Chimpanzee in Biological News

The chimpanzee stone age

Researchers have found evidence that chimpanzees from West Africa were cracking nuts with stone tools before the advent of agriculture, thousands of years ago. The result suggests chimpanzees developed this behaviour on their own, or even that stone tool use was a trait inherited from our common an...

Use of stone hammers sheds light on geographic patterns of chimpanzee tool use

In a finding that challenges a long-held belief regarding the cultural spread of tool use among chimpanzees, researchers report that chimpanzees in the Ebo forest, Cameroon, use stone hammers to crack open hard-shelled nuts to access the nutrient-rich seeds. The findings are significant because thi...

Scientists narrow the time limits for the human and chimpanzee split

A team of researchers has proposed new limits on the time when the most 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 sh...

Mouse model provides clues to human language development

...d and analyzed a mouse model in which parts of the human Foxp2 gene were introduced. Foxp2 is known to be a key gene for language. Since the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged, only minimal genetic alterations have occurred, even with reference to the mouse: The alterations, as scientists surmised, are clos...

Humans related to orangutans, not chimps, says new Pitt, Buffalo Museum of Science study

...lone. The occurrence of orangutan features in Australopithecus contradicts the expectation generated by DNA analysis that ancestral humans should have chimpanzee similarities, Schwartz and Grehan write. Chimpanzees and gorillas were found to share only those features found in all great apes. Schwartz and Gre...

The secret to chimp strength

... February's brutal chimpanzee attack, during which a pet chimp inflicted devastating injuries on a Connecticut woman, was a stark reminder that chimps are much stronger than humans...

Lincoln Park Zoo scientists awarded National Institutes of Health grant

.... Chimpanzees can provide researchers insight into humans because of a shared evolutionary history and similar social patterns. Additionally, both chimpanzee and human mothers provide the majority of infant care throughout a long period of infant development. In most mammals, including humans, the mother-of...

Small male chimps use politics, rather than aggression, to lead the pack, U of Minnesota study says

...findings are reported in the February issue of the American Journal of Primatology . While it's widely known that grooming plays an important role in chimpanzee social interaction, this study is the first to show that it can be a strategy for achieving dominance. Mark Foster, who was an undergraduate pursui...

African thicket rat malaria linked to virulent human form

..., P. falciparum seemed to not be closely related to anything else but the chimpanzee parasite. But this study places it in a sister group of parasites from rode... chabaudi , P. berghei ,, and P. yoelii ,, as a sister group of human and chimpanzee P. falciparum , and P. reichenowi ,. This is interesting and surprising b...

In a last 'stronghold' for endangered chimpanzees, survey finds drastic decline

... Evolutionary Anthropology. "Since most threats to chimpanzee populations are derived from human activities such...n, this has contributed to the dramatic decline in chimpanzee populations. Furthermore, the situation has deteri...d of the 1980s, when the first and last nationwide chimpanzee survey was carried out, the total population of ch...

Despite 'peacenik' reputation, bonobos hunt and eat other primates too

... Unlike the male-dominated societies of their chimpanzee relatives, bonobo societyin which females enjoy a higher social status than maleshas a "make-love-not-war" kind of image. While chimpanzee males frequently band together to hunt and kill monkeys, the more peaceful ...

Book's plea: Save the bonobos

...ntenance of their habitat, the little apes could become extinct in the wild in less than a decade. The bonobo, one of two species that make up the chimpanzee genus, Pan, is among nature's quaintest, cutest animals. Along with the common chimpanzee, the bonobo is the closest relative to humans, with a genome...

Spradling receives Gruber Foundation Genetics Prize for new genetic techniques

...or his pivotal role in the Human Genome Project 2004: Mary-Claire King, for three major findings in modern genetics: the similarity of the human and chimpanzee genomes; finding a gene that predisposes to breast cancer; and forensic genetics 2003: David Botstein, a driving force in modern genetics who establi...

Did walking on 2 feet begin with a shuffle?

... hides when humans split off from other primates, Kramer and co-author Adam Sylvester, now a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, used the chimpanzee as a way of looking into the past and testing other researchers ideas about the origins of bipedalism. Chimpanzees are humans closest relatives. Th...

