14 DAY TRIAL // Wildlife researchers in The Netherlands say that, according to their investigations, orphaned chimps have fairly poor social skills.
More precisely, it looks like, whenever they try to play with others of their kind, baby chimps that have never had a mom by their side don't take long to turn aggressive.
Hence the fact that their play dates don't last all that long.
“Orphaned chimpanzees had more difficulties to successfully coordinate their social play interactions.”
“Although the orphaned chimps were motivated to play, it seems that they were less able to coordinate their play bouts and prevent them from resulting in aggression,” researcher Edwin van Leeuwen explains, as cited by EurekAlert.
The researchers suspect that orphaned chimpanzees have issues interacting with others due to the fact that they did not have a mom to teach them how to act in social contexts and make friends.
This means that, much like in the case of humans, mother chimps are the ones responsible for fostering social skills in their offspring.
“Since social play comprises a complex context in which signals about intentions need to be communicated, it seems that orphaned chimpanzees have missed out on valuable lessons from their mothers,” Edwin van Leeuwen argues.