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This might just be one of the cutest videos ever. Like humans, chimps are born with a strong maternal instinct and when instinct and friendship are paired up like this, there’s no ignoring the cuteness.
Photo: Monica Szczupider / National Geographic
When Dorothy, a beloved female chimp died at the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center in Cameroon, her burial was witnessed by the rest of the chimps residing there.
Monica Szczupider took this photo that showed a wall of grieving chimps paying their last respect:
Speaking about Dorothy, Miss Szczupider, 30, said the chimp was a "prominent figure" within a group of about 25 chimps.
"Chimps are not silent. They are gregarious, loud, vocal creatures, usually with relatively short attention spans", she said.
"But they could not take their eyes off Dorothy, and their silence, more than anything, spoke volumes."
Link | Larger pic at Nat Geo Visions of Earth 2009
Chimps may be portrayed as mischieviously fun but largely harmless by Hollywood, but the truth is anything but. In the wild, chimpanzees are killers that engage in years-long war against one another, and their behavior may explain man’s propensity for violence:
It was a four-year "war" witnessed by Dr Jane Goodall, and Dr Muller’s PhD supervisor, Richard Wrangham, a professor of primatology from Harvard University, Boston, that put an end to our cosy ideas.
In the Seventies, Prof Wrangham and Dr Goodall watched a group of chimpanzees split into two factions. One group killed every male and some of the females in the other group. The victims had recently been their companions.
Although Dr Goodall was the first to suggest it, Prof Wrangham went on to develop a theory that would explain human violence based on the aggression he had witnessed. As he points out, we are hardly a peaceful species. In Britain, men are 24 times more likely to kill or assault another person, and 263 times more likely to commit a sexual offence than a woman.
Prof Wrangham’s theory is called the Demonic Male Hypothesis. He argues that human males and chimps share a tendency to be aggressive with our closest common ancestor. Chimpanzees and humans have many attributes in common: we share approximately 98.5 per cent of our DNA, we both hunt and males show a strong desire to form alliances against other males while jockeying for status. Male chimpanzees are hostile towards other groups of chimps; you don’t even have to go to Arsenal to know that men are not dissimilar.
Forget DNA! Scientists have re-traced our evolutionary tree and confirmed human’s relationship to fellow apes through laughter.
Who says you can’t learn anything by tickling chimps?
To investigate that, Marina Davila Ross of the University of Portsmouth in England and colleagues carried out a detailed analysis of the sounds evoked by tickling three human babies and 21 orangutans, gorillas, chimps and bonobos.
After measuring 11 traits in the sound from each species, they mapped out how these sounds appeared to be related to each other. The result looked like a family tree. Significantly, that tree matched the way the species themselves are related, the scientists reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
They also concluded that while human laughter sounds much different from the ape versions, its distinctive features could well have arisen from shared ancestral traits.
After measuring 11 traits in the sound from each species, they mapped out how these sounds appeared to be related to each other. The result looked like a family tree. Significantly, that tree matched the way the species themselves are related, the scientists reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
According to a new study published in the latest issue of Developmental Psychobiology, orphaned baby chimpanzees that received motherly care and attention from human surrogate parents were found to be more intellectually advanced than the average human baby, when both were compared at nine months.
When the chimps were nine months old, they took an IQ test normally used to evaluate human infant development. Bard explained that typical items on the cognitive test required the chimps to “imitate scribbling on paper,” look at pictures in a book as the examiner pointed to each one, and pick up a cup to find a block hidden underneath.
The infant chimps aced the test, even surpassing the scores of average human infants tested at the same age.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by 
Humans are not the only political animals. Mark Foster, an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, discovered that while big, aggressive males rely on physical force to dominate, smaller and more mild-mannered chimps use politics to gain higher social standings:
The finding was gleaned from 10 years of observing dominant male chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, looking at behaviors they used to compete for alpha male status relative to their size.
Analysis showed that larger males relied more on physical attacks to dominate while smaller, gentler males groomed other chimpanzees, both male and female, to gain broad support.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by noface.
The discovery of an abandoned baby Fongoli chimp in Senegal caused Jill Pruetz, a biological anthropologist at Iowa State University, to drop everything and hop on a plane. Pruetz has studied the Fongoli chimps of Senegal and as a result of her pioneering fieldwork she was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer last year, so she knew this particular group of chimps very well. The baby had been found by hunters, and Pruetz and her team searched for the mother, hoping she had not been killed. They found a large group of chimps in a tree, with only one female without a baby, and they put the baby on the ground nearby. As Pruetz described the scene:
Mike, an adolescent [chimp] whose own mother disappeared soon after he was weaned, came down and approached the baby, who just sat in the sack and looked from us to the chimps. He looked at her and smelled her and then picked her up and took her to the tree where her mother, Tia, raced down and retrieved her!
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.
