Free Republic

Where on this great earth of ours could King Kong’s descendant survive an attack from an army of zoo workers carrying guns and tranquilizing darts? If you said Skull Island you’re right, but you’re also living in a fantasy world. Those living in the real world know the only logical place would be Japan, and sure enough, that’s where this latest ape-human drama played out. (Ichiro the chimp, a 42-year-old resident of Ishikawa Zoo in Japan, managed to escape to the roof in order to cool down during a heatwave. But it took a lot of work from the zoo...

Compared to their sex-mad, peace-loving Bonobo counterparts, chimpanzees are often seen as a scheming, war-mongering, and selfish species. As both apes are allegedly our closest relatives, together they are often depicted as representing the two extremes of human behaviour. Orlaith Fraser, who will receive her PhD from LJMU's School of Biological Sciences in July 2008, has conducted research that shows chimpanzee behaviour is not as clear cut as previously thought. Her study is the first one to demonstrate the effects of consolation amongst chimpanzees. In her recently published article, Fraser analyses how the apes behave after a fight. Working with...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chimps performed about as well as college students at mental addition, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a finding that suggests non-verbal math skills are not unique to humans. The research from Duke University follows the finding by Japanese researchers earlier this month that young chimpanzees performed better than human adults at a memory game. Prior studies have found non-human primates can match numbers of objects, compare numbers and choose the larger number of two sets of objects. "This is the first study that looked at whether or not they could make explicit decisions that were based...

Young chimpanzee can recall number placement better than people can. A particularly cunning seven-year-old chimp named Ayumu has bested university students at a game of memory. He and two other young chimps recalled the placement of numbers flashed onto a computer screen faster and more accurately than humans. “It’s a very simple fact: chimpanzees are better than us — at this task,” says Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at Kyoto University in Japan who led the study. The work doesn't mean that chimps are 'smarter' than humans, but rather they seem to be better at memorizing a snapshot view of their...

Chimps don't mind being chumps in raisin game 19:53 04 October 2007 NewScientist.com news service Roxanne Khamsi Unlike humans, chimpanzees will gladly accept a rotten deal from one another, suggesting they have a very different concept of fairness, a new study shows. Experiments reveal that chimps are more focused on the immediate outcome of a transaction than the overall fairness of the deal. By contrast, people generally place a huge emphasis on equity in deal brokering – so much so that it will cause them to make irrational economic decisions. This is demonstrated, for example, in what's known as the...

He's now got a human name — Matthew Hiasl Pan — but he's having trouble getting his day in court. Animal rights activists campaigning to get Pan, a 26-year-old chimpanzee, legally declared a person vowed Thursday to take their challenge to Austria's Supreme Court after a lower court threw out their latest appeal. A provincial judge in the city of Wiener Neustadt dismissed the case earlier this week, ruling that the Vienna-based Association Against Animal Factories had no legal standing to argue on the chimp's behalf. The association, which worries the shelter caring for the chimp might close, has been...

Female chimpanzees 'sell' sex for fruit By Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 11/09/2007 Female chimpanzees are "selling" sex to the males that gather the most fruit, according to new research. Behavioural psychologists found that female chimps mate with the males that give them the most fruit, while male chimps steal "desirable" fruits such as papaya from farms and orchards in a bid to woo potential mates. Oranges, pineapples and maize are among the most sought after crops, with bananas proving far less popular. The scientists also discovered that the chimp that gathered the most fruit in the...

WASHINGTON - Why did humans evolve to walk upright? Perhaps because it's just plain easier. Make that "energetically less costly," in science-speak, and you have the conclusion of researchers who are proposing a likely reason for our modern gait. Bipedalism — walking on two feet — is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and scientists have debated for years how it came about. In the latest attempt to find an explanation, researchers trained five chimpanzees to walk on a treadmill while wearing masks that allowed measurement of their oxygen consumption.

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla. Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the shifting fortunes of warring rebel factions, and the heart of the animals' range...

