Birds and monkeys in the Amazon share information via ‘internet of the forest’: new research

Ettore Camerlenghi, Deakin University and Ari Martínez, University of California, Santa Cruz

You might go for a walk in the forest to disconnect from work and calm your nerves after a busy week. The chirping and calls of birds in the canopy above might be exactly what allows you to relax.

But what sounds soothing to humans may signal danger to other animals – and trigger fear across the forest.

In our research, published today in Current Biology, we show that when some animals spot a predator they issue a warning cry that is picked up by others and spread through the rainforest canopy. For a time, different species are linked into a shared information network, and parts of the forest briefly fall silent.

Birds and monkeys

During an expedition to a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon, working with a falconer, we used trained raptors to trigger warning calls from birds and primates. We recorded the calls then played them back into the forest and monitored how the community responded.

We already knew that birds sometimes repeat the warnings of others – occasionally even those of different species, or of primates. What we wanted to know was how widespread this behaviour is across the animal community.

Researchers released birds of prey in the Amazon rainforest to study how the alarm calls of other animals travel through the ‘internet of the forest’.

We discovered that alarm calls produced by small bird species – those weighing less than 100 grams – were most often passed on. Other small birds living in the canopy were the most likely to relay the call, but other animals joined in too.

Larger species, including capuchin and spider monkeys, sometimes responded as well. Two canopy species in particular – the black-fronted and the white-fronted nunbirds – stood out as especially likely to repeat and propagate the warnings of their neighbours throughout the forest.

Sounds and silence

Alarm calls from species living in the forest understorey were far less likely to spread and be propagated by other birds or primates.

However, even when these alarm calls were not repeated, they changed the forest’s soundscape. Small canopy birds almost completely stopped singing after hearing a predator alert. At the same time, animals in lower forest layers often continued to make sounds despite the perceived threat.

Together, these findings suggest that the Amazonian canopy is not only the rainforest’s most mysterious layer – largely unexplored and home to much of its biodiversity – but also functions as an information highway, like a fibre-optic network through which animals rapidly share signals of danger.

A new layer of the ‘internet of the forest’

In the past decade, the idea of an “internet of the forest” has become popular through the concept of the “wood wide web”, where plants exchange resources and information via root systems and fungal networks. Our work points to another communication system, one operating high above the ground.

Suspended above our heads is a vast ecosystem where animals constantly listen to one another, forming an eavesdropping network that spreads critical information within seconds.

The vocal activity of birds is usually associated with finding mates and defending territories. However, we now know that sometimes this activity, or lack of it, may represent pulses of a soundscape of fear.

Next time you walk through a rainforest, look up and listen to the birds. A sudden silence may mean a raptor is gliding somewhere above the canopy.

Ettore Camerlenghi, Associate Research Fellow, Avian Behaviour, Deakin University and Ari Martínez, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→April 21, 2026

Surgeons Perform First-Ever Surgery for Critically-Endangered Monkey Weeks Before She Gave Birth

Chester Zoo via SWNS

GNN often stays abreast of births among the Chester Zoo’s incredibly diverse residents of rare and endangered species, but few have ever been cuter or rarer than this Roloway monkey.

Chester Zoo is one of only two places in the UK that Roloway monkeys can be found, a spokesman said, and the breeding population there supports the animal as conservationists ponder what to do to ensure it can survive in its West African home.

The mother is named Masaya, and before the 15-year-old primate gave birth to a daughter named Lagertha, she was the first ever Roloway monkey to undergo surgery in captivity—to remove a golf-ball sized abscess from her foot.

Masaya had to have one toe amputated during the procedure, which was done at the University of Liverpool’s Small Animal Teaching Hospital.

“Masaya is a very experienced mom and she’s parenting magnificently,” said

Zoe Edwards, primate keeper at Chester Zoo. “The fact Masaya’s foot has healed so well is a huge relief. If she’d had a [full] amputation, we’d have been left with real questions about whether she could hold her offspring or continue with her normal behaviors.”

Roloway monkeys originate from West Africa and are listed as Critically-Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Once common in the lush rainforests of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the Roloway monkey now survives only in isolated pockets of old-growth forest.

The baby’s name is Lagertha – credit, Chester Zoo via SWNS

Masaya at the Liverpool Vet. Hospital where she underwent surgery – credit, Chester Zoo via SWNS

Chester Zoo witnessed the first birth of a Roloway monkey in captivity in 2020, and Lagertha is the 3rd to be born since then. Edwards said it marked an important moment in the species’ conservation. There are only a few breeding females in zoos in Europe, and only one other in England at the Yorkshire Wildlife Park.

Masaya had experienced recurring problems with her foot since she came to the zoo in 2023. It was determined to be an abscess, and when the swelling worsened in 2025, the decision was made to take Masaya to Liverpool for a CT scan.

“It’s not every day you take a monkey to vet school,” said Charlotte Bentley, Veterinary Officer at the zoo’s Animal Health Center. “Following the scan, we decided an operation was the way forward.”

According to the New England Primate Conservancy, the Roloway monkey is now considered one of the most urgently threatened primates in the entire world. A big-bodied monkey, they have been hunted to such small populations that, ironically, they’re now considered too uneconomical to pursue anymore, and so have inadvertently gained a short respite from poaching.

he conservancy admits that the most likely chance for survival is for breeding programs like the one at Chester to continue the propagation of the species until such a time as their native forests in Ghana and the Ivory Coast can be appropriately and reliably protected from poachers and logging. Surgeons Perform First-Ever Surgery for Critically-Endangered Monkey Weeks Before She Gave Birt

Read More........→March 22, 2026

Chimps’ Love for Crystals Could Help Us Understand Our Own Ancestors’ Fascination with These Stones

A chimp named Toti observes the crystal – credit, García-Ruiz et al., 2026, according to CC 4.0. license

Scientists have found that chimpanzees are attracted to crystals, seem to value them, want to keep them where they sleep, and can easily distinguish any stone that shines or glitters from others that don’t.

The researchers were hoping to understand whether our own species’ long documented appreciation (bordering on obsession) with crystals, gems, and precious metals, extends even further back down our evolutionary timeline.

The findings must be taken with several grains of sodium chloride crystal, but may open up a fascinating field of study into the origins of value.

Maybe you’ve experienced this: news comes out about a large diamond or ruby selling at auction for the same price as a house, and you or a friend have a brief moment of wondering, “why?”

Similarly, maybe you subscribe, or at least sympathize, with Warren Buffet’s long-held views on gold—namely that it’s nothing but a shiny rock—”a barbarous relic,” as the Oracle of Omaha famously said.

