Tails in Humans

Humans Evolved from Ape-like Ancestors

...and whether you 'accept' it or not makes no difference to the fact that it happened

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Genetic throwbacks - evidence that our distant ancestors possessed tails (more below)
Throwbacks are accidental expressions of long-dormant genes - in this case, one that results in the production of a tail

Numerous medical and scientific papers documenting such cases from around the world can be found here:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=8684345

Or go to: www.pubmed.com and search for 'tail human vestigial'

Indian man's 13-inch tail

Thousands of people are queuing up to worship a man with a 13 inch tail in India.

Ananova news
June 2006

Chandre Oram, from Alipurduar in West Bengal, is regarded as an incarnation of Hindu monkey god Hanuman. Mr Oram also loves climbing trees and eating bananas, according to the Press Trust of India. He said: "People have a lot of faith in me. They are cured of severe ailments when they touch my tail. I believe I can do a lot of good to those who come to me with devotion." However, doctors say his tail is a rare but known congenital defect and that he is not a god.

Although it has made Mr Oram an object of devotion, it has also brought him some problems. He added: "Almost 20 women have turned down marriage proposals. They see me and agree, but as soon as I turn around, they see my tail and leave. "I have decided to marry the woman who accepts me and my tail. Or else, I'll remain a bachelor like Hanuman." Doctors have offered to remove the tail surgically but MrOram has refused their help. His sister Rekha said: "He will not survive without his tail. It has become part of his being, his existence."

Baby with tail 'reincarnation of Hindu god'

Crowds are flocking to Indian temples to see a Muslim baby with a 'tail' who is believed to be the reincarnation of a Hindu god.

The 11-month-old boy has been named Balaji or Bajrangbali, another name for monkey-faced Lord Hanuman.

He is reported to have a 4in 'tail' caused by genetic mutations during the development of the foetus.

Iqbal Qureshi, the child's maternal grandfather, is taking Balaji from temple to temple where people offer money to see the boy.

Mr Qureshi says the baby has nine spots on his body like Lord Hanuman and showed them to journalists, reports Indian newspaper The Tribune.

There have been other cases of babies born with tails. A report appeared in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1982 by Dr Fred Ledley.

His paper entitled 'Evolution and the Human Tail' concerned a baby born with a 2in growth on its back.

Originally from: www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_492558.html

Genetic Throwbacks

"Genetic storage is a nuance of evolution too often ignored. Many paleontologists believe that when a bone disappears in evolution, the genetic blueprint for that bone is also erased.... But in fact evolution does not occur in this fashion. Hoatzin's ancestors never lost the genetic blueprint for producing Archaeopteryx-style clawed fingers. Recent advances in genetic research reveal that most species carry such blueprints that are "switched off" and can't express their code as fully formed tissue. In other words, when an organ has been "lost," most of the time its blueprint is still there, in genetic storage.

A wealth of evidence supports this theory of re-expression by genes that have been turned off for millions of years. Most of it occurs in throwbacks, the rare appearance of ancient organs in species that, as a whole, had lost the anatomical features millions of generations earlier.

A good example is multi-toed horses. Modern horses belong to the same general group as tapirs, and tapirs have four toes on each forefoot. The single-toed modern horse evolved from a four-toed ancestor. Every so often a healthy, normal, single-toed mare gives birth to a colt that has little extra toes sticking out beside the big main toe. Zoologists point to this multi-toed foal as a case where natural processes allow a bit of the ancestral blueprint to show through, letting ancient ancestral traits re-express themselves.

Whales offer a more spectacular case. Modern whales have no hind legs at all, and even when all the blubber and muscle are flensed from the hip region, there is no remnant of the hip bones except a small splint representing the ilium. Even the oldest-known fossil whales display only slightly enlarged hip bones and some remnants of thigh and knee. But way back in their ancestry whales did have big hind legs, at a stage when they were land-living predators. And every once in a while a modern whale is hauled in with a hind leg, complete with thigh and knee muscles, sticking out of its side. These atavistic hind limbs are nothing less than throwbacks to a totally pre-whale stage of their existence, some fifty million years old.