Once upon a time, Mary-Claire King and the late Allan Wilson published a paper — that became a widely-cited classic — about the genetic similarity of chimps and humans. “Evolution at Two Levels in Humans and Chimpanzees,” Science 188 (1975):107-116 was, alas, cited far more for proving the genetic near-identity of chimps and humans than for its much more interesting, deeper and more disturbing message...

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV. But he doesn't care for coffee, and he isn't actually a person—at least not yet. In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26- year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person." Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his...

a population of savannah chimps (Pan troglodytes verus) living in the Fongoli area of south-east Senegal have been seen making spears from strong sticks that they sharpen with their teeth. The average spear length is 63 centimetres (25 inches)... And the method of procuring food with these tools is not simply extractive, as it is when harvesting insects. It is far more aggressive. They use the spears to hunt one of the cutest primates in Africa: bushbabies (Galago senegalensis). Bushbabies are nocturnal and curl up in hollows in trees during the day... Chimps were observed thrusting their spears into hollow...

Chimpanzees have been seen using spears to hunt bushbabies, US researchers say in a study that demonstrates a whole new level of tool use and planning by our closest living relatives. Perhaps even more intriguing, it was only the females who made and used the wooden spears to hunt the tiny nocturnal primates, report Assistant Professor Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani of Iowa State University. Bertolani saw an adolescent female chimp use a spear to stab a bushbaby as it slept in a tree hollow, pull it out and eat it. Pruetz and Bertolani, now at the University of Cambridge,...

NEW YORK While the Iraq Study Group report earned generally positive reviews at newspapers across the country today, Thursday's front page of the New York Post took a far different (but typically outrageous) approach, picturing James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the chairmen of the panel, as "surrender monkeys" -- with their faces pasted on the heads of actual chimps. The front page story by Niles Latham declares, "The Iraq Study Group report delivered to President Bush yesterday contains 79 separate recommendations - but not one that explains how American forces can defeat the terrorist insurgents, only ways to bring the...

Male chimpanzees have a penchant for a toyboy lifestyle and would far rather pair off with an older female than find one of their own age, a study has found.To a young male chimp there is nothing so attractive as wrinkles, sagging skin and bald patches in a female who is old enough to be his great-great-grandmother. Young women in human society can find themselves faced with a queue of men hoping to buy them a drink, but in chimpanzee communities it is the experienced female who is regarded as the epitome of beauty. The toll that age and a...

One of the fastest-evolving pieces of DNA in the human genome is a gene linked to brain development, according to findings by an international team of researchers published in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Nature. In a computer-based search for pieces of DNA that have undergone the most change since the ancestors of humans and chimps diverged, "Human Accelerated Region 1" or HAR1, was a clear standout, said lead author Katie Pollard, assistant professor at the UC Davis Genome Center and the Department of Statistics. "It's evolving incredibly rapidly," Pollard said. "It's really an extreme case." As a...

HIV origin 'found in wild chimps' This mother chimp is SIV positive The origin of HIV has been found in wild chimpanzees living in southern Cameroon, researchers report. A virus called SIVcpz (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus from chimps) was thought to be the source, but had only been found in a few captive animals. Now, an international team of scientists has identified a natural reservoir of SIVcpz in animals living in the wild. The findings are to be published in Science magazine. It is thought that people hunting chimpanzees first contracted the virus - and that cases were first seen in...

Did humans and chimps once interbreed? 17 May 2006 From New ScientistBob Holmes IT GOES to the heart of who we are and where we came from. Our human ancestors were still interbreeding with their chimp cousins long after first splitting from the chimpanzee lineage, a genetic study suggests. Early humans and chimps may even have hybridised completely before diverging a second time. If so, some of the earliest fossils of proto-humans might represent an abortive first attempt to diverge from chimps, rather than being our direct ancestors. We can observe the traces of this complex history in the human...

In an attempt to better define science, evolution and intelligent design, filmmakers are preparing a documentary that reviews lessons delivered last year in U.S. Middle District Court in Harrisburg. Crews from "NOVA," a popular PBS science television series, will be in Dover, York and Harrisburg this summer conducting interviews and obtaining footage for a two-hour show centered on Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. [Link to text of opinion: Kitzmiller et al. v Dover Area School District et al.] Barbara Moran, senior researcher for Boston-based "NOVA," said crews paid attention to the trial and interest grew with each...

