Planet of the Apes: Wing Bowlers: So disciplined

Anyone doubting our evolutionary tie to other apes should check out that Philadelphia festival of food and fun known as Wing Bowl. The annual event has some striking parallels to behavior outlined in the article "Chimpanzee Hunting Behavior and Human Evolution," which appeared in the magazine American Scientist.

Chimpanzees sometimes "go on hunting binges, in which they kill a large number of monkeys and other animals over a period of several days or weeks," the article states. The hunting is done mostly by males, though there are a few female hunters and the party is joined by many other females in estrus (heat), who help turn the event into an orgy of sex and monkey eating.

Wing Bowl, which will take place Friday, has much in common with this chimpanzee ritual, except the monkeys are replaced by prekilled chicken wings, and the abundantly fertile females may just be advertising, not delivering.

Beneath the surface, however, there is an essential difference: Top competitors engage in eating feats that push the outer limits of the human body's capacity, some consuming more than 200 wings within 30 minutes.

From an evolutionary perspective, Wing Bowl, despite its Animal House atmosphere, highlights something uniquely human: The discipline on display here may represent part of what sets our species apart from other animals in our artistic and technological achievements.

The top competitors in Wing Bowl are experienced speed-eating champions, many of them experts at downing hot dogs, hamburgers, eggs, and tacos. Speed eating so fascinated gastroenterologist David Metz that in 2007 he asked one of these champs to perform in his University of Pennsylvania laboratory after swallowing a barium tracer.

Then Ed "Cookie" Jarvis, 29, was compared to a "control" - a normal but big guy with a healthy appetite, who ate seven hot dogs and promptly felt sick.

Jarvis, who was 5 feet, 10 inches and then weighed a fit 165 pounds, "consumed two hot dogs at a time to facilitate rapid ingestion," Metz wrote in a paper published in the American Journal of Roentgenology. "At 10 minutes, the speed eater had eaten a total of 36 hot dogs. His stomach now appeared as a massively distended, food-filled sac occupying most of the upper abdomen." From the outside, Metz wrote, Jarvis looked pregnant. Over the speed eater's objections, the gastroenterologist stopped the test, afraid something might burst.