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Throughout their history the ancient Egyptians recorded making voyages to a place called the 'Land of Punt'. To the Egyptians it was a far-off source of exotic animals and valuable goods. From there they brought back perfumes, panther skins, electrum, and, yes, live baboons to keep as pets. The voyages started as early as the Old Kingdom, ca. 4,500 years ago, and continued until just after the collapse of the New Kingdom 3,000 years ago. Egyptologists have long argued about the location of Punt. The presence of perfumes suggests that it was located somewhere in Arabia, such as Yemen. However...

To solve the mystery of where Punt was, a team of scientists is turning to two mummified baboons in the British Museum... One was found at Thebes and the other in the Valley of the Kings. The team is conducting oxygen isotope tests on the preserved hairs of the baboons. Oxygen isotopes act as a 'signal' that can tell scientists where an animal is from... To aid in narrowing down the location of Punt the team is also performing oxygen isotope tests on samples of modern day baboons from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Uganda and Mozambique. If the oxygen isotope...

A federal judge threw out a lawsuit filed by employees of a Houston hospital system over its requirement that all of its staff receive the experimental COVID-19 shot. The Houston Methodist Hospital system suspended 178 employees without pay last week over their refusal to get the shot. Of them, 117 sued seeking to overturn the requirement and over their suspension and threatened termination. In a scathing ruling Saturday, U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes of Houston deemed lead plaintiff Jennifer Bridges’ contention that the vaccines are “experimental and dangerous” to be false and otherwise irrelevant. He also found that her likening...

JEZEBEL SPIRIT ON DISPLAY

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., urged Joe Biden to push back against his fellow Democrats' impeachment effort of President Donald Trump, saying in a series of Twitter posts, if he truly wants "unity," he should instruct them to drop the matter...Biden has repeatedly called for unity and announced the theme of his inauguration will be "America United," a ploy some, such as television host Megyn Kelly, have called cynical and hypocritical.

Monkeys appear in Grecian frescoes dating back to the Bronze Age 3,600 years ago, but monkeys aren't native to Greece or the Aegean isles. But it's clear that the artists actually saw these monkeys in Grecian frescoes, or at least talked to someone who did in great detail, because the depictions are so accurate that researchers can identify the monkeys, according to a new study. Vervet monkeys appear in a fresco from Akrotiri, Thera. They're known for their rounded muzzles, a white band on the forehead, an extended tail and elongated limbs -- all accurately shown in the fresco. Baboons...

Baboons can stand in for humans during cross-species transplantation studies. Now, for the first time, researchers have kept baboons alive and healthy for up to six months on transplanted pig hearts. Credit: Paul A. Sounders ========================================================================= In four adjacent enclosures transplantation researcher Bruno Reichart kept four happy baboons. “They can hop around, eat, drink and they are enjoying life,” he says. “They watch TV—their favorite is the cartoon with the chipmunk.” Most importantly, he says, they were healthy and normal—which is astonishing, given the fact that the hearts beating life in their chests were anything but normal for a baboon....

A Fish and Game commissioner in Idaho who came under fire for circulating images of he and his wife posing with dead animals during a hunt in Africa resigned on Monday, saying he had made "poor judgments." In a letter to Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, the commissioner, Blake Fischer, said those judgments "resulted in sharing photos of a hunt in which I did not display an appropriate level of sportsmanship and respect for the animals I harvested." While claiming the photos were out of character, Fischer apologized and said he hoped the photos would "not harm the integrity and...

Idaho Fish and Game Commissioner Blake Fischer shared photos of his guided hunting trip in Africa with friends and colleagues when he returned last month, expecting they’d appreciate his success. Instead, several former Fish and Game commissioners are pushing for his resignation — with a photo of a “family of baboons” that Fischer shot with a recurve bow prompting most of the outrage. Fred Trevey, who was a Fish and Game commissioner from 2007 to 2015, wrote Fischer an email asking him to resign “to shield the commission as an institution and hunting as a legitimate tool of wildlife management...

The GOP fears a political backlash from female voters, à la what unfolded in 1991 following hearings with Justice Clarence Thomas and law professor Anita Hill...Feinstein’s comments crystallize the Kavanaugh/Ford narrative. We have two credible people who have risen to the tops of their professions. Yet, no one’s certain about who’s truthful. And, there’s no guarantee we’ll know for sure even after a public hearing. After all, people still wonder about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, 27 years later.

