough to really be passed on
from generation to generation.
So in orangutans learning opportunitiesare quite skewed towards the first part
of development.
Then they leave their mothers and theyspend around half of their time on their
(08:16):
own and half of their time withone or two other individuals.
Even though these individualsare significantly less tolerant than their moms,
so they get less time to observe theseindividuals from a close distance.
And then if they're male andthen they become flanged,
they even have less opportunities becauseother males won't interact with them
anymore.
Yeah, exactly. So as unflagged males,especially when they arrive in a new area,
(08:41):
we find loads of evidence that they seekthe presence of residents to learn from
them. But as soon as they transitioninto the flanged mail stadium,
it's quite a solitary lifefor the rest of their lives.
Caroline says,
the other possibility is that Rakusfigured out the leaves have healing
properties all on his own.
(09:03):
You would assume that he somehowrealized while treating this wound or a
previous wound that he sustained,
that chewing up this plantis soothing his pain or
is helping with the healing process.
But it must have been some quiteimmediate effect that he could
connect with the plant. Andthat made him realize, okay,
(09:25):
so maybe if I apply thisplant to my other wounds,
that will make the pain go away as well.
This is what Carolinethinks most likely happened.
Rakus found his way to plant medicinethrough what she calls individual
exploration.
We don't know how much Rakusreally understands that applying this plant to his
wound will make the wound heal better,
(09:46):
but because the plant haspain relieving properties,
we think that that might be the mechanismthat makes them connect the benefits
of applying this plant to the wounds.
The problem with this wound healingis that it's not immediate, right?
So they chew up the plant, they apply it,
and then over the next couple ofdays or weeks, the wound will heal.
(10:08):
But he was only applying theplant material to the wound,
so he wasn't smearing iton any other body part,
but he was really just applying it tohis wound in the face and it lasted for
seven minutes. So itseemed very intentional.
It's pretty incredible to knowthat they could be out here either
knowingly or unknowingly usingsubstances in a way that has a very
(10:33):
delayed gratification.
Yeah, that's theinteresting thing about it,
the delayed gratificationor the delayed effect.
How did they connect this effect tothe action if the action is so rare and
hardly ever performed?
So what do you think theimplications of this finding are?
We
(10:58):
have
to
think
about
what
cognitive
foundation
is
behind
this
behavior.
Since
humans
also
use
plants
to
treat
their
wounds
and
all
kinds
of
medical
conditions,
that
most
likely
the
last
common
ancestor
between
the
non
human
apes
and
the
humans
also
had
the
cognitive
foundation
that
is
needed
to
perform
these
behaviors.We
know
that
ape
relatives
can
use
these
medical
plants,
it
is
highly
likely
that
early,
very
early
humans
could
also
use
medical
plants.The
question
is,
what
is
needed
to
perform
this
behavior?
And
for
this,
I
believe
we
have
to
look
at
what
other
species
can
do
and
what
we
see
in
other
species.
(11:34):
Wow, there's so much goodstuff that we've talked about.
I just want to say thanks again forcoming on the podcast and talking with us.
Thanks, Ray, for having me.
It was a pleasure to talk about ourorangutans and the fancy things that they
can do.
(11:54):
This next story takes us to LuongoNational Park in Gabon and chimpanzees.
As I said before, chimps have beenknown to use plants on wounds.
Alessandra is a PhD student at theUniversity of Osnabruck and back in 2019,
she was conducting field research on theRecambo community - a group of around
35 chimpanzees.
She was studying how group members dealtwith wounds when she recorded a video
of Susie - an adult femalechimpanzee - her adolescent son Sia,
and her young daughter Sassandra.
(12:35):
So I recorded thisvideo in November, 2019,
and this is my first observationof insect application to wounds.
The three family membersare all close together.
Sia appears to have a wound onhis foot. Susie looks concerned.
Susie catches a fly.
She places the fly between her lips andwe can see little Sassandra close to her
(12:58):
attempting to get what Susie has.
And Susie then approaches thefoot of her adolescent son, Sia,
and she applies the fly on awound that Sia had just on his
foot.
And we can see Susie taking backthe fly and reapplying it again.
(13:18):
As she does this, Susiegets some more spectators.
