Apes
dr. dolittle | December 13, 2016... or any other human language for that matter. Even though both monkeys and humans have the anatomical tools for speech, only humans communicate in this manner. Researchers had assumed, incorrectly, that the anatomy of the vocal tract (lips, tongue, larynx) of monkeys was not capable of producing speech. A new study published in Science Advances shows instead that it is all in our heads.
The researchers came to this conclusion after creating x-ray videos of macaques making sounds and eating. They used these videos to create computer models that could translate the movements they observed in…
gregladen | July 7, 2011Behaviors are not caused by genes. There is not a gene that causes you to be good, or to be bad, or to be smart, or good at accounting, or to like bananas. There are, however, drives. "Drives" is a nicely vague term that we can all understand the meaning of. Thirst and hunger are drives we can all relate to. In fact, these drives are so basic, consistent and powerful that almost everyone has them, we share almost exact experiences in relation to them, and they can drive (as drives are wont to do) us to do extreme things when they are not met for long periods of time. While eating…
gregladen | March 22, 2011With never-before-seen video, primatologist Isabel Behncke Izquierdo (a TED Fellow) shows how bonobo ape society learns from constantly playing -- solo, with friends, even as a prelude to sex. Indeed, play appears to be the bonobos' key to problem-solving and avoiding conflict. If it works for our close cousins, why not for us?
gregladen | August 12, 2010I know Marc Hauser, and I trust him. I worked with him for a few years as a colleague on the faculty in the Anthropology department on various administrative matters (such as graduate admission and undergraduate program development) and we taught together. We are very different kinds of people, and did not always see eye to eye (well, we disagreed on one thing, once), but the same can be said of almost any two people from those days and that department, to some degree.
I've just heard about the "investigation" into his lab and the retraction of, so far, one paper produced in that lab…
gregladen | August 11, 2010The newly reported Saadanius hijazensis may or may not be a "missing link" but in order for this monkey to climb onto the primate family tree, a new branch had to be sprouted. So, not only is Saadanius hijazensis a new species, but it is a member of a new taxonomic Family, Saadaniidae, which in turn is a member of a new Superfamily, Saadanioidea. Why is this important? It's complicated. But not too complicated.
The fossil was found while University of Michigan paleontologist Iyad Zalmout was busy looking for dinosaur fossils in western Saudi Arabia. He found the monkey, from a much…
gregladen | June 25, 2010Is it a Falsehood that Humans Evolve from Apes?
How about this one: Is it a Falsehood that Humans did NOT evolve from Apes????
Yes and no. Humans descend from a population of primates from which other apes also descended (minimally the two species of living chimps) and which was part of the panoply of late Miocene forms, all related to each other, that we call apes. So yes, humans evolved from apes.
There are people who don't believe that. They, creationists, think that apes are apes and humans came from somewhere else, like the Garden of Eden or Mud or whatever. (This may depend on…
gregladen | January 4, 2010I had mentioned earlier that the volcanoes of the Virugna region in the Western Rift Valley (as well as other highland spots) have often been islands of rain forest separated from each other by different habitats, including grasslands and wooded savannas. this has produced an island effect that has been a laboratory for evolution, and it is likely that these forest islands (and others in the greater region of east Central Africa and western East Africa) have been the loci of evolution of many endemic species. (See Island Africa: The Evolution of Africa's Rare Animals and Plants by Kingdon…
gregladen | August 28, 2009This is another falsehood, but a tricky one. Remember the point of falsehoods: They are statements that are typically associated with meanings or implications that are misleading or incorrect, and in some cases downright damaging. "Humans evolved from apes" is an excellent example of a falsehood because it is technically correct, yet the implied meanings that arise from it are potentially wrong. Even more importantly, you can't really analyze the statement "Humans evolved from apes" without getting into an extended analysis and discussion of what an ape is and what a human is.
When…
edyong | May 9, 2009
Immunity to viral infections sounds like a good thing, but it can come at a price. Millions of years ago, we evolved resistance to a virus that plagued other primates. Today, that virus is extinct, but our resistance to it may be making us more vulnerable to the present threat of HIV.
Many extinct viruses are not completely gone. Some members of a group called retroviruses insinuated themselves into our DNA and became a part of our genetic code. Indeed, a large proportion of the genomes of all primates consists of the embedded remnants of ancient viruses. Looking at these remnants is like…
gregladen | February 16, 2009The incident just reported an hour or so ago is unusual, but not unexpected or unheard of.