Such throwbacks even occur in human infants. Hospitals occasionally register an entirely modern-looking baby characterized by all the expected organs, plus an unexpected tail, a long, caudal appendage protruding beyond the buttocks for two or three inches. Some of these tails are even bigger than the average caudal remnant displayed by our close kin, the chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.

Birds with teeth may have appeared ridiculous to creationists, but in point of fact modern birds do carry the ancestral genetic code for making teeth tucked away in their inactive file. No living species of bird manufactures teeth. But recent surgical manipulations of bird embryos demonstrate clearly that the potential is still there. In 1983, experimenters transplanted tissue from the inner jaw (dental lamina) of an unhatched chick to an area of the body tissue, where the graft could grow. In the transplanted position, the chick's dental lamina started to produce tooth buds! Birds with teeth could grow right in the twentieth century."

- Robert T. Bakker, The Dinosaur Heresies, pp.314-316, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1986

More rare photos of humans born with vestigial tails
Of course, evolution-deniers like Creationists say: "Occasionally a human baby is born with a tail-like appendage and this is said to be evidence that our ancestors had tails. Actually, such rare congenital deformities are usually a type of fatty tumour having no relationship to the tail of a monkey" You can judge for yourself









NOTE: I am trying to determine references and the origin and of these photos. If you happen to know - or have more photos you would like to share - please contact me [ pygiancurve-news (at) yahoo (dot) com ]

Extra breasts
Of course, genetic throwbacks can involve the appearance of other primitive body parts, like extra breasts, a condition called polymastia, dating back to a time when our direct ancestors had more than two mammary glands. Look it up, it's a medical condition. There are so many things the biased tabloids and media just don't tell us hey? (image on the right is of a fictional character from the film Total Recall)

General Comments Evolution happens - deal with it Oh, and if you're thinking along the lines of that silly argument: 'but dogs and cats have tails, we didn't evolve from them', then be sure to read the letters page

Hair
We also tend to (conveniently) forget how hairy we human beings are / can be




Walking upright
Is not unique to ourselves. Various primates are very comfortable with it
	Natasha, a five year old macaque monkey, started walking upright after recovering from a critical illness. She apparently no longer walks on all fours.

Bonobo Bonking Quite surprisingly, Bonobo apes not only engage in missionary position sex, but also French kiss and perform oral sex. Within Bonobo society, sex has evolved as a way of successfully avoiding conflict. There is much we humans could learn from these very close relatives of ours.