But even so, there’s something about the appeal of shiny rocks that clearly transcends logic, and that’s been true not only for the 5,500 year history of gold’s use as money, but for likely our entire existence.

Crystals have repeatedly been found at archaeological sites alongside Homo remains. Evidence shows hominins have been collecting these stones for as long as 780,000 years. Yet, we know that our ancestors did not use them as weapons, tools, or even jewelry. So why did they collect them at all?

Something about these stones made them desirable, even when they weren’t used for anything, and hoping to understand why, Spanish scientists conducted an experiment with 9 encultured chimps at a primate rescue center.

Encultured means that the animals have had extensive contact with humans, and is the first reason to hold one’s horses regarding scientific conclusions, but the results of the experiment nevertheless left the scientists “amazed.”

“We were pleasantly surprised by how strong and seemingly natural the chimpanzees’ attraction to crystals was,” said lead author Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a professor in San Sebastian in crystallography. “This suggests that sensitivity to such objects may have deep evolutionary roots.”

Modern humans diverged from chimps between 6 and 7 million years ago, so we share substantial genetic and behavioral similarities. To find out if fascination with crystals is one of them, the researchers provided two groups of chimpanzees (Manuela, Guillermo, Yvan, Yaki, and Toti in group one and Gombe, Lulú, Pascual, and Sandy in group two) with access to crystals.

A chimp named Yvan spent more than 15 minutes inspecting a small crystal – credit García-Ruiz et al., 2026, according to CC 4.0. license

In the first experiment, a large quartz crystal—called the monolith—was placed on a platform, along with a normal rock of similar size. While initially both objects caught the chimps’ attention, soon the crystal was preferred and the rock disregarded. Once they had removed it from the platform, all chimps inspected the crystal, rotating and tilting it so they could view it from specific angles. Yvan then picked up the crystal and decisively carried it to their hay-lined sleeping huts.

A second experiment showed that the chimps could identify and select smaller quartz crystals—similar in size to those found in hominin site excavations—from a pile of 20 rounded pebbles within seconds.

When pyrite (Fool’s Gold) and calcite crystals, which have different shapes than quartz crystals, were added to the pile, chimps still were able to pick out crystal-type stones.

“The chimpanzees began to study the crystals’ transparency with extreme curiosity, holding them up to eye level and looking through them,” García-Ruiz said. The animals then immediately, like the monolith experiment, took them back to their dormitories.

Chimps repeatedly examined the crystals for hours. Sandy, for example, carried pebbles and crystals in her mouth to a wooden platform where she separated them.

“She separated the 3 crystal types, which themselves differed in transparency, symmetry, and luster, from all the pebbles. This ability to recognize crystals despite their differences amazed us,” García-Ruiz said.

The authors pointed out that chimps don’t usually use their mouths to carry objects, so this could mean they were hiding them, a behavior consistent with treating the crystals as valuable, the team pointed out. It could, however, also mean they were testing to see if they were edible, but maybe not.

Another behavior by the chimps demonstrated the potential that they understood a value proposition in the crystals: that in order to get them back, the researchers had to barter for them, with substantially more pounds of food then the crystal. If indeed they were testing to see if it were edible, the amount of food they demanded in return seems strange.

Philosophically, the food trade experiment mirrors the classical value paradox of gems and precious metals.

One can’t eat a gemstone or gold coin, yet they cost far more than bread. Starving to death, one would trade every gemstone on Earth for a loaf of bread, so why do we assign them so much value? Based on how many bananas and how much yogurt García-Ruiz and his team had to offer, it could be that chimpanzees fall into that same paradox.

An interesting hypothesis as to why the chimps found the crystals interesting is their shape.

Crystals are the only natural polyhedral objects, meaning the only natural solids with many flat surfaces. When early humans tried to make sense of their environment, their cognitive processes might have been drawn to patterns that were unlike what they knew.

The clouds, trees, mountains, animals, and rivers of the natural world surrounding our ancestors were defined by curvature and ramification, so few items had straight lines and flat surfaces.

The combined observations from the experiments identified that both the transparency and the shape as alluring properties to the chimps. It might have been the same qualities attracting early humans to these rocks.

However, the fact that the chimps had long become accustomed to living with humans should, the researchers note, be considered a limiting factor in interpreting anything conclusively from the studies. Ideally, García-Ruiz said, the experiment should be replicated with wild apes, and preferably not only with Chimps, but also bonobos and gorillas.

Michael Haslam, an archaeologist with Historic Environment Scotland, told the New York Times that the great apes aren’t the only animals that value crystals: some birds have been known to collect them. Bowerbirds, fascinating birds that will decorate their nests with all sorts of objects, have been documented arranging quartz crystals around the perimeter of their nest to attract females.The gemstones of our marketplaces today are just certain kinds of scarcer crystals that are cut and polished, and there’s every reason to suspect that if the Hope Diamond were placed in front of Sandy, or the male bowerbird, they’d behave exactly the same. Chimps’ Love for Crystals Could Help Us Understand Our Own Ancestors’ Fascination with These Stones

Read More........→March 18, 2026

Apes Show Ability to Imagine in ‘Tea Party’ Experiments, and Scientists are Very Excited

43-year-old bonobo named Kanzi – Courtesy of Ape Initiative / Johns Hopkins / SWNS

Apes share the human ability to imagine and pretend, suggests new research that included a series of tea party experiments.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, called it the first study to show the capacity for pretending is not unique to mankind.

They learned that apes can use their imagination and play pretend. One bonobo engaged with cups of imaginary juice and bowls of pretend grapes “consistently and robustly” across three experiments, challenging long-held assumptions about the abilities of animals.

The findings, published this week in the journal Science, suggest that the capacity to understand pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an “enculturated ape”, and likely dates back six to nine million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors.

“It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now,” said study co-author Dr. Christopher Krupenye.

“Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative.

“Jane Goodall discovered that chimps make tools and that led to a change in the definition of what it means to be human—and this, too, really invites us to reconsider what makes us special and what mental life is out there among other creatures.”

He said that, by the age of two, human children can engage in pretend scenarios, like tea parties. Even at 15-months-old, infants show measures of surprise when they see a person “drinking” from a cup after pretending to empty it.

Credit: Getty Images For Unsplash+

There had been no previous studies of pretend behavior in non-human animals, despite several reports of animals seemingly engaging in pretending behavior from both the wild and in zoos or captivity.

