Latest Apes Stories
Sharing food has widely been considered by scholars as a defining characteristic of human behavior. But a new study by Iowa State University anthropology professor Jill Pruetz now reports that chimpanzees from her Fongoli research site in Senegal also frequently share food and hunting tools with other chimps. Co-authored by ISU anthropology graduate student Stacy Lindshield, their study is posted online in Primates and will be published in a future issue of the journal. The researchers...
Playful behavior of young chimps develops like that of children Playful behavior is widespread in mammals, and has important developmental consequences. A recent study of young chimpanzees shows that these animals play and develop much the same way as human children. The work, to be published in the Nov. 16 issue of the online journal PLoS ONE, can therefore also shed light on the role of human play behavior. The authors of the study, Elisabetta Palagi and Giada Cordoni, of the...
Culture is not a trait that is unique to humans. By studying orangutan populations, a team of researchers headed by anthropologist Michael Krützen from the University of Zurich has demonstrated that great apes also have the ability to learn socially and pass them down through a great many generations. The researchers provide the first evidence that culture in humans and great apes has the same evolutionary roots, thus answering the contentious question as to whether variation in behavioral...
Human children are more likely than chimpanzees to collaborate when solving problems, according to a new European study. The researchers compared the responses of 3-year-old children in Germany with semi-free-ranging chimpanzees in a sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and found that the children preferred to perform a task collaboratively rather than alone, while the chimpanzees showed no such preference. Human children begin very early to recognize the need for help,...
Television ads featuring cute chimpanzees wearing human clothes are likely to distort the public's perception of the endangered animals and hinder conservation efforts, according to a team of primatologists and a marketing professor at Duke University. The researchers showed 165 study participants three different collections of television ads for products like toothpaste and soft drinks and then surveyed them to see whether attitudes toward conservation changed. One group saw a serious...
Although humans and chimpanzees move quite differently, muscle attachment sites at their thighbones are similar. This result, which has recently been published by anthropologists of Zurich University in the scientific journal "Anatomical Record", has major consequences for the interpretation of fossil hominin finds. PhD student Naoki Morimoto, member of the Computer-Assisted Paleoanthropology group of Ch. Zollikofer and M. Ponce de León, and junior author of the study, was surprised by...
According to a new study, the first ancestor of modern humans to master the art of cooking was homo erectus. Harvard University researchers said that the ability to cook and process food allowed homo erectus, the Neanderthals and homo sapiens to make huge evolutionary leaps that differentiated them from chimpanzees and other primates. The scientists back-up claims by previous studies that suggest homo erectus may have known how to cook. They based their results on an analysis of...
Scientists, wondering for years how long ago our so-called prosocial behavior evolved, have recently found that chimpanzees also have a significant favoritism for prosocial behavior, which is in contrast to previous studies that positioned chimps as reluctant altruists that led to the widely held belief that human altruism evolved in the last six million years only after humans split from apes. In a new paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS),...
With the aim of better protecting endangered species, game wardens are studying the behavior of surviving great apes in the wild. This is often painstaking work because it is difficult to distinguish between different individuals. A new software system will make things easier by analyzing the animals' faces for individual identification.The pictures from the video trap are highly encouraging. A strong young male gorilla appears several times "“ in a tree, moving through the forest, at a...
Researchers say that evolution of human longevity led to both a large brain and brain shrinkage. A team of researchers sought to find out if a chimpanzee brain shrinks as much as a human's brain does with old age. Chet Sherwood, an anthropologist at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and a team of scientists from seven other U.S. universities used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure the space occupied by various brain structures in adult humans and chimpanzee. They...
Latest Apes Reference Libraries
The Siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus), is an arboreal gibbon native to the forests of Malaysia, Thailand, and Sumatra. Its range overlaps with the Lar Gibbon and Agile Gibbon. While the illegal pet trade takes a toll on wild populations, the principal threat to Siamang is habitat loss in both Malaysia and Sumatra. Palm oil production is clearing large swathes of forest, reducing Siamang habitat, along with other species such as the Sumatran Tiger. The Siamang can be twice the size as...
The bonobo (Pan paniscus), until recently is usually called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often the dwarf or gracile chimpanzee. It is one of the two species of chimpanzees. Physical characteristics Its head is smaller than that of the Common Chimpanzee but has a higher forehead. It has a black face with pink lips, small ears, wide nostrils, and long hair on its head. Females have slightly prominent breasts in contrast to the flat breasts of other female apes, though not as prominent...
The common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), also known as the robust chimpanzee, is a great ape. Basic facts Common chimpanzees are found in the tropical forests and wet savannas of Western and Central Africa. They once inhabited most of this region, but their habitat has been dramatically reduced in recent years. Adults in the wild weigh between 88 and 143 lbs (40 and 65 kg). Males can measure up to 63 inches (160 cm) and females up to 51 inches (130 cm). They are lighter than humans...
The Sumatran orangutan (Pongo abelii) is the least common of the two species of orangutans. It lives on the Sumatra island of Indonesia. They are smaller than the Bornean orangutan. Baby Sumatran orangutans are often poached as highly prized Zoo Inhabitants. The poachers often kill the baby's mother for no apparent reason. The Sumatran Orangutan is only found north of Lake Toba.
The Bornean orangutan, Pongo pygmaeus is a species of orangutan native to the island of Borneo. It is slightly larger than the other species of orangutan, the Sumatran orangutan. The Bornean orangutan is more common than the Sumatran, with about 45,000 individuals existing in the wild. There are only about 7,500 of the Sumatran species left in the wild. Orangutans are becoming increasingly endangered due to habitat destruction. Many orangutans are killed so that their babies can be captured...