And the cool stuff.
When I noticed that something cool wasgoing on is because there is this female
chimpanzee, her name isJoy, and the baby Jumbo,
she came to observe. Andusually in chimpanzees,
when there is something cool going on,
you notice it immediately because ifthere are group members around somebody or
(13:41):
somebody else, they are comingand they look what's going on.
So your mind must have just been
exploding, like what's going on here?
Did you realize in the moment that theywere catching flies or catching flying
insects?
How could you expect chimpanzees catchinginsects and putting them into the
(14:03):
wounds? It's like chances zero and funny,
when I came back to campand they observed the video,
I don't know how many times Iwatched it, but so many anyway,
and I asked to the guys, the ecoguides, working with us like,
guys, what do you think?
Do you think it's possible that she caughtsomething and put it into the wound?
(14:25):
And they were like, well,it looks like that. But no,
it's impossible. Impossible.
When something cool happens in the field,
you never know if you'll see it nextweek, four years from now or never again.
In this case,
they had to continue following the chimpswith the hope it might happen again.
(14:46):
In our case, I was very,
very lucky because then afterobserving Susie tending to Sia's
wounds, not even 10 days later,
one of the dominant malesof the group, Freddy,
very well known for his big belly.
He got really badly injuredto his arm, and then voila!
(15:07):
It happened again.
Because they knew whatthey were looking for.
They were able to record theinteraction more closely.
This second video is much clearer andshows big bellied Freddy catching insects
and putting them in his wounds.
So how frequently do the
(15:28):
chimps in your community get injured?
Rekambo, chimpanzees get injuredquite often, mainly due to
intergroup conflicts.
So meaning that basically are malesthat they discuss about females,
they discuss about wounds,
or in some rare occasions they canbe injured by the prey they tend to
(15:50):
kill. So these kind of situations,
they might inflict quite bigwounds like big open legs,
forearms the back,
the back back is one of the mostimportant places for them to
be injured.
Wow.
They are crazy. What I observe every day,
(16:12):
it's individuals taking care of the woundof others that being frequently leaves
supplying insect to the wounds of others,which at first it appears like, okay,
maybe this is not so common,
but I can say after 24months of observation,
this is really, really very common.
(16:32):
Chimps treating each other's woundswith insects is groundbreaking for many
reasons. First, they'reusing insects as medicine,
which is oddly complicated.
But the deeper implicationsof this research lie in the fact that the chimps are
caring for each other. They're potentiallydisplaying pro-social behavior,
which is defined as actions intendedto help others or society without a
(16:54):
direct and immediate benefit to oneself.
Not all species aredemonstrably pro-Social.
Definitively, yes. In humans,in chimpanzees, we are not sure,
and this makes this study very unique.
Usually when researchers test forpro-social tendencies in animals,
they look at whether the animalsshare their food and on that metric,
(17:16):
chimps are not pro-social.
Chimpanzees. They don'tlike sharing their food.
Not even Italians really like it.
But Alessandra's research shows
chimps do help each other, evennon-family members in other ways.
So if they are friends, forexample, and one of the two,
see the other friends like lickingthe tiny wound. Then also the other,
(17:38):
they got interested in that.
Just like how if you fall offyour bike and get scraped up,
a nearby friend might seeyou with a bloody knee and check to see if you're okay
or need a bandaid. Chimps do thesame, and no matter who gets injured,
when one chimp is being treated byanother, there are always onlookers.
A kind of medical theater, if you will.
(18:02):
Watching in chimpanzees isa very important moment.
This is how they learnis the same as in humans.
When something cool is happeningor we want to learn something,
watching is one of thebest ways of doing it.
And when then they start imitating others,
they start maybe sometimes selectingthe wrong insects and they put
(18:25):
not the right one into the wounds,
or sometimes they put it onstuff that is not the wound.
And then slowly you notice anincreasing in frequency of the behavior,
and also it becomes extremely precise.
But sometimes they domore than just watch.
Alessandra witnessed young chimps activelyget involved in the healing processes
(18:49):
of their injured friends.
Basically when there is blood or dirt,
they take some leaves and then they justclean with the leaves or then adopt the
leaves against the surfacelike a clean towel.
Interesting.