For instance, in the wild, young female chimps have been observed carrying and playing with sticks, holding them like mothers would hold their infants. And a chimp in captivity seemed to drag imaginary blocks along the floor after playing with real wooden blocks.

Dr. Krupenye and co-author Amalia Bastos, a former Johns Hopkins postdoctoral fellow who is now a lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, wondered if they could test the capacity to pretend in a controlled environment.

They created experiments similar to a child’s tea party to test Kanzi, a 43-year-old bonobo living at Ape Initiative in Iowa, is the world’s only research center and sanctuary dedicated exclusively to the study and conservation of bonobos, our closest primate relative.

Kanzi had been anecdotally reported to engage in pretense, and could respond to verbal prompts by pointing.

In each test, a researcher and Kanzi faced one another, tea party-style, across a table. In the first task there were two transparent cups on the table, both empty, alongside an empty transparent pitcher.

Kanzi – Courtesy of Ape Initiative / Johns Hopkins / SWNS

The researcher tipped the pitcher to “pour” a little pretend juice into each cup, then pretended to dump the juice out of one cup, shaking it a bit to really get it out.

The researcher then asked Kanzi: “Where’s the juice?”

The bonobo pointed to the correct cup that still contained pretend juice, even when the researcher changed the position of the cup filled with pretend juice.

In case Kanzi thought there was real juice in the cup, even if he couldn’t see it, the team ran a second experiment, during which a cup of real juice was placed alongside the cup of pretend juice.

When Kanzi was asked what he wanted, he pointed toward the real juice almost every time.

A third experiment repeated the same concept, except with grapes. A researcher pretended to sample a grape from an empty container, then placed it inside one of the two jars.

After pretending to empty one of the containers, he asked Kanzi: “Where’s the grape?”

Kanzi again indicated the location of the pretend object. The researchers said Kanzi wasn’t perfect, but he was consistently correct.

“It’s extremely striking and very exciting that the data seem to suggest that apes, in their minds, can conceive of things that are not there,” said Dr. Bastos.

“Kanzi is able to generate an idea of this pretend object and, at the same time, know it’s not real.”

The researchers now want to test whether other apes and animals can engage in pretend play or track pretend objects. They also hope to explore other facets of imagination in apes, perhaps their ability to think about the future or to think about what’s going on in the minds of others.

“Imagination is one of those things that in humans gives us a rich mental life,” said Dr. Krupenye.“And if some roots of imagination are shared with apes, that should make people question their assumption that other animals are just living robotic lifestyles constrained to the present. We should be compelled by these findings to care for these creatures with rich and beautiful minds and ensure they continue to exist.” Apes Show Ability to Imagine in ‘Tea Party’ Experiments, and Scientists are Very Excited

Read More........→February 10, 2026

Birth of UK's Only Bonobo Baby Gives Fresh Hope for World's Most Endangered Ape

credit – Adam Kay, Twycross Zoo / SWNS

Conservationists and zookeepers are celebrating our closest living relative giving birth to a healthy baby.

Heart-tugging photos show the bonobo mother Yuli cradling her tiny newborn after it was born at Twycross Zoo in Leicestershire last Thursday.

Experts have hailed the birth as a ‘globally significant’ moment which could help save one of the world’s rarest apes and humanity’s cousin.

Twycross Zoo is the only UK zoo to care for the species, and says the new arrival has the distinguished status as the only baby bonobo in the whole country.

The infant’s mother Yuli arrived at Twycross Zoo from Vallée Des Singes in France as part of the European-led conservation program in 2023.

“Bonobos are human’s closest living relatives, yet they remain one of the most endangered and least understood apes on Earth,” said Dr. Rebecca Biddle, chief conservation officer at Twycross Zoo. “Every birth is a true milestone and a powerful reminder of what can be achieved when zoos work together.

“As the only UK zoo caring for bonobos, here at Twycross Zoo, we are immensely proud and feel a great responsibility to play our part in protecting this incredible species,” she added.

credit – Adam Kay, Twycross Zoo / SWNS

Bonobos, which are listed as “Endangered” on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, are indeed as Biddle says—Homo sapiens’ closest living relatives, sharing more than 98% of our DNA.

In the wild, their population is said to be decreasing due to many human-caused threats such as poaching and deforestation.

Found only in the wilds of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the bonobo is a highly unique ape due to their matriarchal society. Typically, primate troops are led by a dominant male, but bonobos are one of few primate species, and the only great ape, to live in female-led societies.

The conservation program looks after 10% of all the bonobos in Europe, and is a key part of a collaborative effort between EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquaria) member zoos.At the moment, neither mother nor newborn will be visible to the public as they enjoy a critical period of bonding and nurturing. Birth of UK's Only Bonobo Baby Gives Fresh Hope for World's Most Endangered Ape

Read More........→November 02, 2025

Rarest Monkeys Now Number Close to 2,000 Thanks to One Man's Jane Goodall-like Passion

A golden snub-nosed monkey in Tanjiahe National Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province – credit, David Blank CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

From the BBC comes the story of an intrepid and dedicated scientist who has spent decades working in China’s mountain forests in an effort to protect and understand one of the nation’s most amazing animals.

The golden sub-nosed monkey is revered alongside the giant panda as “national treasures” of Chinese wildlife, yet this couldn’t protect them from logging and hunting that followed in the wake of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Members of this sub-species located in the UNESCO-listed Shennongjia mountains of Hubei Province, were the subject of intense study by Professor Yang Jingyuan, a research ecologist who arrived in these mountains in 1991.

For Yang, the golden sub-nosed monkey was Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees. By the time Yang arrived in Shennongjia, the population had collapsed to just 500 or so individuals across 6 family groups. Years of illegal logging as a form of subsistence living had reduced forest coverage in the mountains to 63%.

But before Yang could protect the animals, he had to first learn to understand them. With his research colleagues, he began striking out into the newly-created Shennongjia Forest Reserve to study these incredible animals.

The monkeys were at first so wary of humans that Yang and his team had to stay half a mile away to be able just to observe the monkeys in their habitat. Eventually though, with repeated encounters, half a mile became and quarter mile, and a quarter mile became 200 yards, 100 yards, 20 yards—until Yang and whoever he brought with him were accepted by the troupes.

The BBC’s China Correspondent, Stephen McDonell, experienced this treatment as baby monkeys and curious juveniles climbed all over him on a visit to special, 100 square kilometer monkey zones hat are off-limits to the hundreds of thousands of visitors who come to enjoy a mountain ecosystem that is without exaggeration unique in the world.

