A little boy pressed his nose on the glass where a Western Lowland Gorilla is interacting with the zoo-goers. He turns around to his parents with a big smile. “Oh look, the monkey wants to kiss you”, said his mother.

The Barbary Macaque, Macaca sylvanus, was formerly named Barbary Ape due to the absence of a tail (to be more precise, they have a vestigial tail that looks like a stump). However, we know now that it is more closely related to macaques than to apes so its name was changed to correctly reflect what they are.

They also found that knuckle walking evolved at least two different times; gorillas fundamentally knuckle walk differently than chimpanzees and bonobos.

Kivell and Schmitt think this suggests independent evolution of knuckle-walking behavior in the two African ape lineages.

Some scientists point to features in the human anatomy as our own vestiges of a knuckle-walking ancestry. One notable example is the fusion a two wrist bones that could provide us extra stability, a feature we share with gorillas, chimps and bonobos.

But some lemurs have that feature too, and they do a variety of different movements in the trees but do not knuckle-walk, Kivell said.

Altogether, the evidence leans against the idea that our own bipedalism evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor, the pair wrote. “Instead, our data support the opposite notion, that features of the hand and wrist found in the human fossil record that have traditionally been treated as indicators of knuckle-walking behavior in general are in fact evidence of arboreality.”

In other words, a long-ago ancestor species that spent its time in the trees moved to the ground and began walking upright.

There are no fossils from the time of this transition, which likely occurred about seven million years ago, Kivell and Schmitt said. But none of the later fossils considered to be on the direct human line were knuckle-walkers.

Read more on Science Daily: Bipedal Humans Came Down From The Trees, Not Up From The Ground

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio

We’re not the only species that are capable of laughing according to new study. Great apes are able to laugh like humans too, and they do it frequenty. This finding suggests that the last common ancestor of humans and apes also laughed around 10 to 16 million years ago. The ability to laugh subsequently evolved among apes and human, resulting in distinctive ways of laughing among them.

“Orangutans produce a short laugh series of noisy calls. Gorillas, chimps and bonobos produce longer laugh series and the calls are produced more rapidly” said project leader Marina Davila Ross, a primatologist from University of Portsmouth. With partners Michael Owren and Elke Zimmermann, Davila Ross recorded over 800 recordings of 22 juvenile and infant apes, and also three human babies laughing as they were tickled in their palms, feet, necks and armpits.

Presented in the latest edition of Current Biology, the study shows that human laughter is most similar to that of chimpanzees and bonobos, followed by gorillas and orangutans. Human laughter is least similar to those of siamangs, a lesser ape. “These results coincide with the genetic topology of great apes and humans,” said Davila Ross. She doesn’t rule out if apes or monkeys have a sense of humor but said that “it is difficult to find a method to accurately test it”.

Read the rest of the article from Discovery News: Chimps, Other Apes Laugh Like People.

I wonder what function does laughing serve in primates.

Originally posted on The Prancing Papio.

Des Moines, Iowa – January 29, 2009 – Great Ape Trust of Iowa scientist Dr. Serge Wich and three other internationally respected orangutan experts have edited a book set for release in the United States next month that, for the first time, compares data collected at every known orangutan research site and examines the information to discern differences and similarities among orangutan species, subspecies and populations.

Scientists are aware of significant variation in the behavior, morphology and life histories of orangutans, found only on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo, but the comparative approach in Orangutans: Geographic Variation in Behavioral Ecology and Conservation provides a theoretical framework to explain them, according to Wich and his co-editors. The data analyzed in the book, collected for Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii) Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) and their subspecies, provide a foundation for conservation action plans to save the critically endangered wild orangutans from extinction, and also emphasizes the effects of human settlement on orangutans and their habitat.

Wich and his esteemed co-editors – Dr. S. Suci Utami Atmoko, a biology research associate and lecturer at Universitas Nasional in Jakarta, Indonesia, and a member the IUCN-SSC Primate Specialist Group; Tatang Mitra Setia, who has studied Indonesian primates since 1979 at the Ketambe Research Center and is the dean of the biology faculty at Universitas Nasional; and Dr. Carel P. van Schaik, a Dutch primatologist who is a professor and director of the Anthropological Institute and Museum at the University of Zürich, Switzerland – all have extensive backgrounds tracking and studying wild orangutans. All also are widely respected for their own scientific publications.

For this book, they brought together more than 70 of the world’s leading orangutan experts to rigorously synthesize and compare the data, quantify the similarities and differences, and seek to explain them.

