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Prof. Begun said: "Our findings further suggest that hominines [bonobos, chimpanzees, and gorillas] not only evolved in western and central Europe - but spent over five million years evolving there and spreading to the eastern Mediterranean before eventually dispersing into Africa."....This migration, he added, was "probably a consequence of changing environments and diminishing forests."

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...

A recent study claims that a majority (54%) of Americans now accept as true the statement “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.”1 Unfortunately, given the increased secularization of American society, this increased acceptance of evolution may well be real. Nevertheless, it’s remarkable that, despite decades of attempts by the scientific establishment and popular culture to convince Americans of human evolution, 46% of Americans still reject it! Not too surprisingly, evolutionists attribute this apparent increase in acceptance of human evolution to higher levels of education and scientific literacy. In their minds, it is only...

... 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...

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.

THIS is the secret African island inhabited by super aggressive "monster'" chimps all freed from a US testing laboratory. The apes -who are infected with contagious diseases- were abandoned on the Liberian river island after being released by their captors. The jungle wilderness - known to locals as ‘Monkey Island’ - is now home to more than 60 chimps who are notoriously protective of its shores. Many of the animals are said to be "super aggressive"and those living nearby are terrified to go there for fear of being attacked. Only a select few locals - who regularly take the apes...

10 Weapons That Animals Use We've come a long way from thinking that what separates us from the animals is, say, using a rock to bash in the skull of our competitors. It turns out that there are a lot of creatures out that that re-purpose tools to make their personal world better and someone else's world a lot worse. Take a look at the world's craziest and most intimidating weapons wielded by animals. 10. The Herring Gull's Bread This bird has learned how to use bread to construct a trap. Herring gulls live in large colonies in the urban...

Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology. Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks. The report's authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, said the finding could have implications for human evolution. Chimps had not been previously observed hunting other animals with tools. Pruetz and Bertolani made the discovery at their research site in Fongoli, Senegal, between March 2005 and July 2006. "There were hints that this behavior might...

Cultured Cousins? January 31, 2007 by Kirsten Vala Looking at apes, tools, and human evolution Many animals have been observed using tools: Dolphins use sponges when fishing, crows use sticks to forage for insects in dead wood, capuchin monkeys use stones to break open nuts. A wild chimpanzee in a nest (or bed or sleeping platform), essentially a simple shelter. This is a constructed artifact, a simple example of elementary technology, which happens to be a great ape universal. (© W.C. McGrew) Apes use tools. So what? What does that tell us about human evolution? As it turns out, observing...

Young chimpanzees learn how to use tools to open nuts from their mothers. Photo: Christophe Boesch Researchers have discovered a band of chimpanzees in West Africa which use crude stone hammers to crack open nuts, a sophisticated use of tools the monkeys have been teaching to each new generation for more than a century. Using carefully selected stones weighing up to 15kg, the chimps pound the tough shell of the panda nut to extract a high-energy kernel that is an important part of the animal's diet, researchers report Friday in the journal Science. "It is a very skillful behavior...

Here is some of what is posted on the page: Jan. 17 — The chimpanzee version of the AIDS virus appears to be extremely rare in wild chimps, which suggests the apes evolved a way to deal with the killer virus generations ago, researchers said on Thursday. The study also confirmed earlier theories that AIDS passed to humans from chimps in Central Africa, they said SCIENTISTS HAVE long known nonhuman primates carry their own version of the AIDS virus. But so far, it has been found only in captive chimpanzees. No one knows how prevalent or geographically or genetically diverse ...

The Bible describes humans as being created in the image of God—the pinnacle of His creation. In contrast, those who embrace the presupposition of naturalistic origins have put much effort and even monkey business into a propaganda crusade to claim a bestial origin for man. The idea that humans evolved from an ape-like creature was first widely promoted by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 1800s and later by Charles Darwin in his 1871 book The Descent of Man—published 12 years after his acclaimed evolutionary treatise On the Origin of Species. Thomas Huxley, a friend of Darwin, also did much to...

Church of Cheetah Missouri Synod? Perhaps not as ridiculous as it sounds according to the U.K. Independent. That newspaper suggests that chimpanzees tossing rocks at trees could be a primitive form of religous practice. They provide a video of this "ritual" but to your humble correspondent, it looks like nothing more than a bunch of dumb monkeys idly tossing rocks around. However, the idea of chimp worship is no more ridiculous than the Independent aping a lot of other news outlets last December when they published a story about how 2016 will be the HOTTEST YEAR ON RECORD. So rather than be branded...

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....

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...

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...