“Even after logging was banned there were still people illegally felling timber. If they didn’t cut down trees, how would they have money?” Professor Yang, director of the Shennongjia National Park Scientific Research Institute, told McDonell.

Golden snub-nosed monkeys in Tanjiahe National Nature Reserve, Sichuan Province – credit, David Blank CC BY-NC-SA 3.0.

Shennongjia virgin forest – credit, Evilbish CC BY-SA 3.0

“There were also people secretly hunting here to survive. It was only after a long period of building awareness that the consciousness of local farmers changed.”

In the 1990s, with a shifting focus from forestry to forest conservation, local residents eking out this subsistence living were offered government money to relocate so that the forests could regrow. Many accepted the offer, and now benefit from the tourism boom the mountains are experiencing.

There is no place on Earth that has greater biodiversity of deciduous woody plants than Shennongjia, and a dizzying 3,400 higher-order plant species, and over 600 invertebrates have been recorded there. The golden snub-nosed monkey is very much a fuzzy golden cherry on top of a biodiverse cake ten layers-high.

“I’m very optimistic,” said Prof Yang. “Their home is now very well protected. They have food and drink, no worries about life’s necessities and, most of all, their numbers are growing.”

Golden snub-nosed monkeys captured via camera trap – credit, eMammal CC 2.0. via Flickr

Indeed, an archived report from Xinhua claimed that those 500 remnant individuals became 1,200 by 2013. This represents major progress since females give birth to only one baby at a time.

At the time McDonell visited, their numbers had jumped again to 1,600, and forest cover along the hills and valleys had increased to around 96% of the reserve’s total area.

Professor Yang can live freely among them like some character of fable. He speaks to them in their calls, having learned the meanings of each vocalization during his many years of observing them.

Like Goodall, his research has yielded incredible insights into their lives. For example, each monkey has an egg timer-like understanding of its lifespan, and when it’s time to pass away, they silently leave their families behind and visit special, secluded areas to die alone in the forest.

According to Yang, there hasn’t been a single successful attempt to find these sites, either by researchers or rangers.Yang’s institute estimates that the monkeys will come to number 2,000 individuals in Shennongjia sometime over the next 10 years, a testament to the magnificent outcomes conservation can provide, providing there’s someone in the right place at the right time to make the effort to make a difference. Rarest Monkeys Now Number Close to 2,000 Thanks to One Man's Jane Goodall-like Passion

Read More........→October 07, 2025

Chimps are upping their tool game, says study

WASHINGTON - "Planet of the Apes" may have been onto something.

Chimpanzees are steadily honing their tool-using skills -- a process unfolding over millennia, driven by the exchange of ideas through migrations between populations, according to a new study published Thursday in Science.

The finding in chimps -- humans' closest living relatives -- holds relevance for us too, as it supports the idea that, deep in the mists of time, our own ape ancestors leveraged social connections to improve their technologies, lead author Cassandra Gunasekaram told AFP.

Scientists have long marvelled at chimps' ability to pass down intricate behaviours, like tool use, from one generation to the next.

Yet while human civilisation has leapt from the Stone Age to the Space Age, chimpanzee "culture" -- defined as socially learned behaviours -- seemed to have remained static.

Gunasekaram, a doctoral student at the University of Zurich, set out to challenge this assumption.

She and colleagues combined genetic data tracing ancient chimpanzee migrations across Africa with observations of 15 distinct foraging behaviours across dozens of populations and the four subspecies.

These behaviours were categorised into three levels: those requiring no tools, those with simple tools, like using chewed leaves as a sponge to absorb water from tree holes, and the most complex, which involve toolsets.

One striking example of toolset use comes from Congo, where chimps use a stout stick to bore a tunnel into the ground to reach a termite nest, then modify a plant stem by chewing its tip into a brush to "fish" for termites in the tunnel they've made.

The study found that advanced tool use strongly correlated with populations connected by genetic exchanges over the last 5,000–15,000 years, suggesting such behaviours spread when groups interacted.

Areas where three subspecies overlap exhibited the most complex tool use, highlighting how cross-group connections foster cultural knowledge.

By contrast, simpler behaviours, such as foraging without tools, seemed less tied to migration and likely evolved independently in different regions.

- Foraging efficiently -

Gunasekaram said this mirrors how trading ideas and incremental innovation have been critical to human technological progress, taking us from early abacuses to modern smartphones.

"They've become so complex that one person alone could not reinvent them from scratch," she said.

But unlike humans, chimps have far fewer opportunities to encounter new individuals and ideas -- migrations occur gradually, driven by sexually mature females moving to new communities to avoid inbreeding.

Analysing ancient genetic flows helped the team overcome one of the biggest challenges in studying the evolution of chimpanzee culture: the limited window of observation, as the species has only been researched scientifically for about a century.

What's more, "Chimpanzee tools are made of sticks and stems, which are all perishable," Gunasekaram explained, making it nearly impossible to trace how their artefacts have evolved over time.

So, will chimps one day rival human ingenuity? Hardly. But given enough time, they could become more efficient foragers.

For example, some populations are already more advanced in cracking nuts with hammers and anvils made of stone , and one particularly innovative group has even invented a stabiliser for the anvil, said Gunasekaram.by Issam Ahmed Chimps are upping their tool game, says study

Read More........→July 16, 2025

Cameroon islands offer safe home for orphaned chimps

MARIENBERG - Adolescent chimps are, in some respects, rather similar to their human counterparts.

They live with mum until well into their teens, are sometimes a bit cheeky and, being highly social animals, struggle to survive alone until they have been taught how to fend for themselves.

So when poachers kill mother chimps for food, keep the young chained in captivity for the exotic pet trade, or the family group is destroyed when its forest home is cleared for commercial palm oil plantations, the orphaned chimps need help.

In Cameroon, the NGO Papaye International runs a sanctuary for the endangered animals on three islands in the Douala-Edea national park.

"The chimpanzees in the sanctuary are chimpanzees that have had a tragic past due to poaching, deforestation and groups that have been killed," said Marylin Pons Riffet, the 57-year-old French head of the charity.

AFP | Daniel Beloumou Olomo

"We only take in orphaned chimpanzees, who are young and therefore need the helping hand of man after having had a gun pointed at them or their habitat destroyed," she told AFP.

The charity helps the orphans become re-accustomed to surviving in semi-wild conditions, but on islands away from their only predator -- the humans with whom they share 98 percent of their DNA and a good degree of behaviour.

Populations of common chimpanzees, which used to roam across 26 countries in equatorial Africa, have plummeted since the 1980s, and they are at risk of extinction in the wild.