Decade of the Mind symposium in Iowa to emphasize need for $4 billion in federal support

... Institute at Kyoto University in Japan. Matsuzawas research has focused on chimpanzee intelligence and tool use, both in the wild and in laboratory settings. His session is titled chimpanzee Mind: A Combining Effort of Fieldwork and Laboratory Work. Dr. Robert ...

Great Ape Trust to gather internationally recognized scientists for Decade of the Mind III

... Institute at Kyoto University in Japan. Matsuzawas research has focused on chimpanzee intelligence and tool use, both in the wild and in laboratory settings. His session is titled chimpanzee Mind: A Combining Effort of Fieldwork and Laboratory Work. Dr. Robert ...

Rwanda conservation effort to link isolated chimps to distant forest

...2008 include: Begin a study of the behavioral ecology of the Gishwati chimpanzee population to determine population size, resource and space use, patterns o...Reserve. This would include employment opportunities for trackers for the chimpanzee study, planting and monitoring forest trees and technical support for the d...

Key 'impact hunters' catalyze hunting among male chimpanzees

...himpanzees. Hunts rarely occurred in the absence of the impact males. If all chimpanzees were equally skilled at hunting, the addition of any given chimpanzee to a party would increase the likelihood of hunting. However, this did not appear to be the case; it was the addition of these two impact hunters tha...

Great apes endangered by human viruses

... This protective effect outweighed the substantial chimpanzee mortality caused by human disease introduction. ...ology to track human disease introduction into two chimpanzee communities at Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire,... activities in the surrounding area. Consequently, chimpanzee densities at both the research study site and a ne...

There is powerful evidence of evolution in human DNA

...nally useless but scientifically informative remnants of our evolutionary ancestry trapped in the human genetic code. For example, the analysis of the chimpanzee and Rhesus monkey genomes shows indisputable evidence of the human evolutionary relationship with other primates. Over 95 percent of our genome is ide...

Wild chimpanzees appear not to regularly experience menopause

...nd no evidence that menopause is common among wild chimpanzee populations," says lead author Melissa Emery Thomp... begin reproducing at age 13 to 15. This makes the chimpanzee reproductive profile much longer and flatter than ...son and her colleagues gathered data from six wild chimpanzee populations in Tanzania, Uganda, Guinea, and Gambi...

Young chimps top adult humans in numerical memory

...e same apparatus, following the same procedure. chimpanzee memory has been extensively studied, the researche...e data have suggested that, in some circumstances, chimpanzee memory may indeed be superior to human memory. ...erals. One of the mothers, named Ai, was the first chimpanzee who learned to use Arabic numerals to label sets o...

Great Ape Trust awards $127,000 for international conservation efforts

...lougo Triangle $10,000 Supported field studies of chimpanzee tool use in the Republic of the Congo. Kyam...educe demand on wood from rain forest. Wild chimpanzee Foundation $7,400 Supported public education prog...ht have to accommodate in the next 50 years. chimpanzee Conservation Center $5,000 Great Ape Trust assist...

Fair play in chimpanzees

...her). In the fourth game, the proposer's other choice was hyper-unfair (10 for himself, 0 for the responder). Unlike humans faced with these games, chimpanzee responders accepted any nonzero offer, whether it was unfair or not. The only offer that was reliably rejected was the 10/0 option (responder gets not...

Primate sperm competition: speed matters

...ngineering at the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine, and UCSD Ph.D. candidate Jaclyn Nascimento reported that sperm cells from the more promiscuous chimpanzee and rhesus macaque species swim much faster and with much greater force than those of humans and gorillas, species where individual females mate prima...

New collaborative research reveals chimpanzees can sustain multiple-tradition cultures

...high-ranking individuals in four different captive chimpanzee communities. Researchers then observed as those in...de Waal, Dr. Horner and Dr. Bonnie worked with two chimpanzee groups and introduced each to one of two alternati...chers observed 10 traditions spread throughout the chimpanzee groups at the Yerkes Research Center and the Unive...

Nurtured chimps rake it in

... Human interaction and stimulation enhance chimpanzees’ cognitive abilities, according to new research from the chimpanzee Cognition Center at The Ohio State University. The study (1) is the first to demonstrate that raising chimpanzees in a human cultural environment enh...

