Monkey Teaching A Human

Check out this video of a monkey teaching a human how to crush a leaf. 

Brazilian Capuchin Stone Tool Use

Researchers from Oxford University, working in Brazil, found new archaeological evidence suggests that Brazilian capuchins have been using stone tools to crack open cashew nuts for at least 700 years. Researchers say, to date, they have found the earliest archaeological examples of monkey tool use outside of Africa. In their paper, published in Current Biology,...

Mysterious Chimpanzee Stone Throwing Ritual

In the above video you will see a large male chimp approaching a tree. He pauses for a second, then glances around, grabs a huge rock and flings it full force at the tree trunk. We have known about this. Prior studies have shown or provided anecdotes of wild chimpanzees throwing and banging stones in...

Wild Gorilla Happy Meal Time Songs

Many animals, including chimpanzees and bonobos, have food related calls... But aside from anecdotal reports, there was no evidence of this behavior in gorillas, until now. A new paper in PLoS One documents that the wild western lowland gorillas in the Republic of the Congo sing and hum when eating, as a way to express...

Rare Footage Show Gorilla Sleeping Behaviors

Footage filmed for a new BBC series 'Gorilla Family & Me' reveals what goes on after dark. A family of endangered gorillas are led into the trees by a silverback known as Chimanuka. The clips capture them making and settling in their nests in and around a tree, the first ever film of this behavior... And at...

Katie Slocombe from the University of York observed that before integrating the two different groups of chimpanzees, each produced different grunts for "apple," and after the integration, she noted that the new group members adapted their grunts to the ones produced by the chimpanzees already living there, “Three years after the integration, the grunt calls of...

Gorilla Baby Talk

Eva Maria Luëf and Katja Liebal of the Free University of Berlin have published in the American Journal of Primatology a new paper documenting the occurrence of motheresein 24 captive lowland gorillas. During a 4 month observation of these gorillas, it was observed that elder gorillas used different gestures to start and stop play. To...

Foresight & Innovation in a Devious Chimpanzee

A chimpanzee in at the Furuvik Zoo in Sweden is documented to store various projectile object to be thrown at zoo visitors at a later time. The results of this study has been published in PLoS One, "Spontaneous Innovation for Future Deception in a Male Chimpanzee." I think its a pretty fascinating discussion of foresight,...

Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind

Baboon MetaphysicsDorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, authors of "How Monkeys see the World" and co-authors of "Primate Social Systems" have published yet another thought provoking book on their studies of baboon. In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, "He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke." Baboon Metaphysics is Dorothy L....

Current Biology Covers The 60th Anniversary Of The Founding of Primatology in Japan

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of primatology in Japan, thanks to the works of Kinji Imanishi. Current Biology hosts an essay by Tetsuro Matsuzawa and William McGrew, which reviews Imanishi's contributions to the field. The essay can be found at this link, "Kinji Imanishi and 60 years of Japanese primatology." I'm...