Bonobos, Left & Right Primate Politics Heats up Again as Liberals & Conservatives Spindoctor Science by Frans de Waal August 2007 In this weeks (8th Aug 2007)eSkeptic we publish a hot and timely article by the world-renowned primateologist Frans de Waal, responding to a recent New Yorker article on bonobos, in which primate politics, both left and right, once again muddled the science. The spindoctoring of science for political purposes, of course, is a long and dishonorable tradition, so nothing new here in that regard. However, it is interesting that so many people wish to deny the undeniable relationship between humans and chimps, and at the same time cannot seem to help finding political meanings in primate behavior that supports either a liberal or conservative agenda. On so simple a question how much sex and violence do chimpanzees and bonobos exhibit rides so much political angst about human nature and culture. Fortunately the facts can help sort through the fiction, and Frans de Waal is just the scientist to be our guide. Imagine that youre a writer and you have decided to offer your readers a first-hand account of the politically correct primate, the idol of the left, known for its gay relations, female supremacy, and pacific life-style. Your focus is the bonobo: a relative of the chimpanzee, and genetically equally close to us as the chimpanzee. You go all the way to a place called the Democratic Republic of the Congo to see these darling apes frolic in their natural habitat, hoping to come back with new and exciting material. Alas, you barely get to see any bonobos. You watch a few of them quietly sitting in the trees, eating nuts. Thats all. This is what happened to Ian Parker, who nevertheless managed to write thirteen pages of carefully crafted prose as a far-flung correspondent for The New Yorker. We learn about the hot, soupy air, the rainstorms, the mud streams, the sound of falling fruit shells, and his German host, Gottfried Hohmann, who is described as rather unsympathetic.1 The main message of Parkers piece could of course have been that fieldwork is no picnic, but instead he went for profound revelation: bonobos are not nearly as nice and sexual as they have been made out to be. Given that the bonobos reputation has been a thorn in the side of homophobes as well as Hobbesians, the right-wing media jumped with delight. The bonobo myth could finally be put to rest. Parkers piece was gleefully picked up by The Wall Street Journal and Dinesh DSouza (yes, the same one who blamed 9/11 on the left), who accused liberals of having fashioned the bonobo into their mascot. DSouza urged them to stick with the donkey.2 This might all have been amusing if it werent for the fact that these are not just political skirmishes. At issue is what we know. Parker presented his trip as a fact-finding mission that had unearthed revolutionary new insights. His message was that bonobos are killer apes, just like their cousins, the chimpanzees. The animal kingdom remained red in tooth and claw, as it ought to be. Yet, the most striking cases of bonobo aggression that he reported have been known for decades, and actually didnt come from the natural habitat, even less from first-hand observation by our brave explorer. A typical description was given by Jeroen Stevens, a Flemish biologist, of a gang of five bonobos assaulting a single victim at Apenheul Zoo, in the Netherlands. They were gnawing on his toes. Id already seen bonobos with digits missing, but Id thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth.1 Many such cases have been documented at zoos over the years, and have actually led to changes in policies of how to keep bonobos. This is why I warned in Bonobo: The Forgotten Apenot to romanticize the species: All animals are competitive by nature and cooperative only under specific circumstances.3 The second part of Parkers revisionist attempt was the suggestion that bonobo sexual tendencies have been grossly exaggerated. Since most observations of bonobo sex come from zoos, they can be safely ignored, we were told, on the assumption that captivity distorts behavior. The problem is, of course, the incongruity of considering zoo observations valid in relation to aggression, yet worthless in relation to sex. One either accepts both or rejects both. Perhaps it is time to go over the evidence once again and see if bonobos are as special as they have been made out to be. Unfortunately, the evidence that we have is relatively old. The impression that there are new discoveries is merely a product of creative writing. The DRC is only now emerging from a bloody civil war that has kept field workers away. Knowledge about bonobos in their natural habitat has been at a virtual standstill for about a decade. But there exists excellent field data from before this time. Combined with reports from captive apes, these provide a rather coherent picture. The most important fact, which has remained unchanged over the last three decades of bonobo research, is that there exist no confirmed reports of lethal aggression, neither from the field nor from captivity. For chimpanzees, in contrast, we have dozens of cases of adult males killing other males, of males killing infants, of females killing infants, and so on. This is in the wild. In captivity, I myself documented how two male chimpanzees brutally mutilated a third, castrating him in the process, which led to his death.4 There is absolutely no dearth of such information on chimpanzees, which contrasts greatly with the zero incidence in bonobos. Reviewing chimpanzee violence in Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham went on to draw the following comparison with the gentle ape, the bonobo: we can think of them as chimpanzees with a threefold path to peace. They have reduced the level of violence in relations between the sexes, in relations among males, and in relations between communities.5 None of this is to say that bonobos live in a fairy tale. When first writing about their behavior, I spoke of sex for peace precisely because bonobos had plenty of conflicts. There would obviously be no need for