- We are family -

Fabrice Moudoungue, a 39-year-old carer, travels by boat every day to bring food to the three rainforest-covered islands on the Sanaga river where Papaye International's 34 chimps live

"Here Water Lily! Here Star!" he calls.

The chimps, who recognise his voice, scamper excitedly along the bank of Yakonzo-Okokong Island towards the boat and hug him when he wades out to offer them bananas, coconut, tomatoes and dates.

AFP | Daniel Beloumou Olomo

"They're not 'like' my family. They 'are' my family because we spend all the time, every day, with them," he said with a smile.

Chimps are usually fearful of humans and can be aggressive when scared, especially if they have been mistreated in captivity in the past.

But through daily, gentle contact, Moudoungue and his colleagues at the sanctuary have earned their trust.

"These are young ones that we released about four to five years ago. We visit them all the time to keep contact, so that in case one of them gets sick they will still accept us," said manager Francois Elimbi.

When he reaches Yatou Island, Honey wraps him in her long black arms.

The mature female chimp was released there in 2019 after needing almost 10 years of care at the sanctuary.

"It's inexplicable, very powerful. It even gives you goosepimples when a monkey hugs you. That means he still recognises you. You're his friend," Elimbi said.

- Special bond -

Tchossa and Conso are still too young and inexperienced to be released onto the islands.

They have a big cage near the carers' lodgings on Yatou where they play on their swings and sleep in hammocks, awaiting their daily walk with the staff to rediscover the forest.

Alioum Sanda, 67, has a special bond with Conso.

"He has the marks of the shackles because after the poachers killed his mother, the little one didn't trust them so they shackled him," he said, pointing to the scars on the chimp's body.

He recalled how Conso had changed since his arrival at the sanctuary.

"He was very aggressive considering the mistreatment he'd received when he was in Douala. It took at least two months before he gave me his trust," Sanda recalled.

"I would put nappies on him. I would wipe his wounds."

Conso, now fully recovered, started dancing around, sensing it was nearly time for his daily outing.

Sanda took his bony hand.

"If we don't do what we are doing, they will disappear," he said softly.

“We'll just say then that there used to be an animal called a chimpanzee. We must try to preserve them so that future generations -- our grandchildren -- can see them too." The information contained in the article posted represents the views and opinions of the author and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of eNCA.com. Cameroon islands offer safe home for orphaned chimps

Read More........→December 31, 2024

Gorillas Use Chest Beating to Prevent Conflict, Not Provoke it, a New Study Finds

Male gorilla – credit Kabir Bakie at the Cincinnati Zoo CC 2.5.

A gorilla’s chest beating is an incredible sight, and sound, to behold, but new research based on years of observation of mountain gorillas shows there’s much we never understood about this iconic acoustic.

Since people first went to see King Kong, or since gamers first met Donkey Kong from the Mario Bros franchise, most might say male gorillas beats their chests with their fists, and as a sign of challenge or triumph.

Apart from the fact that they use cupped hands, it seems to serve a number of functions—a challenge not necessarily being one of them.

Edward Wright, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute, spent between 2014 and 2016 observing 500 chest beats from 25 different silverback mountain gorillas in Rwanda’s national parks.

Using acousitc monitoring equipment he and his colleagues determined that the chest thumping was an honest demonstration of body size. This hints at several organizational aspects of gorilla social life. The first is that larger animals were recorded at lower frequencies which could travel half a mile.

By beating their chests, air sacks underneath their larynx reverberate from the kinetic energy, producing a sound, and the bigger the male, the deeper the sound. This is believed to broadcast how big and dominant a male gorilla is as a means of keeping rival males away from their social group.

Furthermore, it’s believed that each thump may act as a calling card, with members of a dominant male’s group being able to identify the silverback from this sound.

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The second aspect was that while sound depth and body size were correlated, body size and frequency of chest thumping instances did not—the dominant males didn’t pound their chest any more than their smaller rivals. This presented Dr. Wright and his colleagues with a fascinating suggestion—the chest thumping is used difuse fights, rather than provoking them.

Along with smaller males hearing the chest thumps of a dominant male and knowing to steer clear, by returning the sound with their own puny chest thumps, they can alert the dominant male to their presence while simultanously demonstrating they’re no match physically due to the higher frequency of their thumping sounds.

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“Even if you’re likely to win a fight, there is still quite a high-risk factor,” Dr. Wright told National Geographic. “These are large, powerful animals that can do a lot of damage.”

How the chest thumps affect the female half of gorilla society is even less well-studied, but the scientists knew at the initiation of their observations that males beat their chest more when the females in their social group enter esterus, and that larger males make deeper calls which were both found to correlate to reproductive success.Future studies will examine whether a large male’s chest beating can act as a siren’s song as it were, and pull females away from other social groups.Gorillas Use Chest Beating to Prevent Conflict, Not Provoke it, a New Study Finds

Read More........→December 18, 2024

Chimps are upping their tool game, says study

WASHINGTON - "Planet of the Apes" may have been onto something.

Chimpanzees are steadily honing their tool-using skills -- a process unfolding over millennia, driven by the exchange of ideas through migrations between populations, according to a new study published Thursday in Science.

The finding in chimps -- humans' closest living relatives -- holds relevance for us too, as it supports the idea that, deep in the mists of time, our own ape ancestors leveraged social connections to improve their technologies, lead author Cassandra Gunasekaram told AFP.

Scientists have long marvelled at chimps' ability to pass down intricate behaviours, like tool use, from one generation to the next.

Yet while human civilisation has leapt from the Stone Age to the Space Age, chimpanzee "culture" -- defined as socially learned behaviours -- seemed to have remained static.

Gunasekaram, a doctoral student at the University of Zurich, set out to challenge this assumption.

She and colleagues combined genetic data tracing ancient chimpanzee migrations across Africa with observations of 15 distinct foraging behaviours across dozens of populations and the four subspecies.

These behaviours were categorised into three levels: those requiring no tools, those with simple tools, like using chewed leaves as a sponge to absorb water from tree holes, and the most complex, which involve toolsets.

One striking example of toolset use comes from Congo, where chimps use a stout stick to bore a tunnel into the ground to reach a termite nest, then modify a plant stem by chewing its tip into a brush to "fish" for termites in the tunnel they've made.

The study found that advanced tool use strongly correlated with populations connected by genetic exchanges over the last 5,000–15,000 years, suggesting such behaviours spread when groups interacted.

Areas where three subspecies overlap exhibited the most complex tool use, highlighting how cross-group connections foster cultural knowledge.