A Republican county official in Pennsylvania has resigned after writing Facebook posts calling NFL players who protest during the national anthem "baboons" and "ignorant blacks."

Officials at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute say the fourth baboon who escaped from their facility Saturday has been captured. All four baboons have been checked by veterinary staff and are well, a news release reports. No details were given on where the baboon was caught... Officials did not say how the animals escaped, only that the four were able to get past perimeter fencing at the institute. Witnesses quickly took to to social media to report baboons on the loose after catching sight of the runaways near Northwest Loop 410 and West Military Drive. Jannell Bouton, 26, snapped photos...

JOHANNESBURG – Baboons, it seems, prefer pinot noir. They also like a nice chardonnay. Largely undeterred by electric fences, hundreds of wild baboons in South Africa's prized wine country are finding the vineyards of ripe, succulent grapes to be an "absolute bonanza," said Justin O'Riain of the University of Cape Town. Winemakers have resorted to using noisemakers and rubber snakes to try to drive the baboons off during harvest season. "The poor baboons are driven to distraction," said O'Riain, who works in the university's Baboon Research Unit. "As far as baboons are concerned, the combination of starch and sugar is...

Scientists claim to have identified the missing link between human speech and monkey chatter. Researchers analysed the distinctive "lip-smacking" sounds made by wild gelada baboons of the Ethopian highlands and found striking similarities to human speech. Their noises are so human-like that Thore Bergman, an assistant professor with the University of Michigan, thought he heard people talking while he was hanging out with the creatures. "I would find myself frequently looking over my shoulder to see who was talking to me, but it was just the geladas," he said. "It was unnerving to have primate vocalizations sound so much...

It’s a story Alfred Hitchcock would love. Baboons, extraordinarily social animals whose collective noun is appropriately “troop” are harassing a Saudi village, targeting houses in coordinated assaults while cleverly avoiding poison bananas the villagers have left behind. Arab News brings us the bizarre story: A minor war has broken out south of Qunfudah in the village of Kiad where large groups of hungry baboons from nearby valleys are attacking residences in search of food and drink. Residents have employed a variety of methods to combat the primates but it is still a daily battle from sunrise to sunset.Hussein Al-Barakati, a...

The sun is setting over South Africa's oldest vineyard and the last of the wine-tasting tourists are climbing onto their buses. But one large family group has no intention of leaving – and there is little the management can do about it. Groot Constantia, in the heart of Cape Town's wine country, can deal with inebriated holidaymakers – but it is invading baboons which have developed a taste for its grapes that the wine makers are struggling with. Each day, dozens of Cape Baboons gather to strip the ancient vines – the sauvignon blanc grapes are a particular favourite –...

Male and female baboons form platonic friendships, where sex is off the menu. Having a caring friend around seems to greatly benefit the females and their infants, as both are harassed less by other baboons when in the company of their male pal. But why the males choose to be platonic friends remains a mystery.

So much for the revolution. Security guards on Friday dragged the last of the renegade New York University students out of a campus cafeteria where they had been holed up in protest for three days. "Solidarity! Solidarity!" the fist-pumping rebels yelled as they were ousted from the Kimmel Center. Four students tried to flee a balcony after campus cops breached their barricade. Others were physically removed - and unceremoniously dumped outside. "He picked me up by the shoulders and dragged me through the door," complained protest organizer Farah Khimji, a 20-year-old sophomore. "I was physically subdued. I was thrown to...

According to Darwinian theory, in the past we had a common ancestor with baboons, further back with bananas and still further with bacteria. This dogma has spread like a ‘meme’, which is a contagious idea that propagates in a similar way as a virus by infecting brains, according to inventor of the word, Richard Dawkins.1 In 2002, Roy Britten dispelled the first monkey meme that human and chimpanzee DNA sequences are 98.5% identical.2 He showed that when indelmutations were also taken into account, the difference suddenly became about 5%. The fact that chimpanzee genomes are about 10% larger than that...

SOUTH AFRICA - For generations, members of the impoverished baboon community in the Cape peninsula have suffered from inequality, forced to live in deplorable conditions on the margins of simian society with no access to education, subsidized housing, and universal healthcare - but this paradigm is about to shift. The baboons - whom scientists describe as the most economically oppressed minority among the primates - are finally fighting back, forcing homo sapiens to rethink their place in the diverse biosphere they had exploited for too long without giving back. Scientists are unsure about the cause of the baboons' sudden compulsion...