peacemaking if they lived in perfect harmony. Sexual conflict resolution is typical of females, but also occurs among males: Vernon regularly chased Kalind into the dry moat After such incidents the two males had almost ten times as many intensive contacts as was normal for them. Vernon would rub his scrotum against Kalinds buttocks, or Kalind would present his penis for masturbation.6 It is entirely possible that one day we will discover serious, perhaps deadly aggression in this species, and it probably will be females collectively attacking a male, since this is the fiercest aggression seen at zoos (and a good argument against attributing female dominance to male chivalry). For now, however, bonobos offer the opposite picture. Whereas most observed chimpanzee killings occur during territorial disputes, bonobos engage in sex at their boundaries. They can be unfriendly to neighbors, but soon after a confrontation has begun, females have been seen rushing to the other side to copulate with males or mount other females. Since it is hard to have sex and wage war at the same time, the scene rapidly turns into socializing. It ends with adults from different groups grooming each other while their children play. These reports go back to 1990, and come mainly from Takayoshi Kano, the Japanese scientist who worked the longest with wild bonobos.7,8 While writing Bonobo, I interviewed field workers, such as Kano and also Hohmann. Asking the latter how his bonobos react to another group, Hohmann replied: It starts out very tense, with shouting and chasing, but then they settle down and there is female-female and male-female sex between members of the two communities. Grooming may occur, but remains tense and nervous.9 This is not exactly the stuff expected of killer apes, although Hohmann did add that groups do not always mingle and that he never saw males from different groups groom. Perhaps the bonobos peaceful image can be countered with descriptions of them catching and eating prey? Isnt this violent behavior? Not really: feeding has very little to do with aggression. Already in the 1960s, Konrad Lorenz explained the difference between a cat hissing at another cat and a cat stalking a mouse. The neural circuitry of the two patterns is different: the first expresses fear and aggression, the second is motivated by hunger. Thus, herbivores are not any less aggressive than carnivores as anyone who has been chased by a bull can attest. The fact that bonobos run after duikers and kill squirrels which has been seen many times is therefore best kept out of debates about aggression. As for sex, I perceive the shyness of many scientists as a problem. It leads them to either ignore sexual behavior or call it something else. They will say that bonobos are very affectionate, when the apes in fact engage in behavior that, if shown in the human public sphere, would get you quickly arrested. Two females may be pressing vulvas and clitorises together, rapidly rubbing them sideways in a pattern known as genito-genital rubbing (or hoka-hoka), and Hohmann, who has seen this pattern many times, wonders: But does it have anything to do with sex? Probably not. Of course, they use the genitals, but is it erotic behavior or a greeting gesture that is completely detached from sexual behavior?1 Fortunately, a United States court settled this monumental issue in the Paula Jones case against President Bill Clinton. It clarified that the term sex includes any deliberate contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks. In short, when bonobos contact each other with their genitals (and squeal and show other signs of apparent orgasm), any sex therapist will tell you that they are doing it.10 Bonobos do it a lot, and not just between male and female. Nothing has changed in this regard. The only disagreement arose when Craig Stanford compared existing data in wild chimpanzees and bonobos. Stanford is an American primatologist who has studied chimpanzees but not bonobos, which may explain why he considered only adult heterosexual relations when claiming similar sex rates for both species.11 Since bonobos have sex in virtually all partner combinations, they were seriously short-changed by these calculations. How much bonobos differ from chimpanzees was highlighted by a recent experiment on cooperation. Brian Hare and co-workers presented apes with a platform that they could pull close by working together. When food was placed on the platform, the bonobos clearly outperformed the chimpanzees in getting a hold of it. The presence of food normally induces rivalry, but the bonobos engaged in sexual contact, played together, and happily shared the food side by side. The chimpanzees, in contrast, were unable to overcome their competition.12 For two species to react so differently to the same experimental set-up leaves little doubt about a temperamental difference. In another illustration, at a forested sanctuary at Kinshasa it was recently decided to merge two groups of bonobos that had lived separately, just so as to induce some activity. No one would ever dream of doing this with chimpanzees as the only possible outcome would be a blood bath. The bonobos produced an orgy instead. In short, so long as we call sex sex and focus on known levels of intraspecific (as opposed to interspecific) violence, there is absolutely no reason to drop the claim that bonobos are relatively peaceful, and that sexual behavior serves a wide range of non-reproductive functions, including greeting, conflict resolution, and food sharing. I understand the frustration of field workers with the image of bonobos as angels of peace, which is not only one-dimensional, but incorrect. On the other hand, anyone who objects to the occasional hyperbole (such as chimpanzees are from Mars, bonobos are from Venus), should realize that no one would ever have heard of the species and no reporter would have considered them for a piece in The New Yorker if theyd been described as merely affectionate. Possibly, one or two decades from now a new image of the bonobo will emerge, one more complex than what we have today. This is already happening