So what does this kind of care sayabout how they relate to each other?
(19:12):
We do know the chimpanzees.
They show behaviors mainly led by
empathy. So for example, wehave apart from wound tending,
we have reports of chimpanzees,
rescue companions from drowning or in very
well known as well in Tai,
we have many reports of thisspecific chimpanzee Freddy,
(19:36):
and he was
mostly adopting orphans and it was sogreat you had these alpha chimpanzees with
everything that was happening around him,
like with babies on hisback, and that is amazing.
So what this can tellus, socially speaking,
I think we can also delve a littlebit more about the cognitive abilities
(20:01):
and also this new ground that we are
starting to define as medical cognition.
So that is something extremelyinteresting because we
now realize that, okay,animals use medicines.
This is very well known,
but what happened when they usemedicine to treat somebody else,
(20:24):
which is so far was thought tobe something exclusive only to
humans. We are currently investigatingthis idea of chimpanzees.
They are treating patients. So.
How do these findings causeyou to rethink notions of
human uniqueness?
(20:46):
Pro socially speaking personally,I don't think that we are unique.
I understand as well thatit might be difficult to
test, but I think that many of us,
we have dogs.
We know that they feel for us,
it's just difficult to scientificallyprove it. So how do we prove it?
(21:09):
Now I have a reallygood way of proving it.
I go in the wild and Iobserve something very cool
without manipulatingthe variables involved.
They just behave as theywant. And me, I document it.
So what does this say abouthow our ancestors might've
(21:29):
cared for one another?
We have reports of caringin pre early humans
already from pre-Neanderthals,
so I'm really not surprisedof observing it in
chimpanzees.
And what this might say is that caringfor others is older than we thought.
(21:50):
What I hope this new research tool to say
to us is maybe to provideus some extra information
about the medicines they use,
which is something that you cannotfind at all in the fossil records.
You have no idea about which kindof medicines they were using,
(22:10):
which kind of knowledge did they have?
That's so cool. There's so manyexciting pathways to follow.
I agree.
Thank you so much forcoming on Origin Stories and
sharing this incredible story with us.
Thanks to you.
(22:34):
Thanks to Alessandra andCaroline for sharing their work.
Check your show notes to learn more andsee videos of Suzee catching flies and
Rakus yelling into the forest.
And thank you again to all of you whohelped us meet our quadruple match goal.
We're so grateful for your support.
Origin Stories is a projectof the Leakey Foundation,
(22:54):
a nonprofit dedicated to funding humanorigins research and sharing discoveries.
Learn more about the LeakeyFoundation or donate to support our
work at leakyfoundation.org.
Support for Origin Stories comes fromlisteners like you with additional support
from the Ann and Gordon GettyFoundation, Camilla and George Smith,
Jeanne Newman, and the Joan andArnold Travis Education Fund.
(23:18):
This episode was produced by me, Ray Pang,
with production helpfrom Meredith Johnson.
Our editors Audrey Quinn andMeredith Johnson is our host.
Theme music by Henry Nagle.
And additional music by BlueDot Sessions and Lee Roservere.
Thanks for listening.
This is Origin Stories, the LeakeyFoundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson.
Before we get to the episode,
I wanted to say thank you so much forall of your support with our matching
fundraiser for Origin Stories.
We were blown away by your generosity,
(00:25):
and we're thrilled to tell you thatthanks to you, we met our goal.
So thank you to Jean Bainbridge,Richard Blanchette, Bernadette Brenkus,
Chinzia De Santis, Robert
(00:48):
Jonas, Amie Kaufmann, Luzie Lenzner,Cahail Mc, Kevin Miller, Charles Musiba,
and 31 other donors whowanted to stay anonymous.
Today on the show we have twostories about medicine. As humans,
we have a vast toolkit of remediesto help ourselves and each other when
we're sick or injured.
(01:08):
We don't know exactly how longwe've been practicing medicine or
what medical care was likefor our ancient ancestors,
but there's plenty of prehistoricevidence of individuals who
survived accidents, bluntforce injuries, broken bones,
and trauma of many kinds.
