John Flynn, André Wyss, John Finarelli, and Karen Sears have been studying the brains of the ancestors of modern Neotropical primates and their early Old World fossil simian counterparts. They were able to determine that the brains of platyrrhines of the Americas were as small as those of the catarrhines of Africa and Eurasia, which [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Anthropology’
May 5, 2008
Novel Tool-Use observed in a wild Chimpanzee from Bossou, Guinea
Even though I’ve been posting a lot on tool use lately, I’m sure you will appreciate this new study. The new study, “Invention and modification of a new tool use behavior: ant-fishing in trees by a wild chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) at Bossou, Guinea,” has been published in the most recent issue of the American [...]
April 29, 2008
Orangutan from Borneo photographed using a spear tool to fish
Tool use among orangutans was first documented by Carel van Schaik. In 1994, Carel observed orangutans developing tools to help themselves eat, while conducting field work in Gunung Leuser National Park, in the northwest Sumatra.
Specifically the orangutans [...]
November 17, 2007
Nakalipithecus nakayamai, a Miocene Ape from Kenya
The collective understanding of Miocene African primate evolution, especially ape evolution, is generally unfounded. Why? Because the fossil record is spotty, there are only a handful of primates from the Miocene. The Miocene lasted from 23.8 to 5.3 million years ago, and a lot of interesting things happened in the ape lineage during that time. [...]
November 14, 2007
Alternative Splicing in Humans & Chimps
I could swear that in the past I had covered news that the minute genetic and massive phenotypic differences between humans and chimpanzees are due to the alternative splicing. But I can’t seem to find the post at all… there maybe a slight chance I didn’t post about it but I’m pretty sure I did [...]
November 13, 2007
A New African Miocene Ape: Nakalipithecus nakayamai
In August, 2007 Gen Suwa and crew reported on a new Ethiopian Miocene Ape, Chororapithecus abyssinicus. And today, Kenyan and Japanese paleoanthropologists have published their study of a fragment of a mandible and 11 teeth, dating back to between 9.8 and 9.88 million years, which was found 2005.
The fossils were unearthed in volcanic mud flow [...]
October 30, 2007
Boing Boing on similarities between chimps and humans
Boing Boing is on fire, first they post on Bill Bass and now they post on a new study from Smithsonian which reviews the,
“traits that [chimpanzees and humans] share, like altruism and vengeance, and those we don’t, like spite and most social learning skills, are shedding light on what it means to be human.”
So check out the article, “Animal Insight.” [...]
October 6, 2007
Bonobo Tool Use
Vannessa Woods just broke some awesome news of bonobos using tools. From her blog, Bonobo Handshake,
“The bonobos at Lola use tools. It’s really amazing because no one’s seen tool use in bonobos in the wild before (I don’t think).And everyone’s always going on about chimps using tools and how it’s so amazing because everyone used [...]
August 26, 2007
A More Thorough Reading of the Chororapithecus abyssinicus paper
Thanks to Afarensis, I got my hands on Chororapithecus abyssinicus paper, “A new species of great ape from the late Miocene epoch in Ethiopia,” and I have read it. A lot of things have been clarified, such as my misunderstanding that the nine teeth were from one individual. The nine teeth are from at least [...]
August 23, 2007
Nine teeth is all it takes to declare a new species of Great Ape
A new Nature paper announces a new species of Miocene great ape, Chororapithecus abyssinicus, and both the press and the blogosphere are having a field day with this publication. From our neck of the woods, Afarensis, P.Z. Myers and John Hawks have commented on the paper and from the press Jay Kelly, Peter Andrews, and [...]