TEMPE, Ariz. -- Researchers believe that dynamic regions of the human genome -- "hotspots" in terms of duplications and deletions -- are potentially involved in the rapid evolution of morphological and behavioral characteristics that are genetically determined. Now, an international team of researchers, including a graduate student and an associate professor from Arizona State University, are finding similar hotspots in chimpanzees, which has implications for the understanding of genomic evolution in all species. "We found that chimpanzees have many copy number variants -- duplications or deletions of large segments of DNA -- in the same regions of the genome as...

MBIHE-MOKELE, Congo - Even as Congolese villagers devise novel ways to snare the fast-disappearing bonobo, scientists are racing to save the gentle "hippie chimp" from extinction. The bonobo, or pan paniscus, is closely related to man and known for resolving squabbles through sex rather than violence. It's also prized by some Congolese for its tasty meat. The wiry, wizened-faced chimps are being killed in treetop nests in Congo's vast rain forest, their only natural habitat in the world, by villagers who do not seem to know how fast their prey is disappearing. "Bonobos are an icon for peace and love,...

First Chimpanzee Fossils Cause Problems for Evolution by Fazale (Fuz) R. Rana, Ph.D.Where were you on September 1, 2005? Perhaps you missed the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: the influential journal Nature published the completed sequence of the chimpanzee genome.1This remarkable achievement received abundant publicity because it paved the way for biologists to conduct detailed genetic comparisons between humans and chimpanzees.2Unfortunately, the fanfare surrounding the chimpanzee genome overshadowed a more significant discovery. In the same issue, Nature published a report describing the first-ever chimpanzee fossils. This long-awaited scientific advance barely received notice because of the fascination with the chimpanzee genome....

One of biggest paradigm shifts in origins in recent years is when genetics and morphological studies began to show that Neanderthals and humans weren’t related. Sure, a lot of Darwin Fundies around here don’t know that because they get all of their science from the talking point lists of their Fundamentalist Leaders. So this is probably a big shock too, science is also showing that man is not related to any hominids including apes. In the groundbreaking book, Who was Adam?, biochemist Fazale Rana examines the scientific research that is overturning Darwinian Fundamentalism. Here, using peer-reviewed research that the Darwin...

I drove into New Haven on a recent morning with a burning question on my mind. How did my daughter do against the chimpanzees? A month before, I had found a letter in the cubby of my daughter Charlotte at her preschool. It was from a graduate student at Yale asking for volunteers for a psychological study. The student, Derek Lyons, wanted to observe how 3- and 4-year-olds learn. I was curious, so I got in touch. Mr. Lyons explained how his study might shed light on human evolution. His study would build on a paper published in the July...

Panama, Nov 1 (Prensa Latina) A US presidential visit to Panama may be received by angry banana growers in front of that country´s embassy here. George W. Bush will arrive in this capital next Sunday for a less-than-24-hour visit, and although the government has worked hard to present the US statesman´s stopover as a step forward in bilateral relations, rejection prevails. The Cooperative of Multiple Services of Puertos Armuelles (COOSEMUPAR), in the province of Chiriqu¡, has some issues with the US transnational banana company Chiquita Brands International, and has asked the Panamanian government to get back four million dollars worth...

Captive chimpanzees fail to help others in their social group, even when it causes no inconvenience, a behavioural study in Nature journal has found. Helpfulness is prevalent in humans, even when it may harm the helper's own interests to aid another. Humanlike attributes shown by chimps include tool use and maybe rudimentary language skills, but this study suggests altruism is not among them. But other researchers said that captive chimps may be less socially inclined. A team led by Joan Silk of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), set captive chimpanzees tests in which they obtained a food reward....

Oh, No ! More Animals in the News !! London: Researchers from Emory University of Texas, and The University of Louisiana have made a careful study of two separate groups of chimpanzees – in an effort to determine whether the primates have any “altruistic impulses”. Both groups noted ,when chimps are provided with treats, they are not the least bit inclined to share them with other chimps – despite clearly identifiable “begging gestures” by their less fortunate counterparts. ( Oddly enough,the same behavior has been observed in self-described liberals – who tend to contribute far less to the needy than...