The earliest evidence is fromabout 1.7 million years ago,
(01:31):
a Homo erectus individualwho had periodontal disease
and infections at the jaw.They lost all their teeth,
but they somehow survived. How? we don'tknow, but in biological anthropology,
when we want to understandthe roots of human behavior,
we look to our ape cousins and it turnsout that our cousins are using medicine.
Origin Stories ProducerRay Pang has our stories.
(01:55):
A
few
months
ago
I
heard
about
a
sumatran
Orangutan
named
Rakus
-
who
was
seen
making
and
smearing
a
peculiar
plant
paste
into
a
fresh
wound
on
his
face.
While
chimps
have
been
documented
using
plant
medicine,
this
is
the
first
known
instance
of
an
orangutan
treating
a
wound
with
plants.
To
learn
more
about
Rakus,
I
called
up
Caroline
Schuppli
-
an
evolutionary
biologist
at
the
Max
Planck
Institute.
(02:19):
Yeah,
rakus is one of the orangutans we haveobserved for many years at our study
site.
(02:41):
Caroline's a Leakey Foundation granteeand director of the SUAQ Balimping
Orangutan Research Project in Sumatra,where she studies how orangutans learn.
The peat swamp forest there has thehighest density of orangutans on earth,
A typical day starts before sunrise sothey can reach the apes before they wake
up.
So we follow the orangutansfrom their morning nests,
so when they leave theirnest in the morning to the point in time when they make
a new nest in the evening.
We have some individuals that like tosnack late into the evenings and those go
to bed at around eight, butmostly it's around six or seven.
(03:03):
I think most of us can relate toan orangutan that likes to snack at
night.
Absolutely.
From morning till night.
Every two minutes they writedown the orangutans asactivities.
How far away it is from otherindividuals. If it's eating,
we write down what it is eating andwhat species, which part of the species.
(03:24):
We usually follow individualsup to 10 days in a row,
and then we give themat least a month break.
Caroline's team was out inthe field conducting their everyday observations when
they saw an orangutan named Rakus doingsomething they'd never seen before.
He's a fully flanged male nowfor three years. Before that,
he was an unflanged male.
(03:45):
In orangutans, males canbe flanged and unflanged.
Flanges are these wide thick fleshypads that grow around a male's face when
they reach full adulthood.
These pads are used to attract matesand to amplify their loud long calls,
a kind of hybrid signal thatmeans, welcome to my land,
and no males allowed
(04:11):
.
One day.
Shortly after he has become a flangedmale and he started to kind of claim a
dominance position in SUAQ.
One day we found him with a big wound inhis face or several wounds in his face.
(04:34):
Ulil
Azhari
and
Armas
Safruddin
are
two
field
assistants
who
work
with
Caroline.
They
were
the
ones
who
first
noticed
Rakus
looked
hurt.
They hardly ever get injured.
They're surprisingly good atpreventing injuries and wounds,
but with this case,
we had actually some signs that Rakuswas kind of challenging the current
(04:58):
dominant male and claiminga dominance position.
And so we believed that the wound stemmedfrom a fight with another flanged male.
Just under his right eye, a large chunkof flesh was missing from his cheek.
The wound was a couple inches wide,but as they kept watching him,
they saw him do something surprising.
And shortly after that he wasseen to chew a plant and smear
(05:21):
the resulting mash of thatplant onto his wounds.
He seemed to deliberately picksome leaves, chew them up,
spit the plant mush into his handand rub it onto his hurt cheek.
The researchers later took a few leavesfrom the plant and brought it back to
camp.
And we realized that this is actuallya plant that's very well known for its
medical properties.
(06:06):
Akar Kuning - a fast growing floweringvine that has long been used in
traditional medicine across Indonesiaand is known to have anti-bacterial,
anti-inflammatory,
anti-fungal and antioxidant properties.Andthe mushed up Akar Kuning leaves
seemed to have a healing effecton Rakus' face. Day by day,
the researchers watched hiswound get smaller and smaller.
And then kind of the significanceof the events started to sink in.
Because we hardly ever find woundedorangutans in our study site it it's
difficult for us to compare thiswound healing to other wound healing,
but from what we can tell,from what we have observed,
there was no signs of infection.
Wow. What was most exciting to youabout this finding and observation?
(06:29):
It was kind of an escalatingexcitement because first of all,
we hardly ever haveinjured orangutans then.