thanks to detailed studies of their socio-ecology, observations that nuance the dynamics of female dominance, and video-analyses of their natural communication. No doubt, the return of bonobo field workers to Africa will significantly add to our knowledge. But whatever we find out, a Hobbesian make-over of the bonobo is not to be expected any time soon. I just cant see this ape go from being a gentle, sexy primate to a nasty, violent one. Japanese primatologist Takeshi Furuichi, perhaps the only scientist to have studied both chimpanzees and bonobos in the forest, said it best: With bonobos everything is peaceful. When I see bonobos they seem to be enjoying their lives.1 About the Author Frans B. M. de Waal was trained as a zoologist and ethologist in the European tradition resulting in a Ph.D. in biology from the University of Utrecht, in 1977. In 1981, Dr. de Waal moved to the USA, first to Madison, Wisconsin, and now in a joint position in the Psychology Department of Emory University and at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, both in Atlanta. He is known for his popular books, such as Chimpanzee Politics (1982), Peacemaking Among Primates (1989, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (1997), and his latest, Our Inner Ape (2006). His current interests include food-sharing, social reciprocity, and cultural transmission in primates as well as the origins of morality and justice in human society. References & Notes 1. Parker, I. (July 30, 2007). Swingers. The New Yorker: 4861. 2. DSouza, D. (2007). Bonobo Promiscuity? Another Myth Bites the Dust. AOL Newsbloggers. 3. de Waal, F. B. M. (1997). Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape, with photographs by Frans Lanting. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 84. 4. de Waal, F. B. M. (1998 [1982]). Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes, Revised Edition. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 5. Wrangham, R. W., & Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic Males: Apes and the Evolution of Human Aggression. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 204. 6. de Waal, F. B. M. (1989). Peacemaking among Primates. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 215. 7. Idani, G. (1990). Relations between unit-groups of bonobos at Wamba: Encounters and temporary fusions. African Study Monographs 11: 153186. 8. Kano, T. (1992). The Last Ape: Pygmy Chimpanzee Behavior and Ecology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 9. de Waal, F. B. M. (1997), p. 81. 10. Block, S. (2007). Bonobo Bashing in the New Yorker. Counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/block07252007.html 11. Stanford, C. B. (1998). The social behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos. Current Anthropology 39: 399407. 12. Hare, B., et al. (2007). Tolerance allows bonobos to outperform chimpanzees on a cooperative task. Current Biology 17: 15.
Social Tolerance Allows Bonobos To Outperform Chimpanzees On A Cooperative Task In experiments designed to deepen our understanding of how cooperative behavior evolves, researchers have found that bonobos, a particularly sociable relative of the chimpanzee, are more successful than chimpanzees at cooperating to retrieve food, even though chimpanzees exhibit strong cooperative hunting behavior in the wild. Science Daily March 9, 2007 The work suggests that some social tendencies or emotions that are adaptive under certain circumstances--such as aggression during competition for mates--can hinder the potential for problem solving under other circumstances, such as sharing of a food resource. The findings appear online in the journal Current Biology, published by Cell Press, on March 8th and are reported by a team led by Brian Hare of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Duke University. By comparing the ability of bonobos and chimpanzees to cooperate in retrieving food, the researchers addressed two hypotheses. The first, the so-called "emotional reactivity hypothesis," predicts that bonobos will cooperate more successfully, because past observations have indicated that they are more tolerant of other individuals than are chimpanzees. In contrast, the second hypothesis, the "hunting hypothesis," predicts that chimpanzees will cooperate more successfully, thanks to their known ability to cooperatively hunt in the wild. The researchers found that, consistent with the first hypothesis, bonobos were more tolerant in their behavior toward other bonobos, and they did indeed exhibit more skill in cooperative feeding than did chimpanzees. For example, two bonobos were more likely to both eat when presented with food in a single dish (rather than two separate dishes) than were chimpanzees faced with a similar feeding scenario. Bonobos also exhibited significantly more sociosexual behavior and play than did chimpanzees under these circumstances. In a related set of experiments, bonobos were found to be better than chimpanzees at cooperating (e.g., by simultaneously pulling a rope) to retrieve food that was not easily divisible--that is, food that might be easily monopolized by one of the two individuals. These observations were consistent with the "emotional reactivity hypothesis" because they potentially reflect the ability of bonobos to tolerate the presence of one another in feeding contexts. The findings also run counter to the "hunting hypothesis," which predicts that chimpanzees--owing to their cooperative hunting skills--would outperform bonobos in cooperative feeding even when food wasn't easily divisible. The authors report that the new work is of particular value because it provides an experimental comparison of social tolerance and cooperation in bonobos and chimpanzees--two closely related species that help inform our understanding of how social behavior evolved in the primate lineage. The findings suggest that one way in which the skill of social problem solving can arise is through evolutionary selection on emotional systems, such as those controlling fear and aggression. Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Cell Press.