Ancient retrovirus sheds light on modern pandemic

...one virus may have made us more vulnerable to HIV." Evidence of human immunity to this ancient retrovirus first emerged with the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome. "When the chimp genome was sequenced, a team of scientists at the University of Washington led by Evan Eichler found the largest difference ov...

Gene mutation linked to cognition is found only in humans

... The human and chimpanzee genomes vary by just 1.2 percent, yet there is a c... a longer protein. Introducing this mutation into chimpanzee DNA resulted in the creation of type II neuropsin....uction in type I neuropsin expression in human and chimpanzee when compared with the rhesus macaque, an Old Worl...

Female-led infanticide in wild chimpanzees

...t of as a male trait. An exception in the realm of chimpanzee behavior was famously noted in the 1970s by Jane G...s the result of new field work involving the Sonso chimpanzee community in Budongo Forest in Uganda, the St. And...idal attacks. Alerted to the killings by sounds of chimpanzee screams, the researchers directly observed one inf...

Man's best friend lends insight into human evolution

...r impulse to fear more dominant individuals and behave aggressively toward more subordinate ones. "Taken together," Hare writes, "the results on chimpanzee cooperation and their use of social cues support the hypothesis that evolution in human social problem solving, much like that of dog social problem s...

Analysis of rhesus monkey genome uncovers genetic differences with humans, chimps

... An international consortium of researchers has published the genome sequence of the rhesus macaque monkey and aligned it with the chimpanzee and human genomes. Published April 13 in a special section of the journal Science, the analysis reveals that the three primate species share about 93 ...

Ebola outbreaks killing thousands of gorillas and chimpanzees

... study provides hope that newly developed vaccines could control the devastating impact of Ebola on wild apes. Direct encounters between gorilla or chimpanzee social groups are rare. Therefore, when reports of large ape die-offs first surfaced in the late 1990s, outbreak amplification was assumed to be throu...

Gene study shows three distinct groups of chimpanzees

...atologists could use to determine the origins of a chimpanzee with uncertain heritage. "Finding such a mark...ive percent of their DNA from more than one common chimpanzee population were rare, with most of the hybrid chim...en less about gorillas and orangutans." The chimpanzee genome differs from the bonobo genome by about 0.3...

E. coli bacteria migrating between humans, chimps in Ugandan park

...himpanzee-focused research and tourism in a park in western Uganda are exchanging gastrointestinal bacteria ?specifically Escherichia coli ?with local chimpanzee populations. And some of the E. coli strains migrating to chimps are resistant to antibiotics used by humans in Uganda. Their study will appear in...

Ape gestures offer clues to the evolution of human communication

... function. For example, a single gesture may communicate an entirely different message depending upon the social context in which it is used. "A chimpanzee may stretch out an open hand to another as a signal for support, whereas the same gesture toward a possessor of food signals a desire to share," said ...

Neuron cell stickiness may hold key to evolution of the human brain

...re more than 98 percent of their genome with their chimpanzee cousins, but the final products of those genomes a... the researchers performed similar analyses on the chimpanzee and mouse genomes. They examined 1,050 accelerated chimpanzee CNSs and 4,707 accelerated mouse CNSs. Said ...

Road-crossing in chimpanzees: A risky business

...omparable data on great-ape progression orders have been lacking. Crossing of man-made roads, sometimes necessitated by intersection with longstanding chimpanzee travel routes, presents a new situation that calls for flexibility of responses by chimpanzees to variations in perceived risk. Understanding how chim...

Ebola-outbreak kills 5000 gorillas

...ew hope for controlling the devastating impact of Ebola on wild gorilla and chimpanzee populations. Since reports of ape die-offs first circulated widely in 2003,...ortality rate of 77%. Lossi was just one in a series of large gorilla and chimpanzee die-offs caused by Ebola over the last twelve years. Accurate figures on ex...

Wild gorillas carriers of a SIV virus close to the AIDS virus

...5 jointly involving the IRD and the University of Montpellier 1, showed the chimpanzee subspecies living in the Congo Basin (2) to be the reservoir of HIV-1 virus...and N are, very clearly, the consequence of inter-species transmission from chimpanzee to humans, whereas the origin of HIV-1 group O is less apparent. It cannot ...