These low-risk tactics are adopted in conditions of numerical superiority, maximizing the benefits and minimizing the costs of out-group conflicts. In premodern warfare involving small-scale group conflicts, humans take collective decisions to adopt risk-reduction tactics, such as ambushes and raids into the enemies’ territory. These adaptations can take the form of territorial tactics, minimizing the risk imposed by rivals and expressed through adaptive flexible behaviors in the face of intergroup competition. From an evolutionary perspective, adaptations reducing these costs and increasing competitiveness are expected. Intergroup competition in territorial social species incurs costs to individuals, such as loss of feeding and breeding opportunities, increased risk of injuries, and death. Then you will be able to fight with advantage”–Sun Tzu “Be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots (…). Generalized linear mixed-effects model LRT, The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Research at the Taï Chimpanzee Project has been funded by the Max Planck Society since 1997. were supported by the Max Planck Society. was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: C.C. Received: SeptemAccepted: SeptemPublished: November 2, 2023Ĭopyright: © 2023 Lemoine et al. PLoS Biol 21(11):Īcademic Editor: Sarah Frances Brosnan, Georgia State University, UNITED STATES We advocate territorial contexts as a key paradigm for unpicking complex animal cognition.Ĭitation: Lemoine SRT, Samuni L, Crockford C, Wittig RM (2023) Chimpanzees make tactical use of high elevation in territorial contexts. Landscape use during territorial maneuvers in natural contexts suggests chimpanzees seek otherwise inaccessible information to adjust their behavior and points to the use of sophisticated cognitive abilities, commensurate with selection for cognition in species where individuals gain benefits from coordinated territorial defense. Our results support the idea that elevation use facilitated rival information gathering and appropriate tactical maneuvers. Upon leaving hills, movement decisions conformed with lowest risk engagement, indicating that higher elevation facilitates the detection of rivals presence or absence. Once on border hills, chimpanzees favor activities that facilitate information gathering about rivals. We show that chimpanzees are more likely to use high hills when traveling to, rather than away from, the border where conflict typically takes place. With a unique dataset of 3 years of simultaneous behavioral and ranging data on 2 neighboring groups of western chimpanzees, from the Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, we tested whether chimpanzees make decisions consistent with tactical use of topography to gain an advantage over rivals. Whether other animals use such tactics is unknown. This enables early detection of rivals and low-risk maneuvers, based on information gathered. One such tactic, considered unique to humans, is collective use of high elevation in territorial conflicts. Tactical warfare is considered a driver of the evolution of human cognition.
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