Klaus Zuberbühler and team published his report of blue monkey vocalizations in the Royal Society’s journal Biology Letters. The paper is titled, “Male blue monkeys alarm call in response to danger experienced by others.” I don’t have access to the journal, nor am I willing to pay $50 for the privileged to read it. If [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Psychology’
July 21, 2008
Current Biology Covers The 60th Anniversary Of The Founding of Primatology in Japan
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of primatology in Japan, thanks to the works of Kinji Imanishi. Current Biology hosts an essay by Tetsuro Matsuzawa and William McGrew, which reviews Imanishi’s contributions to the field. The essay can be found at this link, “Kinji Imanishi and 60 years of Japanese primatology.”
I’m not [...]
April 3, 2008
Frans Lanting on the Fongoli Spear Hunting Chimps
It has been far too long since I’ve updated this blog. I apologize, there certainly has not been a lack of material to share — just a lack of time and overemphasis on Anthropology.net, which is totally my bad, I don’t intend to neglect this site again.
Anyways, photographer Frans Lanting recently travelled to take photos [...]
January 31, 2008
Non-Human Primate Tool Use: Gorillas Weilding Weapons, Macaques & Mirror Neurons
I’m scouring the American Journal of Primatology for a paper on gorillas using tools as weapons in the wild. National Geographic News says the paper is out, but I can’t find it anywhere in the early edition nor in the current issues. I’ll continue looking, but in the mean time here’s what we got to [...]
January 4, 2008
Are you smarter than Ayumu the chimp?
Last month Ayumu and five other chimpanzees made the news because of their outstanding cognitive performance. They even beat out college students in their tests. The results of the study was reported in Current Biology, “Working memory of numerals in chimpanzees.”
If you don’t believe me check out the video of Ayumu rocking the test:
Very impressive [...]
December 28, 2007
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s TED Talk on Bonobos
The following video is a bit dated, it’s from 2004… but still I’m sharing it with you because it is very informative and rare. The video is of Susan Savage-Rumbaugh’s TED talk, in which she presents human traits and behaviors in bonobos, specifically the bonobo that made her famous, Kanzi.
November 1, 2007
Rest in Peace Washoe
I’ve been unable to post on a lot of important primatology news as of late, I’ll try to catch up this weekend.
But I’m making time to quickly announce that Washoe has died. She was 42 years old and one of the first apes that was taught sign language, about 300 signs. She was known for [...]
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 13, 2007
Chimpanzee Rationality
Michael Tomasello, one of the biggest and best primatologists out there, recently published a paper in Science on chimpanzee rationality. He and his colleagues setup a game where a human or chimpanzee receives something of value, and is able to share it with another.
He found some interesting results. Generally speaking, humans made offers close to [...]
September 12, 2007
Male Chimps solicit fruit to Female Chimps for sex
A PLoS One study of chimpanzees at Bossou in Republic of Guinea, shows that the male chimpanzees raid farms and orchards for fruit that they steal and bring back to the females. In exchange, the males shared their fruity booty with the females in a food-for-sex trade.
The photo to your right shows one of the [...]