“Instead of just getting really good people with data from one population, we sought data from many scientists,” Wich said. “This gives us the advantage of looking at differences site by site.”

The comparison gives scientists a better understanding of how such ecological factors as fruit availability in the forest, for example, affects various orangutan populations. “By taking a look at differences in ecology, it’s easier to understand variation,” Wich said. “That’s why looking at one taxon is a very useful approach.”

Having such data available in one source “makes us think differently about conservation issues,” he continued. “If all orangutans were all the same, maybe saving a population here and a population there is enough to conserve the species, but if they’re different, conservation measures should reflect that. This site-by-site collection of data makes it much more strategic for us to consider all of these differences. What we are trying to do is not only preserve numbers, but also take geographic variation into account.”

The book points out not only differences between Sumatran and Bornean orangutans, but also their subspecies. There are three known Bornean orangutan subspecies – Pongo pygmaeus pygmaeus, Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii and Pongo pygmaeus morio – and no known subspecies of Sumatran orangutans.

Great Ape Trust’s Dr. Rob Shumaker, one of the scientists invited to contribute chapters to the volume, said the book is “extraordinarily important,” in part because it fills a void in both the quality and quantity of comparative data available on orangutans. “The comparative literature that exists on orangutans is sparse when compared to what we know about chimpanzees, for example,” said Shumaker, who also pointed to a “very notable and unusual level of collaboration among scientists who worked together to create chapters.”

“It’s rare to achieve this level of collaboration and cooperation among field researchers,” he said. “It’s very difficult to find that when looking through literature on other species and other types of great ape.”

Shumaker said that collectively, scientists contributing chapters to the book paint a clearer picture of the flexibility and range of orangutan behavior in the wild and provides important insight to researchers working with captive orangutan populations. Though he has studied the mental abilities of orangutans for more than 20 years, Shumaker said the information presented in the book “revolutionizes my perspective and thinking into the level of variation we might expect in orangutans in captivity.”

Another contributing author, Dr. Anne Russon, said the book is noteworthy not only because it systematically attempts to consider orangutan biology and conservation across the whole of the orangutan’s rage, but also because of the sweeping scope of the research presented.

“It is simply vast,” said Russon, a professor of psychology at Glendon College, York University, Toronto, who since 1989 has studied intelligence and learning in ex-captive Bornean orangutans rehabilitated and released to free forest life.

“It required the work of a huge number of scientists and conservationists, with a very wide range of expertise and covering a time span of more than 30 years, to develop this kind of view of orangutans,” she said. “This effort identified similarities – and perhaps more important, differences – among orangutans that were either unknown or at best only hinted at in the past.”

Though some of the data reported in the book’s chapters remain suggestive because they were not collected to today’s methodological standards, “that points the way forward, in the sense of indicating what aspects of orangutan biology now need attention,” Russon said.

Background Information

Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a scientific research facility in southeast Des Moines dedicated to understanding the origins and future of culture, language, tools and intelligence. When completed, Great Ape Trust will be the largest great ape facility in North America and one of the first worldwide to include all four types of great ape – bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans – for noninvasive interdisciplinary studies of their cognitive and communicative capabilities.

Great Ape Trust is dedicated to providing sanctuary and an honorable life for great apes, studying the intelligence of great apes, advancing conservation of great apes and providing unique educational experiences about great apes. Great Ape Trust of Iowa is a 501(c) 3 not-for-profit organization and is certified by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA).

The title of the new paper spills all the beans, “Primate hunting by bonobos at LuiKotale, Salonga National Park.” As I just mentioned, bonobos have been popularized by many to be a peace loving species, particularly because of the lack of male dominated social system and far less documented occurrences of physical violence. Such observations have often been used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos. In the words of New Yorker writer Ian Parker, bonobos are [were],

“equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatty,”

But earlier this year we got a glimpse into the more devious carnivorous behavior of bonobos, when one of the co-authors of the current paper, Gottfried Hohmann, and another research published in Folia Primatologica, “New Records on Prey Capture and Meat Eating by Bonobos at Lui Kotale, Salonga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo,” their observations of the presence of monkey finger bones in bonobo fecal samples. In the new Current Biology paper Hohmann and Martin Surbeck publish their observations of bonobos hunting diurnal, arboreal and group living primates at LuiKotale in the Salonga National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo.