A 200-pound chimpanzee kept as a pet and once used in commercials was shot and killed by police Monday after it mauled a woman visiting its owner and later cornered an officer in his cruiser, authorities said.
Stamford police Lt. Richard Conklin said the injured woman was hospitalized late Monday in "very serious" condition at Stamford Hospital; her identity was not immediately released. Conklin said she suffered "a tremendous loss of blood" from serious facial injuries.
source
gregladen | February 12, 2009Or not.
Much is made of the early use of stone tools by human ancestors. Darwin saw the freeing of the hands ad co-evolving with the use of the hands to make and use tools which co-evolved with the big brain. And that would make the initial appearance of stone tools in the archaeological record a great and momentous thing. However, things did not work out that way.
It turns out that up-rightedness (bipedalism), which would free the hands, evolved in our ancestors a very long time (millions of years) prior to our first record of stone tools. The earliest upright hominids that are…
gregladen | February 12, 2009And hominids.
We know the fossil record underestimates diversity at least a little, and we know that forested environments in Africa tend to be underrepresented. Given this, the diversity of Miocene apes may have been rather impressive, because there is a fairly high diversity in what we can assume is a biased record.
But I'd like to make the argument from another angle, that of modern ecological analogues. Let us assume that the greater apparent diversity of apes in the middle and late Miocene compared today can be accurately translated as a modern reduction in ape diversity. Not…
gregladen | April 25, 2008The world's rarest great ape has found a safe haven in the mountains of the west central African nation of Cameroon. With guidance from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), Cameroon's prime minister, Ephraim Inoni, has created the world's first sanctuary exclusively for the Cross River gorilla.
Kagwene Gorilla Sanctuary spans only 19.5 square kilometers but contains an important segment of the Cross River gorilla population. The species' range consists of 11 scattered sites in Cameroon and Nigeria. Of the estimated 300 or fewer Cross River gorillas that remain, approximately 20 live in…
gregladen | April 9, 2008Cheeta, yoiu may not realize this, but it was YOU who got me interested in Africa and Anthropolology! Happy 76th birhday! You don't look a day over 50 or so.
And no, I don't say that to all the chimps, just some of them.
From Wikipedia:
Cheeta aka Jiggs (probably born in 1932) is a male chimpanzee noted for appearing in numerous movies and television shows, most famously many Hollywood Tarzan films of the 1930s and 1940s, in which he portrayed a fictional chimp of the same name. Cheeta was bought from Henry Trefflich, a New York animal importer and dealer. He was born in the wild in…
gregladen | April 6, 2008Charlton Heston, Ben Hur, friend to future apes, Moses, English King, has died at the age of 84.
In the words of Michael Levine, Heston's agent:
"If Hollywood had a Mt. Rushmore, Heston's face would be on it"
Here some footage of Heston getting stoned:
(... and meeting his ape-anthropologist girlfriend ... )
gregladen | February 28, 2008This is a photograph of wild western lowland gorillas copulating in, sort of, the missionary position. This shot was taken in the Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of Congo.
The female gorilla in the photograph, nicknamed "Leah" by researchers, has twice made history. In 2005 Breuer and others observed her using tools--another never-before-seen behavior for her kind in the wild. Leah tested the depth of a pool of water with a stick before wading into it in Mbeli Bai, where researchers have been monitoring the gorilla population since 1995.
"Understanding the behavior of our…
gregladen | February 13, 2008OK, here's a quiz for you. You have a tube that is fixed in space. You cannot move it. It is too small for you to get your hands into it, and there is a peanut in the bottom. You want the peanut. How do you extract the peanut?
Have a look at how this chimp did it:
gregladen | January 25, 2008Remember this post on chimpanzee food sharing? Over a PLoS, where the original paper is published, you can get involved in a discussion of the paper. I posted something over there in response to someone else'
Go have a look, here.
Access to the discussion is on the right side bar.
gregladen | January 21, 2008Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex?
One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized as potentially significant for some time, it was probably the Africanist archaeologist Glynn Isaac who impressed on the academic community the importance of the origins of food sharing as a key evolutionary moment. At that time, food sharing among apes was thought to be very rare, outside of mother-infant dyads. Further research…