We ain’t monkeyin’ around here.
Animation of chimpanzee yawning from Emory University. Illustration from BBC News. I'm sure we are all familiar with this scenario: Someone yawns and we would "catch" it or vice versa. This is the phenomenon of contagious yawning. A new paper from The Proceedings of The Royal Society "Computer animations stimulate contagious yawning in chimpanzees" suggests... Continue Reading →
A Fongoli chimp. Photo by Frans Lanting, National Geographic. I just stumbled upon this on Twitter (Thanks to DarwinMonkey). It's a National Geographic page about the Senegalese Fongoli chimps, named after the Fongoli stream that runs through the chimpanzee's range. There are videos showing these chimps using tools fishing for termites, hunting a bushbaby and... Continue Reading →
A research from Duke University by Daniel Schmitt, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, and Tracy Kivell, a post-doctoral research associate, shows that human evolved from tree climbing ancestors, not from knuckle-walkers. Schmitt and Kivell examined and compared the wrist bones of humans and African apes. Their research, "Independent evolution of knuckle-walking in African apes shows... Continue Reading →
A chimpanzee mother using rocks (hammer and anvil) to break open nuts, an example of tool use in primates. Photo from Duke University. A new branch of archaeology is being introduced by international scientists. Led by University of Calgary archaeologist Julio Mercader and 17 other co-authors of the paper "Primate archaeology", advocate a new "Paleoanthropology... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
PNAS will soon publish a paper from Mike Bruford and colleagues who isolated DNA from gorilla hair and feces and ultimately came up with a conclusion that the modern genetic composition of gorilla populations varies across different parts of their current geographic range and that this variation may be tied to Ice Age climate change... Continue Reading →
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.... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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