By contrast, simpler behaviours, such as foraging without tools, seemed less tied to migration and likely evolved independently in different regions.

- Foraging efficiently -

Gunasekaram said this mirrors how trading ideas and incremental innovation have been critical to human technological progress, taking us from early abacuses to modern smartphones.

"They've become so complex that one person alone could not reinvent them from scratch," she said.

But unlike humans, chimps have far fewer opportunities to encounter new individuals and ideas -- migrations occur gradually, driven by sexually mature females moving to new communities to avoid inbreeding.

Analysing ancient genetic flows helped the team overcome one of the biggest challenges in studying the evolution of chimpanzee culture: the limited window of observation, as the species has only been researched scientifically for about a century.

What's more, "Chimpanzee tools are made of sticks and stems, which are all perishable," Gunasekaram explained, making it nearly impossible to trace how their artefacts have evolved over time.

So, will chimps one day rival human ingenuity? Hardly. But given enough time, they could become more efficient foragers.

For example, some populations are already more advanced in cracking nuts with hammers and anvils made of stone , and one particularly innovative group has even invented a stabiliser for the anvil, said Gunasekaram.by Issam Ahmed Chimps are upping their tool game, says study

Read More........→December 10, 2024

Honk! These monkeys have truly legendary noses – now we better understand why they evolved

Slavianin/Shutterstock Katharine Balolia, Australian National University

Of all the monkey species around the world, one stands out with its large, bizarre nose. In male proboscis monkeys, their bulbous noses will often hang past their mouths.

But why evolve such a strange feature? Are they a visual sign of health and status to potential female mates, and to other males? Or did they evolve to help the monkeys make honks and other loud sounds?

In our new study, published in Scientific Reports, we have deepened our understanding of these enlarged nasal structures by investigating what lies beneath: the structures in the skull.

Our findings help to explain how these noses function as visual and acoustic signals of health and status. They also add to a growing body of evidence that shows researchers can use close examinations of skulls to glean information about primate social behaviour.

A battle of noses

One of the largest monkey species in Asia, proboscis monkeys (Nasalis larvatus) are endemic to the island of Borneo. They live in coastal mangroves, peat swamps and riverine forests, and have an unusual diet made up mostly of leaves.

They can swim quite well and have webbed fingers and toes. They typically live in harem groups, made up of a single adult male (who tends to have a large, bulbous nose), some adult females and their offspring.

Males don’t often get the opportunity to attract a harem until they reach middle age. These older, dominant and large-nosed males don’t easily tolerate other large-nosed males, often trying to ward them off aggressively with deep honks and “nasal roars” – loud calls they make using their noses.

Young adult males with smaller noses often live in all-male bachelor groups, and don’t tend to fight aggressively with each other. When these bachelor males get older and become large (and large-nosed) enough to compete with males that are part of a breeding group, they are in a position to overthrow the tenured male. Females then often choose to form a harem group with this new, high-status male.

What’s behind the nose?

We investigated the size and shape of the proboscis monkey nasal cavity. That’s the bony chamber of the skull that sits behind the fleshy nose. Our goal was to find out if the size and shape of the nasal aperture – the front part of the cavity, where the fleshy nose tissue attaches – can tell us more about why these peculiar appendages evolved.

Previous research that looked at the bulbous nose in males suggests it evolved to advertise status. In our new research, we wanted to better understand how this could be the case, this time using data taken from the skull.

We used 3D surface models, downloaded from a public repository, to take size and shape measurements from 33 adult proboscis monkey skulls. We compared these with the adult skulls of king colobus monkeys, blue monkeys and crab-eating macaques, three old world monkey species.

We chose some measurements to quantify the nasal cavity, and others to quantify the nasal aperture in all the species.  We also looked at tooth wear, since older adult monkeys have more worn teeth than younger adults. That would allow us to find out if older adult males had a larger nasal aperture than younger adult males.

Better honks

If male proboscis monkeys have a different nasal cavity shape to females, and a unique shape compared to the other monkey species, it would support the idea these enhanced nasal structures – both the fleshy nose and the cavity behind it – evolved to allow for more effective honks and nasal roars.

That was indeed what we found. The shape of the male nasal cavity was low and long compared to females. This allows males to build up resonance (sound vibration) in their nasal cavities, allowing them to emit deeper and louder calls through their noses.

The nasal aperture shape was also different between the sexes. In males, it looks a bit like an eggplant, while in females it looks more like an upside-down pear. This unique opening shape in males allows for higher intensity sounds to be emitted through the nose.

The sex differences in cavity shape were also larger than what we found in other old world monkey species. This further supports the idea that the nasal cavity of male proboscis monkeys underwent an evolutionary change for the purpose of making certain sounds.

Lastly, the age. Older proboscis monkey males really do have larger nasal apertures than younger adult males, but the cavity itself didn’t increase with age. This supports the idea that the large noses act as a visual signal. It’s also consistent with the fleshy nose size increasing in middle-aged or older adult males, which we know from behavioural studies in the wild.

Our evidence from the skull allows us to better understand how nasal structures in male proboscis monkeys evolved for both acoustic and visual signalling.

The more we know about how regions of the skull function as social signals, the better chance we have of reconstructing extinct primate social behaviour using fossilised skull remains.

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The author would like to acknowledge the paper’s co-author, former ANU Masters student Pippa Fitzgerald.

Katharine Balolia, Senior Lecturer in Biological Anthropology, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→May 31, 2024

Ape Treating His Wound Using Medicinal Plant is a World First for a Wild Animal

Facial wound on adult male orangutan – Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior via SWNS

Even though there is evidence of certain self-medication behaviors in animals, so far it has never been known that animals treat their wounds with healing plants. Now, biologists in Indonesia have observed this in a male Sumatran orangutan.

After sustaining a facial wound, he ate and repeatedly applied sap from a climbing plant with anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties commonly used in traditional medicine. He also covered the entire wound with the green plant mesh.

The closest relatives to humans, the great apes, are known to ingest specific plants to treat parasite infection and to rub plant material on their skin to treat sore muscles.

A chimpanzee group in Gabon was recently observed applying insects to wounds, although the efficiency of the behavior is still unknown. Wound treatment with a biologically active substance, however, has never been documented before.

Cognitive and evolutionary biologists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany—Caroline Schuppli and Isabelle Laumer—conducted the study at the Suaq Balimbing research site in Indonesia, which is a protected rainforest area home to around 150 critically endangered Sumatran orangutans.