I've never heard of an orangutan walkchewing up a plant and smearing it onto
his wound and then realizing that thisis a plant with medical properties.
It was this gradual but quitequick increase of excitement and
(06:51):
realizing that we're onto something here.
This was the first time a primate hadbeen seen using a medicinal plant that
humans also use.
And for Caroline as an evolutionarybiologist studying how orangutans learn,
she wondered how didRakus learn to do this?
That was of course the firstburning question for us.
(07:13):
The thing that's most interestingfor us, given our research area,
animals can either learn somethingby individual exploration,
so figuring it out themselves or theycan learn it from other individuals.
So that's what we call sociallearning. The question is, which one?
But the problem with the social learningtheory is that orangutans are hardly
(07:33):
ever wounded.
So the likelihood that he observedanother individual being wounded,
which would've most likely been anotherflinched male with him being close by
and observing and realizingwhat he's doing is quite low.
So it's unlikely that Rakuslearned this from mom.
(07:53):
I wouldn't exclude the possibility.
It's just given how rarelyorangutans are injured,
especially mothers or infants,
it's quite unlikely that it happensfrequently enough to really be passed on
from generation to generation.
So in orangutans learning opportunitiesare quite skewed towards the first part
of development.
Then they leave their mothers and theyspend around half of their time on their
(08:16):
own and half of their time withone or two other individuals.
Even though these individualsare significantly less tolerant than their moms,
so they get less time to observe theseindividuals from a close distance.
And then if they're male andthen they become flanged,
they even have less opportunities becauseother males won't interact with them
anymore.
Yeah, exactly. So as unflagged males,especially when they arrive in a new area,
(08:41):
we find loads of evidence that they seekthe presence of residents to learn from
them. But as soon as they transitioninto the flanged mail stadium,
it's quite a solitary lifefor the rest of their lives.
Caroline says,
the other possibility is that Rakusfigured out the leaves have healing
properties all on his own.
(09:03):
You would assume that he somehowrealized while treating this wound or a
previous wound that he sustained,
that chewing up this plantis soothing his pain or
is helping with the healing process.
But it must have been some quiteimmediate effect that he could
connect with the plant. Andthat made him realize, okay,
(09:25):
so maybe if I apply thisplant to my other wounds,
that will make the pain go away as well.
This is what Carolinethinks most likely happened.
Rakus found his way to plant medicinethrough what she calls individual
exploration.
We don't know how much Rakusreally understands that applying this plant to his
wound will make the wound heal better,
(09:46):
but because the plant haspain relieving properties,
we think that that might be the mechanismthat makes them connect the benefits
of applying this plant to the wounds.
The problem with this wound healingis that it's not immediate, right?
So they chew up the plant, they apply it,
and then over the next couple ofdays or weeks, the wound will heal.
(10:08):
But he was only applying theplant material to the wound,
so he wasn't smearing iton any other body part,
but he was really just applying it tohis wound in the face and it lasted for
seven minutes. So itseemed very intentional.
It's pretty incredible to knowthat they could be out here either
knowingly or unknowingly usingsubstances in a way that has a very
(10:33):
delayed gratification.
Yeah, that's theinteresting thing about it,
the delayed gratificationor the delayed effect.
How did they connect this effect tothe action if the action is so rare and
hardly ever performed?
So what do you think theimplications of this finding are?
We
(10:58):
have
to
think
about
what
cognitive
foundation
is
behind
this
behavior.
Since
humans
also
use
plants
to
treat
their
wounds
and
all
kinds
of
medical
conditions,
that
most
likely
the
last
common
ancestor
between
the
non
human
apes
and
the
humans
also
had
the
cognitive
foundation
that
is
needed
to
perform
these
behaviors.We
know
that
ape
relatives
can
use
these
medical
plants,
it
is
highly
likely
that
early,
very
early
humans
could
also
use
medical
plants.The
question
is,
what
is
needed
to
perform
this
behavior?
And
for
this,
I
believe
we
have
to
look
at
what
other
species
can
do
and
what
we
see
in
other
species.
(11:34):
Wow, there's so much goodstuff that we've talked about.
I just want to say thanks again forcoming on the podcast and talking with us.
Thanks, Ray, for having me.