The following table from the paper summarizes their observations:

Table 1: Bonobo Monkey Hunts at LuiKotale

The results show us that there were 5 attempts, and 2 of the 3 successful hunts were made by females. Among chimpanzees, females have been rarely been seen taking an active part in hunting parties. But these two female bonobos rocketed up into the trees and attacked their monkey prey just as effectively as the males. I share Frans de Waal‘s opinion that this study is a milestone piece and changes our very foundation of bonobo social organization and socio-ecology.

But hunting may not be a ubiquitous behavior among all bonobos. As Hawks points out,

“at other field sites the bonobos interact in different ways with monkey species, ranging to mutual grooming.”

In fact, bonobos have been observed playing with baby black-and-white colobus monkeys and been seen engaging in grooming behavior with red colobus monkeys, much like adult chimpanzees hunting baboon babies that their offspring were playing with just days earlier. Bipolar anyone?

Surbeck M, Hohmann G. 2008. Primate hunting by bonobos at LuiKotale, Salonga National Park. Current Biology 18, R906-R907. DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2008.08.040

I’ve seen two of these 454 devices in person, over at the JGI. These things are gnarly, and cost a lot of money. I was told that each time you wanna use one of the machines, the reagents alone cost thousands of dollars. I didn’t ask to see a purchase order or anything, but I believe them. These devices do big science, they sequence small fragments of DNA and help on constructing it and they do it well.

You maybe asking, “What good does a bonobo genome do for us? We got chimpanzee, macaque, human… and we’re getting Neandertal, gorilla, and gibbon!” Well exactly that, the more primate genomes we have the more information we can get when we compare the genomes to one another. For example, between the bonobo, chimp, Neandertal, and human genomes we can screen to see what genes are specific to modern humans and what genes are specific to chimpanzees. This is critical in understanding what makes us all different, since it is proposed we share so much together.

In related news, I’m happy to announce that the Sankuru Nature Reserve a 11,803 square miles will be created through a partnership involving American and Congolese conservation groups and government agencies to help preserve bonobos. Lots of press has covered this news, for example here’s the New York Times coverage. As you may know all great apes are severly threatened if not endangered.

“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 to think that’s what makes us human, and now bonobos use tools too.

Tool using is important because we think that’s how early humans got their start. We couldn’t run fast like a cheetah, and we weren’t strong like mammoths, so we started using tools like spears to hunt meat and rocks to open nuts. These days we use tools like crazy. In fact, we can’t do anything without tools. But looking at chimps, and now the Lola bonobos, we can catch a glimpse of how it all started.”

Jump on over to the post to see the video of one of the bonobos using a rock to hammer open some nuts.

There are already a number of awesome blog posts where she documents the her field research.

I’ve added it to my RSS reader, and will add it to the Primatology.net link page… I recommend you do the same!

Many may not know that taxonomies further divide common chimps into three subspecies, represented by three distinct populations separated by geographic divisions (e.g. distance, rivers). They are the Western, Central, and Eastern, known as Pan troglodytes versus, Pan troglodytes troglodytes, and Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, respectively (Groves, 2001).

Previous genetic studies, combined with the nearly complete absence of behavioral or morphological differences, have led some to conclude that the populations are not distinct subspecies (Fischer et al., 2004). In contrast, a new study by researchers from four different institutions seems to show that the three common chimpanzee populations are indeed genetically distinct, and that little or no gene flow occurs between the groups (Becquet et al., 2007).

Recently published in PLoS Genetics, Genetic structure of chimpanzee populations reports on the largest genetic study of chimps to date. They analyzed the genetic material from 84 individuals: 6 bonobos and 78 common chimpanzees.

Their conclusions:

• The western, central, and eastern subspecies designations correspond to clusters of individuals with similar allele frequencies;
• There is little evidence for admixture between groups in the wild; and
• Central and eastern chimpanzees are most closely related in time to each other than either of them are to western chimps.

They failed to find any support for a fourth subspecies (Pan troglodytes vellorosus), originally proposed following mtDNA studies of chimpanzees living near the Sanaga river in Cameroon (Gonder et al., 2006).

References:

• Becquet C, Patterson N, Stone A, Przeworski M, Reich D (2007) Genetic structure of chimpanzee populations. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030066.eor
• Fischer A, Wiebe V, Paabo S, Przeworski M (2004) Evidence for a complex demographic history of chimpanzees. Mol Biol Evol. 21:799-808.
• Gonder MK, Disotell TR, Oates JF (2006) New genetic evidence on the evolution of chimpanzee populations and implications for taxonomy. International Journal of Primatology 27:1103-1127.
• Won YJ, Hey J (2002) Divergence population genetics of chimpanzees. Mol Biol Evol. 22, 297-307.

[Map from Wikipedia]