“During daily observations of the orangutans, we noticed that a male named Rakus had sustained a facial wound, most likely during a fight with a neighboring male,” says Laumer, the first author of the study.

Three days after the injury Rakus selectively ripped off leaves from a vine with the common name Akar Kuning (Fibraurea tinctoria). He chewed on them, and then repeatedly applied the resulting juice precisely onto the facial wound for several minutes. As a last step, he fully covered the wound with the chewed leaves.

“This and related liana species that can be found in tropical forests of Southeast Asia are known for their analgesic and antipyretic effects and are used in traditional medicine to treat various diseases, such as malaria.

“Analyses of plant chemical compounds show the presence of furanoditerpenoids and protoberberine alkaloids, which are known to have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, and other biological activities of relevance to wound healing.”

Observations over the following days did not show any signs of the wound becoming infected and after five days the wound was already closed.Rakus, 47 days after first treating the wound using the medicinal plant – Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior via SWNS

“Interestingly, Rakus also rested more than usual when being wounded. Sleep positively affects wound healing as growth hormone release, protein synthesis and cell division are increased during sleep,” she explained.

Like all self-medication behavior in non-human animals, the case reported in this study raises questions about how intentional these behaviors are and how they emerge.

“The behavior of Rakus appeared to be intentional as he selectively treated his facial wound on his right flange, and no other body parts, with the plant juice. The behavior was also repeated several times, not only with the plant juice but also later with more solid plant material until the wound was fully covered. The entire process took a considerable amount of time,” says Laumer.

“It is possible, that wound treatment with Fibraurea tinctoria by the orangutans at Suaq emerges through individual innovation,” said Schuppli, a senior author of the study published in Nature. “Orangutans at the site rarely eat the plant. However, individuals may accidentally touch their wounds while feeding on this plant and thus unintentionally apply the plant’s juice to their wounds. As Fibraurea tinctoria has potent analgesic effects, individuals may feel an immediate pain release, causing them to repeat the behavior several times.”

Since the behavior has not been observed before, it may be that wound treatment with Fibraurea tinctoria has so far been absent in the behavioral repertoire of the Suaq orangutan population. Like all adult males in the area, Rakus was not born in Suaq, and his origin is unknown.

“Orangutan males disperse from their natal area during or after puberty over long distances to either establish a new home range in another area or are moving between other’s home ranges,” explains Schuppli. “Therefore, it is possible that the behavior is shown by more individuals in his natal population outside the Suaq research area.”

This possibly innovative behavior presents the first report of active wound management with a biological active substance in a great ape species and provides new insights into the existence of self-medication in our closest relatives and in the evolutionary origins of wound medication more broadly.

“The treatment of human wounds was most likely first mentioned in a medical manuscript that dates back to 2200 BC, which included cleaning, plastering, and bandaging of wounds with certain wound care substances,” said Schuppli. Source: https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/ape-treating-his-wound-using-medicinal-plant-is-a-world-first-for-a-wild-animal/

Read More........→May 08, 2024

Chimps shop like humans: Study

Photo Source: Thinkstock

Washington: Chimpanzees use manipulative dexterity to evaluate and select figs, similar to the way humans shop for fruits and vegetables, researchers say. Figs are a vital resource for chimps when preferred foods are scarce. The study demonstrates the foraging advantages of opposable fingers and careful manual prehension, or the act of grasping an object with precision. The findings shed new light on the ecological origins of hands with fine motor control, a trait that enabled our early human ancestors to manufacture and use stone tools. "The supreme dexterity of the human hand is unsurpassed among mammals, a fact that is often linked to early tool use," said Nathaniel J Dominy from Dartmouth College in the US. For the study, researchers observed the foraging behaviours of chimpanzees, black-and-white colobus monkeys, red colobus monkeys and red-tailed monkeys in Uganda. The primates depended on figs, and although ripe figs come in a range of colours, many stay green throughout development and every phase can be present on a single tree, making it difficult to discern solely by colour, which figs are ripe. To determine if the green figs of Ficus sansibarica are edible, chimpanzees ascend trees and make a series of sensory assessments — they may look at the fig's colour, smell the fig, manually palpate or touch each fig (using the volar pad of the thumb and lateral side of the index finger) to assess the fruit's elasticity and/or bite the fig to determine the stiffness of the fruit. Colobus monkeys do not have thumbs and evaluate the ripeness of figs by using their front teeth. Researchers examined the spectral, chemical and mechanical properties of figs, which included boring into individual figs to assess the elasticity of the fruit and extracting fig contents to estimate nutritional rewards such as sugar. They observed the non-selection, rejection and ingestion of individual figs, and collected specimens of figs that were avoided; palpated and rejected; palpated, bitten and rejected; and edible for which less than 50 per cent of the fruit was left. Chimpanzees also use their sense of smell to assess individual figs. Based on the sensory data obtained, researchers estimated the predictive power that sensory information may have on chimpanzees when estimating the ripeness of figs. Palpating figs was about four times faster than detaching and then biting the fruit, suggesting that chimpanzees may have a substantial foraging advantage over birds and monkeys, which rely on visual and oral information. The study provides new insight into how chimpanzees exhibit advanced visuomotor control during the foraging process and more broadly, on the evolution of skilled forelimb movements. The findings were published in the journal Interface Focus. — PTI Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com/

Read More........→May 31, 2016

Monkeys did sing like humans once

Photo source: Thinkstock

Ancient monkeys used auditory cues similar to humans to distinguish between low and high sound notes, say researchers, adding that pitch perception may have evolved more than 40 million years ago to enable vocal communication and song-like vocalisations. Pitch perception is essential to our ability to communicate and make music. "But until now, we didn't think any animal species, including monkeys, perceived it the way we do. Now we know that marmosets, and likely other primate ancestors, do," said Xiaoqin Wang, professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University's school of medicine. Marmosets are small monkeys native to South America that are highly vocal and social. Other animal species have been reported to show pitch perception but none have shown the three specialised features of human pitch perception. First, people are better at distinguishing pitch differences at low frequencies than high. Second, humans are able to pick up on subtle changes in the spread between pitches at low frequencies or hertz. And third, at high frequencies, peoples' ability to perceive pitch differences among tones played simultaneously is related to how sensitive they are to the rhythm. Through a series of hearing tests, Wang's team determined that marmosets share all three features with humans, suggesting that human components of pitch perception evolved much earlier than previously thought. The American continent, with its marmosets in place, broke away from the African land mass approximately 40 million years ago, before humans appeared in Africa. So it's possible that this human-like pitch perception evolved before that break and was maintained throughout primate evolution in Africa until it was inherited by modern humans. "Another possibility is that only certain aspects of pitch perception were in place before the split, with the rest of the mechanisms evolving in parallel in Old and New World monkeys," the authors noted. "Now we can explore questions about what goes wrong in people who are tone deaf and whether perfect pitch is an inherited or learned trait," Wang concluded in a paper forthcoming in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. — IANS. Source: http://www.tribuneindia.com