It was a pleasure to talk about ourorangutans and the fancy things that they
can do.
(11:54):
This next story takes us to LuongoNational Park in Gabon and chimpanzees.
As I said before, chimps have beenknown to use plants on wounds.
Alessandra is a PhD student at theUniversity of Osnabruck and back in 2019,
she was conducting field research on theRecambo community - a group of around
35 chimpanzees.
She was studying how group members dealtwith wounds when she recorded a video
of Susie - an adult femalechimpanzee - her adolescent son Sia,
and her young daughter Sassandra.
(12:35):
So I recorded thisvideo in November, 2019,
and this is my first observationof insect application to wounds.
The three family membersare all close together.
Sia appears to have a wound onhis foot. Susie looks concerned.
Susie catches a fly.
She places the fly between her lips andwe can see little Sassandra close to her
(12:58):
attempting to get what Susie has.
And Susie then approaches thefoot of her adolescent son, Sia,
and she applies the fly on awound that Sia had just on his
foot.
And we can see Susie taking backthe fly and reapplying it again.
(13:18):
As she does this, Susiegets some more spectators.
And the cool stuff.
When I noticed that something cool wasgoing on is because there is this female
chimpanzee, her name isJoy, and the baby Jumbo,
she came to observe. Andusually in chimpanzees,
when there is something cool going on,
you notice it immediately because ifthere are group members around somebody or
(13:41):
somebody else, they are comingand they look what's going on.
So your mind must have just been
exploding, like what's going on here?
Did you realize in the moment that theywere catching flies or catching flying
insects?
How could you expect chimpanzees catchinginsects and putting them into the
(14:03):
wounds? It's like chances zero and funny,
when I came back to campand they observed the video,
I don't know how many times Iwatched it, but so many anyway,
and I asked to the guys, the ecoguides, working with us like,
guys, what do you think?
Do you think it's possible that she caughtsomething and put it into the wound?
(14:25):
And they were like, well,it looks like that. But no,
it's impossible. Impossible.
When something cool happens in the field,
you never know if you'll see it nextweek, four years from now or never again.
In this case,
they had to continue following the chimpswith the hope it might happen again.
(14:46):
In our case, I was very,
very lucky because then afterobserving Susie tending to Sia's
wounds, not even 10 days later,
one of the dominant malesof the group, Freddy,
very well known for his big belly.
He got really badly injuredto his arm, and then voila!
(15:07):
It happened again.
Because they knew whatthey were looking for.
They were able to record theinteraction more closely.
This second video is much clearer andshows big bellied Freddy catching insects
and putting them in his wounds.
So how frequently do the
(15:28):
chimps in your community get injured?
Rekambo, chimpanzees get injuredquite often, mainly due to
intergroup conflicts.
So meaning that basically are malesthat they discuss about females,
they discuss about wounds,
or in some rare occasions they canbe injured by the prey they tend to
(15:50):
kill. So these kind of situations,
they might inflict quite bigwounds like big open legs,
forearms the back,
the back back is one of the mostimportant places for them to
be injured.
Wow.
They are crazy. What I observe every day,
(16:12):
it's individuals taking care of the woundof others that being frequently leaves
supplying insect to the wounds of others,which at first it appears like, okay,
maybe this is not so common,
but I can say after 24months of observation,
this is really, really very common.
(16:32):
Chimps treating each other's woundswith insects is groundbreaking for many
reasons. First, they'reusing insects as medicine,
which is oddly complicated.
But the deeper implicationsof this research lie in the fact that the chimps are
caring for each other. They're potentiallydisplaying pro-social behavior,
which is defined as actions intendedto help others or society without a
(16:54):
direct and immediate benefit to oneself.
Not all species aredemonstrably pro-Social.
Definitively, yes. In humans,in chimpanzees, we are not sure,
and this makes this study very unique.
Usually when researchers test forpro-social tendencies in animals,
they look at whether the animalsshare their food and on that metric,
(17:16):
chimps are not pro-social.
Chimpanzees. They don'tlike sharing their food.
Not even Italians really like it.
But Alessandra's research shows
chimps do help each other, evennon-family members in other ways.