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Tool Making
Armed and dangerous The discovery of a chimpanzee making and using a spear in Senegal is not only a surprising revelation about our nearest evolutionary relative, say Mairi MacLeod and Ian Sample - it could also provide invaluable insights into how man developed technology Mairi MacLeod and Ian Sample Friday February 23, 2007 Guardian In the dry heat of the west African savanna, a chimp called Tumbo hauled herself up into a wizened tree. She had spotted something: an interesting-looking hole at a fork in the trunk. Watching her, researcher Paco Bertolani suspected that she was looking for insect larvae to eat; the chimpanzees had done this before. Tumbo grabbed a thin branch, snapped it free and purposefully honed one end, using her teeth to make a point. Then, she moved closer to the hole, grasped the primitive spear, and rammed it inside with as much might as she could muster. Afterwards, she pulled it out and sniffed and licked the end. Tumbo repeated the violent stabs again and again until, apparently satisfied, she moved across to a withered branch adjoining the trunk and leapt up and down to break it free. From within the now exposed hole, she retrieved an unmoving bushbaby, evidently dead as a result of the onslaught. She sat down and calmly dismembered the animal, chewing on the meat with relish and accompanying her meal with odd handfuls of fresh leaves. Tumbo is the first chimpanzee to be seen making and using a tool to hunt for meat. Details of her spearing her prey are revealed for the first time today in the journal Current Biology. Such behaviour has never been seen before, and it represents an important leap forward in our understanding of just how sophisticated chimpanzees - humankind's closest relatives - really are. There was a time when scientists believed that one of the major differences between us (humans) and them (animals) was tool use. But those days are long gone. Last year, chimps in the Congo were captured by hidden video cameras using stick tools to dig and dangle for termites. Earlier this month, a crop of ancient stone tools dating back 4,300 years were unearthed and identified as having been used by chimps, fuelling a debate about a chimpanzee Stone Age and the chance that both chimps and early humans inherited tool use from a common ancestor. Now there's Tumbo using a spear. We have certainly come a long way since a young Jane Goodall began her inspirational research into chimpanzee behaviour at Gombe in Tanzania in the 1960s, back in the days when chimps were seen as innocent, peace-loving creatures (since then, they have been observed hunting down monkeys in coordinated groups, not to mention murdering each other). Increasingly, chimp behaviour is being found to be so human-like that it is giving scientists invaluable insights into the evolution of early humans. "Technology is one of the most important aspects of the human condition. It's the reason we've conquered the planet, but it had to come from somewhere," says William McGrew, a primatologist and expert on the evolution of material culture at Cambridge University. "Short of inventing a time machine, the next best thing is to look at our nearest living relations and their technology." According to McGrew, evidence from the archeological record suggests that our hominid ancestors started using tools in hunting around 400,000 years ago in Europe. "And what do you think [they used]?" he asks. "Sharpened wooden sticks. It is essentially the same weapon that's being used by these apes, except it's bigger." But why has spear-making by chimpanzees never been seen elsewhere, despite decades of research? The reason could be that chimp behaviour in this particular habitat - the hot, dry savanna of Fongoli in Senegal - has not been studied in detail before. Chimps adopt different strategies in different environments: complex cultural differences have emerged between populations. And the Fongoli chimps do seem to be quite an unusual population. As well as using spears, they have taken up residence in a number of caves, worn from rock by millennia of flowing water. It seems they like to use them for picnics and siestas, or to shelter from the heat during the day. Bertolani, of Cambridge University, who is collecting data for his PhD, once spent the day with Fongoli chimps in one of their more open caves and witnessed events not out of place in a soap opera. He says some rested and groomed, others quarrelled, while males showed off, running in and out of the cave for the benefit of a female. Others did their best to ignore the spectacle and carried on sleeping in the dark recesses. Researchers have also witnessed the chimp equivalent of a pool party - with no little astonishment, because chimps usually have a strong aversion to water. "Chimps are reckoned to be hydrophobic, because they sink like stones," says McGrew. "Then along come the Fongoli chimps, who, when the rains come in May and fill up the depressions in the plateaus, jump in and sit there up to their chests, all crammed in together." "They run through and splash each other and display," says Jill Pruetz, director of the Fongoli project at Iowa State University. One of the most intriguing things about the Fongoli spear use is that it is females who do the hunting. Monkey hunts by chimps are well documented, but they are dominated by the big males. Although females occasionally take part in hunts, it's normally a back-seat role. Charging through the trees is dangerous, especially with a small infant, and even if a female catches the quarry, there's a good chance she will have to surrender it to a larger male. Pruetz says females and youngsters are forced to innovate to get protein for their diets; her point is that it is females who are driving the adoption of new technology. "The females and maybe the young males too are basically having to solve problems in a creative way because of competition with adult males," she says. "That may be by technology, and not by brute strength or force." "Basically, you can spot that tree hole and you can creep up and take a good look," says McGrew. "You can do that even if you're encumbered with an infant, and because it's a solitary activity, you don't have to coordinate with others." The researchers say spear use in Fongoli is performed almost exclusively by females and youngsters. In spite of the fact that the researchers were concentrating on male behaviour during their study, they saw only one attempt at spear-making by an adult male out of a total of 22 episodes. "[This] strengthens the case that in all likelihood the origins of technology [in humans] were with females," says McGrew. The chimpanzees at Fongoli have been habituated to humans for less than two years. In that short time researchers have discovered a wealth of new chimpanzee behaviour. What else are these apes going to surprise us with? Pruetz says she is learning to expect the unexpected and is hoping that it will be possible to keep the research going at Fongoli far into the future. So we know now that chimps are skilled and cooperative hunters. We know they are capable of terrible violence, but also empathy and, according to some observers, even primitive morality. We see the roots of human behaviour in wild chimpanzees today: they are on a behavioural continuum with us. But how far, if anywhere, will their technology go? Humans achieved great leaps in technology only after millions of years of environmental pressure gave rise to more complex brains. "Chimps do a pretty good job of tackling their problems without developing technology. What's instructive is when they need it," says McGrew. Chimps have the advantage of big, strong jaws and teeth, he says, so they can accomplish many of their jobs without tools. But, he says, "even after human technology took off, it took millions of years to get notable changes, so for us primatologists to be lucky enough to see anything in a couple of decades is highly unlikely. Every one of us would love to be on the scene when there's an important advance in chimp technology. It hasn't happened yet, but we live in hope." But we might not get the chance. Chimp numbers are in freefall as a result of illegal trapping, hunting for bushmeat and deforestation. Just as we are beginning to truly appreciate just how amazing the abilities of chimpanzees are - how they mirror us in so many ways, yet are also intriguingly different - we're busy wiping them out.