The first detailed genetic comparison between humans and chimpanzees shows that 96 per cent of the DNA sequence is identical in the two species. But there are significant differences, particularly in genes relating to sexual reproduction, brain development, immunity and the sense of smell.An international scientific consortium publishes the genome of the chimpanzee, the animal most closely related to homo sapiens on Thursday in the journal Nature. It is the fourth mammal to have its full genome sequenced, after the mouse, rat and human being.Some of the scientific analysis of the 3bn chemical "letters" of the chimp's genetic code focused...

When it comes to fishing tasty termites out of their mounds, wild chimpanzees don't have the right stuff. Most, in fact, are southpaws. A three-year study of 17 wild chimps in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, found that 12 of them used their left hands when using sticks to probe for termites. Four were right-handed and one was listed as ambiguously handed. "Contrary to previous claims, wild chimpanzees show population-level handedness in tool-use," reported the research team led by William D. Hopkins of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. Population-level handedness indicates a preference for one...

The most comprehensive study to date exploring the genetic divergence of humans and chimpanzees has revealed that the genes most favoured by natural selection are those associated with immunity, tumour suppression, and programmed cell death. These genes show signs of positive natural selection in both branches of the evolutionary tree and are changing more swiftly than would be expected through random mutation alone. Lead scientist Rasmus Nielsen and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, examined the 13,731 chimp genes that have equivalent genes with known functions in humans. Research in 2003 revealed that genes involved with smell, hearing, digestion,...

Mr. Muggs has been outed, no more Mister nice Guy, Fred J. How can a sweet little, vegetarian, sweetypie rip off someones nuts, and nose, and hand, and still claim vegetarian sweety status? Hell, I forgot, I think a foot was ripped off, too! Don't take Me wrong, I walk around with wild critters every day, and love them with all My heart and soul, but, I never, ever, forget that any of the little bastards would eat Me for lunch, in a NooYawk heartbeat. May I say, "Thank God, I'm a country Boy"? http://photobucket.com/albums/v244/tsiya/

Chimps behaving badly Among chimpanzees and humans alike, one sex is also responsible for most of the violence. What is it with males? Words: Sanjida O'Connell Page 1 Page 2 In 1974, a young man was studying chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. What Richard Wrangham - today a professor at Harvard University and with his own chimpanzee research centre in Uganda - saw at Gombe 30 years ago influenced him to such an extent that he developed a major new theory, which was published in 1996. It is called the Demonic Male Hypothesis, and it suggests that...

Mauled Man Tried to 'Reason' With Chimps 19 minutes ago U.S. National - AP SAN FRANCISCO - A man who was severely mauled by two chimpanzees at an animal sanctuary last week was quickly overwhelmed when the apes attacked, his wife said Monday. "One was at his head, one was at his foot. But all that time ... he was trying to reason with them," a sobbing LaDonna Davis told ABC's "Good Morning America." "I couldn't do anything." Davis, 64, and her husband, St. James Davis, were visiting Animal Haven Ranch near Bakersfield on Thursday when two male chimps escaped...

Woman attacked by chimp speaks of the attack updated 03/05/05 BAKERSFIELD - A West Covina man critically attacked by a chimpanzee on earlier in the week continues to struggle for his life at Loma Linda University Medical Center. The attacked happened on Thursday morning at the Animal Haven Ranch near Havilah. On Saturday, his wife LaDonna Davis, who was also attacked, spoke to NBC’s Today Show about the trauma that changed her and her husband's lives forever. Davis and her husband St. James Davis were having a birthday party for their longtime pet chimpanzee Moe. When they were suddenly attacked...

HAVILAH, Calif. — St. James and LaDonna Davis raised Moe the chimpanzee as their son. That was the word they used to describe him, and that was how they treated him — like a hairy, rambunctious child who was a pampered member of the family. They taught him to wear clothes, to take showers, to use the toilet and to watch TV in their West Covina home. They had their picture taken in bed with him. On Thursday, the day they marked as Moe's 39th birthday, their love for the chimp nearly cost them their lives. The Davises were visiting...