So if they are friends, forexample, and one of the two,
see the other friends like lickingthe tiny wound. Then also the other,
(17:38):
they got interested in that.
Just like how if you fall offyour bike and get scraped up,
a nearby friend might seeyou with a bloody knee and check to see if you're okay
or need a bandaid. Chimps do thesame, and no matter who gets injured,
when one chimp is being treated byanother, there are always onlookers.
A kind of medical theater, if you will.
(18:02):
Watching in chimpanzees isa very important moment.
This is how they learnis the same as in humans.
When something cool is happeningor we want to learn something,
watching is one of thebest ways of doing it.
And when then they start imitating others,
they start maybe sometimes selectingthe wrong insects and they put
(18:25):
not the right one into the wounds,
or sometimes they put it onstuff that is not the wound.
And then slowly you notice anincreasing in frequency of the behavior,
and also it becomes extremely precise.
But sometimes they domore than just watch.
Alessandra witnessed young chimps activelyget involved in the healing processes
(18:49):
of their injured friends.
Basically when there is blood or dirt,
they take some leaves and then they justclean with the leaves or then adopt the
leaves against the surfacelike a clean towel.
Interesting.
So what does this kind of care sayabout how they relate to each other?
(19:12):
We do know the chimpanzees.
They show behaviors mainly led by
empathy. So for example, wehave apart from wound tending,
we have reports of chimpanzees,
rescue companions from drowning or in very
well known as well in Tai,
we have many reports of thisspecific chimpanzee Freddy,
(19:36):
and he was
mostly adopting orphans and it was sogreat you had these alpha chimpanzees with
everything that was happening around him,
like with babies on hisback, and that is amazing.
So what this can tellus, socially speaking,
I think we can also delve a littlebit more about the cognitive abilities
(20:01):
and also this new ground that we are
starting to define as medical cognition.
So that is something extremelyinteresting because we
now realize that, okay,animals use medicines.
This is very well known,
but what happened when they usemedicine to treat somebody else,
(20:24):
which is so far was thought tobe something exclusive only to
humans. We are currently investigatingthis idea of chimpanzees.
They are treating patients. So.
How do these findings causeyou to rethink notions of
human uniqueness?
(20:46):
Pro socially speaking personally,I don't think that we are unique.
I understand as well thatit might be difficult to
test, but I think that many of us,
we have dogs.
We know that they feel for us,
it's just difficult to scientificallyprove it. So how do we prove it?
(21:09):
Now I have a reallygood way of proving it.
I go in the wild and Iobserve something very cool
without manipulatingthe variables involved.
They just behave as theywant. And me, I document it.
So what does this say abouthow our ancestors might've
(21:29):
cared for one another?
We have reports of caringin pre early humans
already from pre-Neanderthals,
so I'm really not surprisedof observing it in
chimpanzees.
And what this might say is that caringfor others is older than we thought.
(21:50):
What I hope this new research tool to say
to us is maybe to provideus some extra information
about the medicines they use,
which is something that you cannotfind at all in the fossil records.
You have no idea about which kindof medicines they were using,
(22:10):
which kind of knowledge did they have?
That's so cool. There's so manyexciting pathways to follow.
I agree.
Thank you so much forcoming on Origin Stories and
sharing this incredible story with us.
Thanks to you.
(22:34):
Thanks to Alessandra andCaroline for sharing their work.
Check your show notes to learn more andsee videos of Suzee catching flies and
Rakus yelling into the forest.
And thank you again to all of you whohelped us meet our quadruple match goal.
We're so grateful for your support.
Origin Stories is a projectof the Leakey Foundation,
(22:54):
a nonprofit dedicated to funding humanorigins research and sharing discoveries.
Learn more about the LeakeyFoundation or donate to support our
work at leakyfoundation.org.
Support for Origin Stories comes fromlisteners like you with additional support
from the Ann and Gordon GettyFoundation, Camilla and George Smith,
Jeanne Newman, and the Joan andArnold Travis Education Fund.
(23:18):
This episode was produced by me, Ray Pang,
with production helpfrom Meredith Johnson.
Our editors Audrey Quinn andMeredith Johnson is our host.
Theme music by Henry Nagle.
And additional music by BlueDot Sessions and Lee Roservere.
Thanks for listening.
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