We ain’t monkeyin’ around here.
Main slab of Darwinius masillae (specimen PMO 214.214), new genus and species, from Messel in Germany. Photo from Wikipedia. Ida or "Aunt Ida" as many might recall from this summer of craziness sent shock waves around the nation as it was herald the missing link between prosimians and anthropoids (primates and human). Deserving of its... Continue Reading →
Animation of chimpanzee yawning from Emory University. Illustration from BBC News. I'm sure we are all familiar with this scenario: Someone yawns and we would "catch" it or vice versa. This is the phenomenon of contagious yawning. A new paper from The Proceedings of The Royal Society "Computer animations stimulate contagious yawning in chimpanzees" suggests... Continue Reading →
A Fongoli chimp. Photo by Frans Lanting, National Geographic. I just stumbled upon this on Twitter (Thanks to DarwinMonkey). It's a National Geographic page about the Senegalese Fongoli chimps, named after the Fongoli stream that runs through the chimpanzee's range. There are videos showing these chimps using tools fishing for termites, hunting a bushbaby and... Continue Reading →
A research from Duke University by Daniel Schmitt, associate professor of evolutionary anthropology, and Tracy Kivell, a post-doctoral research associate, shows that human evolved from tree climbing ancestors, not from knuckle-walkers. Schmitt and Kivell examined and compared the wrist bones of humans and African apes. Their research, "Independent evolution of knuckle-walking in African apes shows... Continue Reading →
Boing Boing is on fire, first they post on Bill Bass and now they post on a new study from Smithsonian which reviews the,"traits that [chimpanzees and humans] share, like altruism and vengeance, and those we don't, like spite and most social learning skills, are shedding light on what it means to be human."So check out the article, "Animal Insight."... Continue Reading →
Primatology.net 