Latest Chimpanzee Stories

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...

While both humans and chimpanzees start out life with key portions of their brains underdeveloped, the rapid growth in these cognitive and decision-making areas that occur in human children are not characteristic of young chimps, a new study has discovered.According to Sindya N. Bhanoo of the New York Times, researchers from Kyoto University in Japan discovered that both species "start out with undeveloped forebrains" but that "the human brain increases in volume much more...

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),...

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...

Chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, do not experience a decrease in brain volume as they age like humans do, according to a study by George Washington University researcher Chet Sherwood and his colleagues. Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) July 25, 2011 Chimpanzees, the closest living relatives to humans, do not experience a decrease in brain volume as they age like humans do, according to a study by George Washington University researcher Chet Sherwood and his colleagues. There...

Children as young as three years of age share toy rewards equally with a peer, but only when both collaborated in order to gain themKatharina Hamann with an international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, Harvard University and the Michigan State University found that sharing in children that young is a pure collaborative phenomenon: when kids received rewards not cooperatively but as a windfall, or worked individually next to...

How influential are mass media portrayals of chimpanzees in television, movies, advertisements and greeting cards on public perceptions of this endangered species? That is what researchers based at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo sought to uncover in a new nationwide study published in PLoS ONE, an open-access scientific journal. Their findings reveal the potential role that media plays in creating widespread misunderstandings about the conservation status and nature of this great ape.Study...

A Connecticut woman who was mauled more than two years ago has received a new face, the third full face transplant to be performed in the United States.Charla Nash, 57, was attacked by a friend's 200-pound chimpanzee in February 2009. Travis the chimpanzee went berserk and ripped off Nash's hands, nose, lips and eyelids before police shot and killed it.The mauling left Nash blind and she has only been able to take in pureed food through the small opening that was left of what used to be her...

A study released today gives insight into the evolutionary origins of consciousness. Researchers have long understood that chimpanzees are self-aware and can anticipate the impact of their actions on the environment around them, AFP is reporting. An ability once assumed to be uniquely human, several species of primates and dolphins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror, which would suggest a sophisticated self-awareness. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal...