chimpanzees

The BBC has also thought that chimpanzees were entering the Stone Age. And now: Eminent anthropologist Frans de Waal explains that politicians have a lot to learn from how chimpanzees show empathy. “How chimpanzees reveal the roots of human behaviour” at BBC Reality: Chimpanzees don’t seek humans out the way dogs do. In many ways, dogs are more like humans than chimpanzees are and better able to communicate with us emotionally. Dogs don’t seek out chimpanzees, come to think of it, though recently, some researchers needed to convince themselves that something like that was happening between monkeys and wolves. (Uh, no.) Physical resemblance is apparently not all it’s cracked up to be. Serious study might be worthwhile. Follow UD News Read More ›

It’s great to see concern for primate apes taking a rational turn that can actually be in their interests: In recent years, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation organizations, and animal rights groups have told the public to stop touching chimpanzees and other wild animals. National Geographic, PETA, and even Instagram draw explicit links between human touch and harm. They discourage wildlife enthusiasts from visiting “fake sanctuaries” that let tourists play with wild animals. Sanctuary accreditation organizations, such as the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA), can refuse to accredit facilities that allow visitors to touch primates. They say that visitor illness, easily communicated through touch, can kill a young chimpanzee. Moreover, this touch—even if it is playful—can harm chimps and other wild animals Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Sharing meat after hunting and exchanging other valued food items is considered key in the evolution of cooperation in human societies. One prominent idea is that humans share valuable foods to gain future favors, such that those we chose to share with are more likely to cooperate with us in the future. Despite regularly occurring in humans, sharing food outside of kinship or mating relationships is rare in non-human animals. Our two closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, are two of the rare exceptions, and because of the important role of food sharing in human evolution, examining the sharing patterns of chimpanzees can help to answer questions on how sharing food amongst adults evolved and how it may Read More ›

Reading the claims for ape generosity in The New York Times, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor offers a clarification: There is a fallacy about the human mind that regularly appears in research on animal behavior, and this fallacy is related to the pervasive misunderstanding about machine “intelligence.” It is a misunderstanding about the most basic characteristic of the human mind—that the human intellect and will are immaterial. That the human intellect and will are immaterial abilities is supported by a mountain of logic and empirical research. It is precisely this immateriality that animals and machines lack. Science writer Carl Zimmer has an essay in the New York Times, “Seeking Human Generosity’s Origins in an Ape’s Gift to Another Ape” (September 11, 2018) Read More ›

Can you believe a typical science site coming to a conclusion that is so evidence-based? We all know that parrots can talk. Some people may have even seen elephants, seals, or whales mimicking speech sounds. So why can’t our closest primate relatives speak like us? Our new research suggests they have the right vocal anatomy but not the brainpower to use it. … We also found that apes have particularly large cortical association areas, as well as a bigger hypoglossal nucleus than other primates. The hypoglossal nucleus is associated with the cranial nerve that controls the muscles of the tongue. This suggests that our closest primate relatives may have finer and more voluntary control over their tongues than other primate Read More ›

Some articles in science journals leave one wondering, that’s for sure. At Nature: Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts Abstract: Observations of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) provide valuable comparative data for understanding the significance of conspecific killing. Two kinds of hypothesis have been proposed. Lethal violence is sometimes concluded to be the result of adaptive strategies, such that killers ultimately gain fitness benefits by increasing their access to resources such as food or mates1,2,3,4,5. Alternatively, it could be a non-adaptive result of human impacts, such as habitat change or food provisioning6,7,8,9. To discriminate between these hypotheses we compiled information from 18 chimpanzee communities and 4 bonobo communities studied over five Read More ›