Cameron, Clegg and...chimps?

An interesting article from Anjana Ahuja of the TimesOnline.co.uk website's Eureka Zone section on British Politics and how our common ancestors with Chimpanzee's have been doing the same thing for millions of years.

By bringing their two tribes together, David Cameron and Nick Clegg are hardly making history. They might be partners in the first coalition government that Britain has seen for 65 years but they are, in fact, practising a behaviour that dates back more than five million years.

It was mainly thanks to the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal that psychologists discovered that people don't have the monopoly on forming coalitions. His pioneering observations at Arnhem Zoo, summarised in his 1982 classic Chimpanzee Politics, showed that chimpanzees can be as artful as politicians in orchestrating tactical partnerships and strategic alliances. This has led primatologists and others to conclude that the ability to form coalitions goes back at least as far as the common ancestor of humans and chimps, giving it a provenance of five to seven million years.

In hierarchical chimp colonies, governed by an alpha male, lower-ranking males sometimes gang up to depose the alpha. In fact, these colonies often form a landscape of constantly shifting alliances, with deposed alphas returning later to seize the throne once more. Interestingly, female chimps also form their own alliances to keep overly domineering male counterparts in check, and sometimes to aid the underdog as the colony reconfigures itself

Read the Article