Chimps tear off man's face From correspondents in Los Angeles March 5, 2005 A CALIFORNIA man's face was torn off in a savage attack by two huge chimpanzees while he was delivering a birthday cake to his former chimp pet of 30 years. The victim, St James Davis, 62, was in critical condition after suffering severe facial and bodily injuries, officials said today. He and his wife had been paying a visit to their old simian pal, Moe, when the attack happened. Mr Davis was attacked by two male chimpanzees who had escaped from a cage adjoining Moe's at the...

Chimps Shot Dead After Attacking Visitors At California Sanctuary POSTED: 8:08 am EST March 4, 2005 BAKERSFIELD, Calif. -- A couple's plans for a birthday party for their former pet chimpanzee turned tragic when two other chimps at an animal sanctuary escaped from their cage and attacked. The man was critically injured with massive wounds to his face, body and limbs, and the attacking animals were shot dead. St. James and LaDonna Davis were at the Animal Haven Ranch in Caliente to celebrate the birthday of Moe, a 39-year-old chimpanzee who was taken from their suburban Los Angeles home in...

Monkeys make a meal of human babies From The Times January 01, 2004 Chimpanzees struggling to survive amid the destruction of their forest habitat are snatching and killing human babies. At least eight children have died in the past seven years in Uganda and Tanzania after being taken by chimpanzees and a further eight have been injured. The children were found with limbs and other body parts chewed off. Primate experts blame deforestation and human encroachment on the chimpanzees' habitat for the aggressive behaviour, but are divided on whether the animals are defending their territory or seeking a replacement food...

So Ted Kennedy refers to Bush's conservative judicial nominees as"neanderthals"...and nary a peep about it in the mainstream press.Well, let's see what sort of animal we're dealing with here!

President George W Bush's personal chef has been humiliated by a team of French practical jokers who tempted him with a job offer to desert his employer and go to work for President Jacques Chirac.The stunt, which is threatening to spiral into a diplomatic incident, happened when Walter Scheib visited Paris in his capacity as president of the Chefs des Chefs d'Etat, a club for those who cook for the world's heads of state.On Wednesday evening he was due to attend a party at the Elysee Palace given by the French leader's wife, Bernadette. That afternoon a French television company...

Researchers investigating the origins of the AIDS virus have traced it to a similar virus--simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV)--that jumped from chimpanzees to humans. But how chimpanzees first acquired SIV remains unclear. New findings published today in the journal Science indicate that HIV's predecessor arose as a combination of two monkey viruses about a million years ago. Paul Sharp of the University of Nottingham and his colleagues studied the evolutionary history of a variety of SIV strains. The researchers found that the family trees of the chimpanzee virus (SIVcpz) constructed using different parts of its genome varied significantly, suggesting it arose...

A new report argues that chimpanzees are so closely related to humans that they should be included in our branch of the tree of life. Chimpanzees and other apes have historically been separated from humans in classification schemes, with humans deemed the only living members of the hominid family of species

Washington - Research has long indicated that all dogs, from prissy Pekingese to slobbering St. Bernards, are the domesticated descendants of wolves. But scientists have tussled like puppies over the question of when and where the transition from wild carnivore to newspaper-toting pet began - and why, exactly, dogs and humans have gotten along so well. Now, a new analysis of dog DNA pegs East Asia as the place where wolves and people began their dance of co-domestication - not Europe or the Middle East, as some experts have contended. The work also suggests that domestication began about 15,000 years...

You reach Harvard University's biological anthropology department by climbing five flights of fusty wooden stairs in the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Mass. It's an old building, haunted by the remnants of long lost tribes and the ghosts of an era when anthropologists thought nothing of collecting the paraphernalia of ancestor worship, not to mention the bones of the ancestors themselves. But it's not bones that have brought me to the Peabody today. I've made the climb to meet Carole Hooven, a young graduate student in biological anthropology, and Richard Wrangham, one of the world's leading experts on chimpanzee behavior. They...