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Tag: "ape" at biology news

Lessons from the orangutans: Upright walking may have begun in the trees

...to tell whether you're looking at a human or other ape ancestor. It's been getting more and more difficul...that bipedalism would have benefited tree-dwelling ape ancestors. Because these ancestors were probably fruit-eaters, as orangutans are, they would have...

Gene mutation linked to cognition is found only in humans

... the expression of type II in the PFC of two great ape species, chimpanzees and orangutans, and found that it was not present. Since these two species diverged most recently from human ancestors (about 5 and 14 million years ago respectively), this finding demonstrates that type II is a human-specific fo...

Ebola outbreaks killing thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees

...aks may be amplified by Ebola transmission between ape social groups. The study provides hope that newly ... groups are rare. Therefore, when reports of large ape die-offs first surfaced in the late 1990s, outbreak amplification was assumed to be through "massive...

Ebola-outbreak kills 5000 gorillas

...rilla and chimpanzee populations. Since reports of ape die-offs first circulated widely in 2003, sceptics...ted areas that were designed to be the bulwarks of ape conservation efforts. Ebola has not totally made apes totally extinct from these areas but it has pu...

Singing for survival

...referential communication system in a free-ranging ape species." "Finding this ability among ape species, especially gibbons who in a sense bridge the evolutionary gap between great apes and monkey...

UAB researchers confirm HIV-1 originated in wild chimpanzees

...g chimpanzees in west-central Africa. By analyzing ape fecal samples collected by trackers from the fores...n) in as many as 35 percent of chimpanzees in some ape communities. The UAB investigators went on to molecularly clone and sequence the complete viral ge...

Most human-chimp differences due to gene regulation ?not genes

...his study shows that as humans diverged from their ape ancestors in the last five million years, genes for transcription factors -- which control the expression of other genes -- were four times as likely to have changed their own expression patterns as the genes they regulate. Because they influence th...

Genetic study shows humans have pushed orangutans to the brink of extinction

...time that a recent and alarming decline of a great ape population--brought about by man--has been demonstrated, dated, and quantified using genetic information," says Goossens, a wildlife geneticist at Cardiff University who conducted the genetic study. "Developing effective conservation and recovery pro...

'Banana-jawed' fossil mammal linked to rare sound-producing skill

...ecades, Simons visited the site in search of early ape and monkey fossils, as part of his main research focus on the evolution of primates leading up to humans. During these explorations in the "Badlands of Egypt," his group collected enough specimens of Thyrohyrax to allow a systematic analysis of its j...

Scientists narrow the time limits for the human and chimpanzee split

...recent common ancestor of humans and their closest ape relatives -- the chimpanzees -- lived. Scientists at Arizona State and Penn State Universities have placed the time of this split between 5 and 7 million years ago -- a sharper focus than that given by the previous collection of molecular and fossil...

Wild Gorillas Handy with a Stick

...s in Liberia in 1951, little was known about great ape behavior in the wild. The sighting was published as a short note by Harry Beatty in the Journal of Mammalogy (recounted by primatologist Frans de Waal in The Ape and the Sushi Master). After spotting a shell mound, Beatty saw a chimp “come ambling r...

The first laugh: New study posits evolutionary origins of two distinct types of laughter

...st 7 million years. Evolutionarily elaborated from ape play-panting sometime between 4 million years ago and 2 million years ago, laughter arising from non-serious social incongruity promoted community play during fleeting periods of safety. Such non-serious social incongruity, it is argued, is the evol...

“Hitchhiking?Viruses as Cancer Drug Delivery System

...range into more and more open habitats." When our ape ancestors moved -- for reasons unknown -- onto the open, relatively treeless savannah, they left behind the rain forest and its abundance of fruit and leaves, the mainstays of modern chimpanzee diets. Laden and Wrangham believe that savannah-dwellers...

The roots of civilization trace back to ... roots

...range into more and more open habitats." When our ape ancestors moved -- for reasons unknown -- onto the open, relatively treeless savannah, they left behind the rain forest and its abundance of fruit and leaves, the mainstays of modern chimpanzee diets. Laden and Wrangham believe that savannah-dwellers...

Rodent social behavior encoded in junk DNA

...e Emory researchers have found that the bonobo, an ape noted for its empathic traits, unlike its relative the chimpanzee, has a microsatellite with a sequence similar to that of humans. Two studies have found modest associations between alterations in this microsatellite and autism in some families. As s...

'Punctuated' evolution in the human genome

...rs to have formed from the fusion of two mid-sized ape chromosomes, and it is the primary cytogenetic distinction separating humans and their evolutionary progenitors. Within this 700 Kb region of human chromosome 2, the researchers identified segments of DNA that originated from 14 ancestral loci. Thes...

Poaching, logging, and outbreaks of Ebola threaten central African gorillas and chimpanzees

...s a particular threat, with devastating effects on ape populations. Ebola spreads through contact with bl...ire immediate help. Seven "exceptional sites" have ape populations exceeding 2,000 in a large area (8,232 to 41,900 square kilometres), while five "importa...

Scientists analyze chromosomes 2 and 4

...hromosome 2 arose from the fusion of two ancestral ape chromosomes, researchers supported by the National...duced as the result of the fusion of two mid-sized ape chromosomes and a Seattle group located the fusion site in 2002. In the latest analysis, researcher...

Chimp genome reveals a retroviral invasion

...es found over 100 copies of PTERV1 in each African ape (chimp and gorilla) and Old World monkey (baboon and macaque) species. The authors compared the sites of viral integration in each of these primates and found that few if any of these insertion sites were shared among the primates. It appears therefo...

Retrovirus struck ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas millions of years ago, but did not affect ancestral humans

...from an external retrovirus that actively infected ape species in the past. "The reason retroviruses are so deadly, at the genetic level, is that they have a tremendous potential to mess up a gene and interfere with its expression," explained Dr. Evan Eichler, UW associate professor of genome sciences a...

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