Origins of Marriage and Male 'Exploitation' of Women?

MSM misses the point on chimpanzee meat sharing April 14, 2009 Scienceblogs.com Evolutionary anthropology is a subject that has traditionally been dominated by a focus on males, or at least "masculine" behaviors like hunting. The most popular images of our own ancestors have often been of a group of males setting out for a hunt or crouched over a freshly-killed carcass. It is as if our evolution was driven by male ambition. Such tendencies have triggered some backlash, from the relatively absurd (i.e. the aquatic ape hypothesis) to more reasoned critiques (i.e. Woman the Gatherer), but it is clear that our understanding of our own history is most certainly biased by cultural beliefs and values. News reports released during the last week have underscored this fact. A new paper published in the journal PLoS One described how female chimpanzees in Tai National Park mate more often with males that provision them with meat than those that do not. (Meat is a high-quality and desirable food source that is in short supply.) A number of people, especially journalists, took this to mean that the stereotype of males putting food on the table in order to get sex has some backing in nature. As Eric of The Primate Diaries has pointed out, however, all the attention was on what the males were doing. Females were at best ignored and at worst regarded as prostitutes. Not only are these sexist notions disgusting, but they blind people to some of the most interesting parts of the study. Yes, the males shared meat with females and gained a reproductive benefit, but the females were also being very choosy about who they mated with and when they mated. It is not all about the males. As Eric concluded; Rather than such hackneyed cliches as "Sex sells, even in the rainforest" (Cosmos) or "The way to a chimp's heart is through her stomach" (both Wired and the Chicago Sun-Times) the real story was that female chimpanzees demonstrate flexible and opportunistic strategies to maximize reproductive success. Furthermore, because the sharing of meat was primarily with anestrous females, and because there was no relationship between the amount of meat provided and the number of copulations, suggesting that this had any connection to prostitution or buying someone an expensive meal in order to "get lucky" was to completely miss the point. In all likelihood, females were using these exchanges to determine who would be the best potential father for her offspring over the long term.


