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Extraordinary video footage shows how two scientist parents attempted to raise their infant son alongside a chimpanzee as part of a bizarre nature versus nurture experiment in 1931. Psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg conducted the study on their ten-month-old son Donald and a seven-month-old chimp called Gua at their Florida home. The couple were attempting to establish if it was possible to educate an ape and teach them to communicate as a human. snip Donald took to walking around on all fours, dragging his knuckles like an ape. He would often start biting people when he became aggressive and he...

The ancestors of humans may have begun moving on two legs to forage for food among the treetops in open habitat, researchers have suggested, contradicting the idea that the behaviour arose as an adaptation to spending more time on the ground.The origins of bipedalism in hominins around 7m years ago has long been thought to be linked to a shift in environment, when dense forests began to give way to more open woodland and grassland habitats. In such conditions, it has been argued, our ancestors would have spent more time on the ground than in the trees, and been able...

... The chimpanzee is our closest living relative in evolutionary terms and research suggests our kinship derives from a common ancestor. About five to six million years ago, our evolutionary paths separated, leading to the chimpanzee of today, and Homo Sapiens, humankind in the 21st century. In a new study, stem cell researchers at Lund examined what it is in our DNA that makes human and chimpanzee brains different -- and they have found answers. "Instead of studying living humans and chimpanzees, we used stem cells grown in a lab. The stem cells were reprogrammed from skin cells by our...

A Missouri man who in 2001 was convicted of a felony after he killed a chimpanzee that escaped from a neighboring compound had his conviction expunged after 20 years, St. Louis-based FOX-affiliate KTVI-TV reported Friday. According to the report, Festus, Mo. resident Jason Coats, 37, will no longer have to deal with the “former felon” moniker that has plagued him since he was only 17 years old and he fatally shot one of three chimpanzees which escaped from the recently-disbanded Missouri Primate Foundation on April 19, 2001. The facility housed more than 20 of the animals at the time. Coats,...

To make up for lack of interaction under Covid-19 restrictions, apes at zoos 150km apart can now watch each others’ daily lives on big screens Humans might be tiring of video calls, Zoom birthdays and streamed performances, but the chimps at two Czech zoos are just starting to enjoy their new live online link-up. To make up for the lack of interaction with visitors since the attractions closed in December under Covid-19 restrictions, the chimpanzees at Safari Park Dvur Kralove and the troop at a zoo 150km away in in Brno, can now watch one another’s daily lives on giant...

Broadcaster Danny Baker has been fired from his role at the BBC over a now-deleted tweet comparing Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's newborn son to a chimpanzee. The widely-circulated post showed an image of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee wearing a hat and coat, alongside the caption: "Royal Baby leaves hospital". The BBC Radio 5 Live broadcaster was accused of mocking the Duchess of Sussex's African-American heritage, with Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, who was born on Monday and will be seventh in line to the throne, becoming the first bi-racial British-American royal. Following widespread criticism, Baker again took to...

Zookeepers say a group of chimpanzees used branches weakened by a storm to make a ladder and escape from their enclosure at the Belfast Zoo. Video filmed Saturday by visitors to the Northern Ireland zoo showed several primates scaling a wall and perching atop it, with one walking down a path outside the enclosure. Zookeeper Alyn Cairns said trees in the chimps’ enclosure had been weakened by recent storms, allowing the animals to break them and fashion a ladder to escape.

The chimp at the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Michigan threw feces into a crowd of visitors. The nasty pile hit the woman right in the face and was left hanging from her nose.

All great mind reading begins with chocolate. That’s the basis for a classic experiment that tests whether children have something called theory of mind—the ability to attribute desires, intentions, and knowledge to others. When they see someone hide a chocolate bar in a box, then leave the room while a second person sneaks in and hides it elsewhere, they have to guess where the first person will look for the bar. If they guess “in the original box,” they pass the test, and show they understand what’s going on in the first person’s mind—even when it doesn’t match reality. For...

The chairwoman of the Delta County Republican Party who was accused of favoritism and posting a racist meme on her Facebook page has resigned. Party officials were upset after a photo compared President Barack Obama to a chimpanzee appeared on Linda Sorenson web page, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported. Sorenson stepped down after an accountability meeting was convened by the county’s Republican Central Committee investigating the allegations. She announced her decision to resign in an email to supporters. The committee was investigating allegations that Sorenson and others made that her Facebook page was “hacked” and whether she violated party...

