The dense green canopy of the Gombe Stream Reserve in Tanzania rustled with the sounds of a revolution in anthropology. Through her binoculars, a young Jane Goodall watched a male chimpanzee holding a small, pink object. He pulled pieces off with his teeth, periodically chewing fresh leaves alongside the flesh. Nearby, a female and a juvenile eagerly reached toward his mouth, begging for a share. This was the precise moment the scientific community realized that chimpanzees, long thought to be strict herbivores, actually consume meat.
This Gombe discovery shattered the comforting myth of the entirely peaceful, plant-eating ape. Observers soon documented chimpanzees working in coordinated groups to hunt down red colobus monkeys, bushbucks, and young baboons. The hunts were far from mindless frenzies. They required foresight, planning, and alert observation. Chimpanzees would quietly station themselves near trees that served as escape routes, closing in on their victims like a disciplined tactical unit. Once a catch was made, the spoils were shared or kept by the killer, consumed slowly alongside wads of leaves, with the brain prized as a special delicacy.
Yet, does this hunting behavior make our closest relatives true carnivores? Biological evidence suggests otherwise. A genuine carnivore is built for the chase and the kill, equipped with articulated claws, sharp night vision, and a skin without pores. Their digestive tracts are short, measuring only about three times their body length, to quickly expel rotting flesh. Chimpanzees possess none of these traits. They lack claws, they sweat through their skin, and they have long, complex digestive systems designed for the slow fermentation of plant matter. Their teeth and jaws remain perfectly suited for grinding vegetation, not ripping raw flesh. When these arboreal creatures began spending more time on the ground, animal proteins became accessible, but they never altered the fundamental evolutionary design of the primate body.
To understand the true place of meat in the chimpanzee diet, we must look past the sensational headlines of the hunt and examine the numbers. During a ten-year study of a Gombe group of about fifty chimpanzees, researchers recorded ninety-five mammalian kills. This sounds impressive until you look at the size of the prey. Chimpanzees rarely target animals weighing more than twenty pounds, focusing instead on infants and juveniles.
When anthropologist John Hawthorn calculated the actual nutritional intake from these Gombe figures, the results were striking. The total yield averages out to roughly 2.4 grams of meat per chimpanzee per day, which translates to less than a single gram of animal protein. In comparison, a typical human in the United Kingdom consumes about thirty grams of animal protein daily. For the chimpanzees of Gombe, meat is a tiny, sporadic supplement rather than a dietary staple. The vast majority of their daily sustenance comes from fruits, seeds, nuts, and leaves.
If meat is so nutritionally insignificant, why do chimpanzees hunt at all? Historians and anthropologists suggest that the activity may serve a social rather than a physical function. Scholar Peter Wilson proposed that hunting among chimpanzees arises more from social stress than from nutritional necessity. The cooperative chase and the subsequent sharing of the kill may serve as a powerful mechanism to allay tension and build political alliances within the group.
When chimpanzees do seek animal protein, they often turn to much smaller, less dramatic sources. Insects like termites, beetles, and cicadas are highly sought-after delicacies. Chimpanzees will carefully craft sticks to go fishing in termite mounds, showcasing remarkable problem-solving skills. They also enjoy fruits containing weevils and other insect larvae. Some South American monkeys are known to open infested figs specifically to eat the sweet larvae inside, discarding the fruit itself. These insect-eating habits resemble a preference for sweetness rather than a drive for mammalian flesh.
Ultimately, the Gombe discoveries do not prove that our hominid ancestors were naturally born killers. Instead, they demonstrate the profound behavioral flexibility of primates. Chimpanzees are highly intelligent, opportunistic omnivores capable of choosing their path when the environment demands it. While they possess the tactical capability to hunt and kill, their bodies and their daily lives remain firmly anchored in a vegetarian heritage. Meat-eating was a late, rare addition to the primate story, and it remains a minor footnote in the grand history of our ancestral diet.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Vegetarianism: A History
- Subtitle: A History
- Author: Colin Spencer
- Publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows (New York/London)
- Publication Year: 2002 (First Four Walls Eight Windows printing; originally published as The Heretic’s Feast by Fourth Estate, London, 1993; revised and published as Vegetarianism by Grub Street, London, 2000)
- Edition: Second Edition (Revised and updated)
- ISBN: 1-56858-238-2 (hc.)
- Historical Period Covered: Prehistory (Miocene epoch, 24 million years ago) to the early 21st century (circa 2002)
- Main Subject Areas: History of Vegetarianism, Evolutionary Anthropology, Classical Philosophy, Comparative Religion, Christian Heresy and Sectarianism, History of Science and Medicine, Social Reform Movements, Environmental and Animal Rights History
(Chapter 1)