Chimps Appreciate Music

Chimps born to appreciate music Chimpanzees are biologically programmed to appreciate pleasant music. BBC Online 30 July 2009 The discovery comes from experiments showing that an infant chimpanzee prefers to listen to consonant music over dissonant music. That suggests the apes are born with an innate appreciation of pleasant sounds, say scientists in the journal Primates. Until now, this was thought to be a universal human trait, but the new finding suggests it evolved in the ancestors of humans and modern apes. Tasuku Sugimoto and Kazuhide Hashiya of Kyushu University in Hakozaki and colleagues in Japan tested how a young captive chimpanzee named Sakura responded to music as she aged from 17 weeks to 23 weeks old. Sakura had been been abandoned by her mother, forcing members of the staff at Itozu-no-mori Park in Fukuoka where she lived to care for her. Crucially, she had never been exposed to any form of music before she took part in the trials. During the experiments, Sakura lay on a bed while a woollen string was attached to her right hand, allowing the infant chimp to pull on the cord at will. A music player and speakers was then set up around her, playing melodies lasting between 38 and 63 seconds long. Every time Sakura pulled on the cord, the music would be repeated. During six trials, conducted one a week for six weeks with each lasting around 20 minutes, the researchers played Sakura a range of tunes. One was a 38 second minuet from Duette Englischer Meister in F major. Another, a 38 second minuet from a handwritten sheet of German music composed in 1720. These consonant tunes were also adjusted using orchestration software to make them dissonant. For example, all the Gs in the 38 second Duette Englischer Meister music were altered to G-flat and all the Cs to C-flat, creating 32 dissonant intervals. In three of the six trials, the researchers first played Sakura the more pleasant consonant music and in the others, they started with the less pleasant sounding dissonant music. Play it again Across all six sessions, Sakura pulled on the cord to voluntarily listen to the pleasurable music significantly more often than to the dissonant passages. "Our main surprise was the results being so consistent," says Hashiya. "She rapidly learnt the rule of the setup and consistently produced consonant music over dissonant music for longer duration." The discovery that an infant chimp, with no prior exposure to music, innately prefers to listen to consonant melodies could have important implications for how an appreciation for music evolved. "Music is one of the universal human natures beyond cultures, just like language," says Hashiya. But it was always thought that it was a uniquely human trait, one present even in babies just a few days old. "The preference for consonant music over dissonant music in an infant chimpanzee has implications for the debate surrounding human uniqueness in the capacity for music appreciation," the researchers write in Primates. Experiments have shown that various bird species can differentiate between consonant and dissonant sounds, but they do not actively prefer listening to one over the other. Other research on cotton-top tamarin monkeys also found no such preference. But Sakura's appreciation for consonant melodies "specifically suggests that one of the major factors that constitute musical appreciation might not be unique to humans: instead it might be something that we share with our phylogenetically closest relatives," say the researchers. Hashiya explains that it is very difficult to rule out whether young human infants have had prior exposure to music on the radio or in their family's house before they are tested. "To figure out the response of Sakura, we have to consider her lack of music experience, which should draw a clear contrast with ordinary human infants. It supports the view that the preference is independent of cultural experience," he says. The researchers hope to study the effect further. For now they speculate that the chimps' innate preference for pleasurable melodies may serve some biological function in the wild, perhaps helping them detect other chimps' voices above other sounds, for example.