If you live in a foreign country, it helps to learn the local lingo. And this holds just as true for apes as it does for humans, scientists claim. Chimpanzees that had lived for years in a Dutch safari park adopted a 'Scottish accent' after they moved to a new home in an Edinburgh Zoo alongside nine local chimps, the researchers argue. The Dutch apes would make high pitched grunts when they saw apples. The local Edinburgh chimps, by contrast, made a distinctive, lower-pitched grunt. It's evidence, the scientists from the universities of York, Zurich and St Andrews said, that...

The torso (the part of the body that includes the ribcage, belly and pelvis) of chimpanzees has long been thought to be a rigid block, best suited for a life of tree climbing. Humans, on the other hand, have long and flexible torsos that aid in walking by allowing us to rotate our upper body in the opposite direction of our lower body. The findings from the paper, titled "Surprising trunk rotational capabilities in chimpanzees and implications for bipedal walking proficiency in early humans," changes the evolutionary view of how early human ancestors walked and what they were able to...

Dr Moya-Sola with colleagues discovered the fossil specimen of Pierolapithecus in Spain in 2002. They estimated that the hominid lived about 11.9 million years ago, arguing that it could be the last common ancestor of modern great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas and humans... the shape of the specimen’s pelvis indicates that Pierolapithecus lived near the beginning of the great ape evolution, after the lesser apes had started to develop separately but before the great ape species began to diversify... “The ilium – the largest bone in the pelvis – of the Pierolapithecus is wider than that of Proconsul nyanzae,...

With the recent SCOTUS decision, homosexuality is a hotter topic than ever before. It seems that everyone is talking about it right now. Well, in a recent Big Think video, Bill Nye “the Science Guy” was asked about homosexual behavior in an evolutionary worldview: “If the purpose of a species is to reproduce and survive how would it make sense evolutionarily for humans to have same-sex preferences? Are humans the only ones who practice homosexuality? And if this is so, does this mean that homosexuality is the product of humans personal whim as opposed to instinct?”Bill Nye basically answered this...

CHICAGO (AFP) - French fossil hunters have pinned down the age of Toumai, which they contend is the remains of the earliest human ever found, at between 6.8 and 7.2 million years old. The fossil was discovered in the Chadian desert in 2001 and an intense debate ensued over whether the nearly complete cranium, pieces of jawbone and teeth belonged to one of our earliest ancestors. Critics said that Toumai's cranium was too squashed to be that of a hominid -- it did not have the brain capacity that gives humans primacy -- and its small size indicated a creature...

Eagerly he collects wood from the ground, snaps the branches into small pieces and carefully balances them in a pile. Then, taking care not to burn himself, he gently strikes a match and gets ready for a fry-up. Like all red-blooded males, Kanzi loves messing around with a barbecue. But then, as these extraordinary pictures show, Kanzi is no man. He is a bonobo -pygmy chimpanzee -and his love of fire is challenging the way that we think about our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. For although bonobo apes and larger chimpanzees use twigs and leaves as tools, none...

Researchers have assembled the complete genome of the bonobo, an African ape that is one of humans' closest relatives. The achievement, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, marks a milestone. Adding the bonobo genome to the already-sequenced human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan genomes gives scientists a complete catalog of the DNA of all of the so-called great apes. That should help researchers better understand how humans evolved, scientists said. "There's a common ancestor that we and these apes were derived from. We want to know what that ancestor looked like," said Wes Warren, a geneticist at Washington University in St....

So much for the "hippy chimp". Bonobos, known for their peaceable ways and casual sex, have been caught in the act of cannibalism. An account of a group of wild bonobos consuming a dead infant, published last month, is the first report of cannibalism in these animals – making the species the last of the great apes to reveal a taste for the flesh of their own kind. The account comes from a group of primatologists led by Gottfried Hohmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The team has studied bonobos in the wild at...

A detailed examination of the wrist bones of several primate species challenges the notion that humans evolved their two-legged upright walking style from a knuckle-walking ancestor. The same lines of evidence also suggest that knuckle-walking evolved at least two different times, making gorillas distinct from chimpanzees and bonobos. "We have the most robust data I've ever seen on this topic," said Daniel Schmitt, a Duke University associate professor of evolutionary anthropology. "This model should cause everyone to re-evaluate what they've said before." A report on the findings will appear online during the week of Aug. 10 in the research journal...

A type of chimpanzee known to use sex for greetings, reconciliations, and favors may not be all about peace, love, and understanding after all. A new study reveals that some bonobos—one of humankind's closest genetic relatives—hunt and eat other primates. Groups of the endangered chimpanzee subspecies were observed stalking, chasing, and killing monkeys they later consumed. /* snip */ "The second I read this, I thought: Oh good, finally!" said primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. "Bonobos being so peaceful never sat well with me," said Lonsdorf, who was not involved with the study. "We see...