Chimps use clay to detox and as a mineral supplement, University of Oxford.(2021) Chimps can’t Cook, but maybe they’d like to, Animals. American Association of Zoos and Aquariums Chimpanzee Species Survival Plan – Husbandry Manual. Fulk, R. In: The care and management of chimpanzees in captive environments. Garland (1992) Nutrition of captive chimpanzees. Available at: (Accessed: April 4, 2023). ( link) Current trends in consumption of animal products – NCBI bookshelf (1988).

(no date) What do chimpanzees eat?, WCF | What they eat.

(1999) “Nutritional characteristics of wild primate foods: Do the diets of our closest living relatives have lessons for us?,” Nutrition, 15(6), pp. Learn more about what food groups are really suitable for humans References Though gut proportions differ, overall gut anatomy and the pattern of digestive kinetics of extant apes and humans are very similar.” K. “Anthropoids, including all great apes, take most of their diet from plants, and there is general consensus that humans come from a strongly herbivorous ancestry. After all, humans and chimpanzees are physiologically so similar that the chimpanzees’ nutritional requirements (for feeding in captivity) were based on human values ( Fulk et al., 1992). Milton in her epic paper from 1999 (visit here). Thus, we should start learning from chimpanzees in the wild, as suggested by K. Examples are the complex hand, loss of Vitamin C production, specialized color-vision, and attraction to fruits. Like chimpanzees and many other primates, humans have distinct adaptations to high-fruit diets. Humans and chimpanzees share many biological traits related to foraging and eating, like the shape of hands, sweet taste receptors, digestion, teeth, metabolic characteristics, and other features that have evolved with specialized fruit-eating: As opposed to us – the animals are smart and stick to nature within their natural habitat! So where can we go from here? Given our remarkable genetic, anatomical, and physiological similarities, it is undoubtedly plausible that we can learn about our diet from chimpanzees. However, this deviation from natural living comes at the price of compromised health because it means moving away from the naturally evolved balance between body biochemistry and natural food chemistry. This is why our food choices are heavily influenced by cultural habits – rather than natural instincts – today. We extensively manipulate nature to create conditions that better suit our needs through cultural adaptation. Changing the taste and texture of foods by cooking and seasoning tricks our instinctual knowledge and turns otherwise untasty, inedible matter into edible and palatable foods. We have overcome the limitations given by our biology with our intelligence and skills to manipulate the environment around us including our food sources: we create new food sources by changing the chemical composition through heating and processing.įor example, grains and legumes are not edible in their natural state. The reason for the disorientation is that we do not live within our original natural habitat. We live so far away from nature that we have gotten to the point where we are unsure about the human diet.

Feeding chimpanzee meme