An absolutely fascinating discovery – chimps using purpose-made spears for hunting – and it is mostly the females that do it.

The researchers say spear use in Fongoli is performed almost exclusively by females and youngsters. In spite of the fact that the researchers were concentrating on male behaviour during their study, they saw only one attempt at spear-making by an adult male out of a total of 22 episodes.
“[This] strengthens the case that in all likelihood the origins of technology [in humans] were with females,” says McGrew.
…Pruetz says females and youngsters are forced to innovate to get protein for their diets… “The females and maybe the young males too are basically having to solve problems in a creative way because of competition with adult males,” she says. “That may be by technology, and not by brute strength or force.”

This is a population, in Senegal, that is only just starting to be studied, and is displaying lots of cultural traits not seen in chimps who live in more comfortable circumstances. They also use caves as dwelling places, and have “swimming pools”.

There’s been angst in Britain recently about the problem of regulating IVF – how do you balance patients’ frequent desperation to have a child, the health risks they may be running for themselves and, even more morally problematic, for the possible child-to-be, and the frequently exceedingly high costs to society.

Now it is going further – doctors in the US are contemplating a womb transplant.

Now kidney transplants, liver transplants, even, perhaps, heart transplants; they are all morally unproblematic so far as I’m concerned. Without them, the patients are highly likely to die. They choose for understandable reasons to take the significant medical risks (the operation, the continuing immune-suppression drugs etc) in the hope of many years of relatively healthy life.

But what of a woman who is entirely healthy but happens not to have a functional uterus for one reason or another? Should she be allowed to subject herself to two major operations (the implanting of the donor organ, and its later planned removal), the potential, largely unknown risks to any foetus being developed in that womb, and the huge cost – all so she can bear a child herself, when she has many other opportunities – adoption, even surrogacy?

I think not. And perhaps that final argument is the strongest. How many lives of women could that cash save?

On Radio Four’s PM tonight, there was an item about the first anniversary of the inauguration of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, Africa’s first female head of state. It focused on her campaign against rape, and its notable lack of success.

At the account’s centre was the story of an 11-year-old who died many months after a rape in which she had probably suffered an abdominal fistula due to its violence. (An outcome of rape on which I had written elsewhere.)

How much cash would have paid for treatment to save her life: £100 would probably have done it. You’d get a lot of such treatments for the cost of one uterus transplant…

(A report on the problem of rape in Liberia. (Some may find this account traumatic.)