Read More........→January 17, 2016

Cute golden monkeys play in the snow in nature reserve

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Two baby golden monkeys play in the tree at the Dalongtan Golden Monkey Research Center in Shennongjia, in central China's Hubei Province, on Jan. 12, 2016. The Shennongjia Nature Reserve is home to the rare golden monkeys, which have lived for many years on the verge of extinction since they were first spotted in Shennongjia in the 1960s. The amount of golden monkeys in the nature reserve has doubled since the 1980s because of better environmental protection. [Photo/Xinhua]. Source: China.org.cn

Read More........→January 14, 2016

4 Million Year Old Menu: What Our Ancestors Ate

The diet of Australopithecus anamensis, a hominid that lived in the east of the African continent more than 4 million years ago, was very specialized and, according to a scientific study whose principal author is Ferran Estebaranz, from the Department of Animal Biology at the University of Barcelona, it included foods typical of open environments (seeds, sedges, grasses, etc.), as well as fruits and tubers. 

Artist's concept for Australopithecus anamensi, Credit: Universidad de Barcelona

Australopithecus anamensis (or Praeanthropus anamensis) is a stem-human species that lived approximately four million years ago. Nearly one hundred fossil specimens are known from Kenya and Ethiopia, representing over 20 individuals.

Australopithecus anamensis bone fragment, Credit: University of Zurich

The work, published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences, is directed by lecturer Alejandro Pérez Pérez, from the Anthropology Unit of the Department of Animal Biology at the UB, and its co-authors are professor Daniel Turbón and experts Jordi Galbany and Laura M. Martínez. Australipithecus anamensis is a fossil hominid species described in 1995 by a team led by the researcher Meave Leakey and it is considered to be the direct ancestor of Australopithecus afarensis, known as Lucy, which lived in the same region half a million years later. The paleoecological reconstructions of the sites with Australipithecus anamensis fossil remains are quite similar to those of Australipithecus afarensis, and suggest a scene with different habitats, from open forests to thick plant formations, with herbaceous strata and gallery forests.Traditionally, the reconstruction of the diet of Australipithecus anamensis was carried out by means of indirect evidence (specifically, studies of microstructure and enamel thickness, and the dental size and morphology). In this new study, the team of the UB analyzes the pattern of microstriation of the post-canine dentition, from microscopic traces that some structural components of plants (phytoliths) and other external elements (sand, dust, etc.) leave in the dental enamel during the chewing of food. It is, therefore, a direct analysis of the result of the interaction of the diet with the teeth. SEM images of buccal microstriation pattern of specimens studied: Au. anamensis (a-e) and Au. afarensis (f).

A cercopithecoid model for the study of the diet, Credit: Universidad de Barcelona 

The work published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences studies the microstriation pattern of all the specimens of Australipithecus anamensis recovered up to the year 2003, of which only five are in a good state of preservation. According to the study of the microstriation pattern, the diet of Anthropological anamensis was similar to other present day species of cercopithecoid primates, such as Papiogenus(baboons) and Chlorocebus (green monkey), which live in shrubby savannah areas with a marked seasonal influence. The work arrived at the conclusion that the diet of Australipithecus anamensis was quite abrasive and rich in seeds, leaves and corms, as it is with the baboons of today. This fossil hominid must also have fed on fruit, but in smaller proportions than Australipithecus afarensis.

Graphical representation of the analysis of the groups studied that shows the differences between striation patterns of Au. anamensis and Au. afarensis, Credit: Universidad de Barcelona

What did Australopithecus afarensis eat? The results of the study on the palaeodiet of Australipithecus anamensis match the characteristics of dental morphology and increased robustness of the dentition and the masticatory apparatus compared with its ancestor, Ardipithecus ramidus. The new questions now focus on the diet of Australipithecus afarensis, direct descendent of Australipithecus anamensis, which has a frugivorous and much softer diet, like present day chimpanzees and gorillas in Cameroon. As explained by the researcher Ferran Estebaranz,“the microstriation pattern of Australipithecus anamensis and Australipithecus afarensis is clearly different. This could indicate that the former consumed much harder foodstuffs, whereas the latter had a basically frugivorous diet, of a seasonal character, more similar to the direct ancestor of the two species, Ardipithecus ramidus”. 

Ardipithecus ramidus, Credit: Wikipedia

Contacts and sources: Universidad de Barcelona, http://www.ub.edu, Citaiton: Buccal dental microwear analyses support greater specialization in consumption of hard foodstuffs for Australopithecus anamensis. Ferran Estebaranz, Jordi Galbany, Laura M Martínez, Daniel Turbón and Alejandro Pérez-Pérez. Journal of Anthropological Sciences. Vol. 90 (2012), pp. 1-244, Source: Article, 

Read More........→November 24, 2015

Planet of the Apes soon a reality?

Washington, August 16: A new study reveals that apes might be closer to speaking than many scientists thought. In a study, Marcus Perlman, who started research work at The Gorilla Foundation, sifted 71 hours of video of Koko, a gorilla best known for American Sign Language, interacting with other researchers, and found repeated examples of Koko performing nine different, voluntary behaviors that required control over her vocalisation and breathing. These were learned behaviors, not part of the typical gorilla repertoire. Perlman watched Koko blow a raspberry when she wanted a treat, blow her nose into a tissue, play wind instruments, huff moisture onto a pair of glasses before wiping them with a cloth and mimic phone conversations by chattering wordlessly into a telephone cradled between her ear and the crook of an elbow. Perlman said that Koko did not produce a pretty, periodic sound when she performed these behaviors, like people do when they speak, adding that she could control her larynx enough to produce a controlled grunting sound. He said that Koko was probably no more gifted than other gorillas: the key was her environment. This suggests that some of the evolutionary groundwork for the human ability to speak was in place at least by the time of our last common ancestor with gorillas, estimated to be around 10 million years ago. Perlman further said that Koko showed the potential under the right environmental conditions for apes to develop quite a bit of flexible control over their vocal tract. The study is published in the journal Animal Cognition. — ANI. Source: Article,

Read More........→August 17, 2015