Planet of the Apes?

[KRITER]

This here from the Washington Post News Service
Chimpanzees in West Africa been seen making speers from stiks and using them to hunt.This the first time a animals been seen routinly making weapons to kill other then people.
Its a multi step practice.Researchers in Senegal think humans made close to the same thing millions of years ago.
The female chimpanzees seem to be the main makers of the speers and the innovators and creative problem solvers.
The chimpanzees was seen tairing the side branchs off long strate stiks,peeling off the bark and sharpning the ends.
Theyd get wut the article called a power grip in the speer and kill other small mammals and eat them.

This mite be sumkind of evolution.Wuts them lady chimps gona figure out to make next?

[Keykeypie]

rolling pins? :rollingpin: Oh oh...

[Charmagne]

We always knew the animals were smart!:agree: I just didn't know chimpanzees were omnivores. Guess I learn something everyday.

[KRITER]

I kno thay ate bugs.But in this article thay was killing reel littl monkeys.I was surprised myself.
Wen my granma was alive,she lived in a trailer park.Her next door naybors had a Chimpanzee.They put clothes on him and tawt him how to use the bathroom.Sumtimes he,d let himself out their house and go visit my
granma.He,d nok on the door,she,d let him in and he,d sit on the couch and watch tv, she,d call her naybors to tell them wair he was and she,d feed him grapes.I do beleev if he got to talking,I woodnt hav thawt nothing of it.

[veggiesosage]

Does George W know? Chimps are openly and shamelessly carrying out research into new weapons systems and I think regime change is called for :D

[thevegantwins]

Does George W know? Chimps are openly and shamelessly carrying out research into new weapons systems and I think regime change is called for :D
:laugh: :laugh: That gave me and Mr. TVT a big laugh.

We always knew the animals were smart!
Especially females :femme: :D

[Fauxmage]

Chimpanzees are amongst the most violent and savage of primates, second only to us, in my opinion. Bands of roving males will attack and kill all the males and the babies of another group, and then rape the females in order to establish themselves within the group.

My mom new a researcher, whom I met once when I was a teenager. I can't remember why he was researching chimpanzees, but one day, when he got too close to the female, her mate attacked him, tearing off his scalp and biting off three of his fingers.

I can't help but think there is something really wrong with the Universe, when such violent and bloodthirsty animals (and I'm not just talking about the chimps) evolve the ability to use tools to kill, especially to use them to kill for other reasons than for food. When I was little I used to wonder why the apes had to evolve an intelligent, tool-using species, rather than horses, or rabbits, or some other gentle, benign species. :( :confused:

[veggiesosage]

Yeah, chimps can be truly brutal. Although bonobos and gorillas, the other 2 great apes, are pretty chilled.

Whats interesting is that its only very recently that any form of tool use was cited as the defining difference between humans and 'animals'. Does that mean that nobody had noticed them doing it before or have they only jjust learnt?

[Gliondrach]

Chimps are active hunters but meat only forms a small part of their diet. It is thought they think of it as some sort of trophy or status symbol which they can distribute to the favoured few. A way of making alliances.

[Fauxmage]

Whats interesting is that its only very recently that any form of tool use was cited as the defining difference between humans and 'animals'. Does that mean that nobody had noticed them doing it before or have they only jjust learnt? If they disregard the possibility that the chimps have learned new skills by observing us I think they will be making a big mistake. I care for a Siberian Husky who learned how to open the back window of my truck by watching me. The window catch opens and closes with a cable that is stretched along its bottom edge, on the inside, and even if I lock the handle so that it can't be turned from the outside, if you pull the cable from inside, the window will pop open. I have several dogs who paw at the cable and open the window, so I put in a couple of straps on the outside, that snap to the tailgate to prevent the window being popped open.

While I was caring for Shasta, the window kept popping open in spite of the snaps, and I was really getting upset! Finally, a neighbor of one of my customers noticed, and was standing by the back of the truck as I returned. He said "Watch what she does." So I closed the window, and snapped the straps shut. Shasta then went to the back of the handle, took it in her mouth and turned it, thus releasing the cables, not like the other dogs did, by pawing at the cables, but by watching the handle rotate as I turned it, and knowing she could do the same thing with her mouth, and then going to each side of the window and pushing at the corners where the straps were snapped, and popping the window open. The straps are not visible from inside, so she had been very carefully watching me as I went through the process of opening and closing the window. She knew there was something at the corners of the window that was keeping it from flying open when she turned the latch. She had to be able to not only understand the sequence I used to get it open (since popping at the snaps before turning the latch would not have worked), she had to figure out a completely different physical solution to her problem (using her mouth to turn the latch, and pushing at the corners from inside to pop the snaps). If a dog can learn a solution to a problem by observing human action, I think any animal could (if only lab animals could learn this and set themselves free :( ). I realize this is only anecdotal evidence, but its better than capturing a bunch of dogs and trying to get them to repeat the "experiment" under controlled circumstances.

Which reminds me of the theories I have read about how early civilizations must have had help from higher beings when they built stuff like the statues on Easter Island, developed complex calendars, recorded the existence of stars or planets not visible with the naked eye, etc. Lots of people like the Atlantis legend, as they find it a reasonable explanation for things that are otherwise hard to understand in the accomplishments of primitive cultures, some of whom had not advanced technologically beyond the Stone Age.

So I'm thinking that maybe we are the "Atlanteans" to the chimps, and someday, when we have disappeared, and the chimps have a highly advanced civilization, we will be thought of as only a legend, that is used by a few wacky chimpanzees to explain how their primitive ancestors managed to build stuff like the Statue of Liberty, the Pyramids, and other stuff they wouldn't have been able to accomplish on their own without an example to learn from. :D

Monkey see, monkey do! :dancemonkey:

[veggiesosage]

If they disregard the possibility that the chimps have learned new skills by observing us I think they will be making a big mistake.

Yep. With you on that one. I think we're more than capable of being a poor influence...

[Oracl]

So I'm thinking that maybe we are the "Atlanteans" to the chimps, and someday, when we have disappeared, and the chimps have a highly advanced civilization, we will be thought of as only a legend, that is used by a few wacky chimpanzees to explain how their primitive ancestors managed to build stuff like the Statue of Liberty, the Pyramids, and other stuff they wouldn't have been able to accomplish on their own without an example to learn from. :D
Lovely idea! :agree: :laugh:

[Gliondrach]

From Yah oo news.

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor
Fri Feb 23, 12:47 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new study, certain to be controversial, maintains that chimpanzees and humans split from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago -- a much shorter time than current estimates of 5 million to 7 million years ago.

The researchers compared the DNA of chimpanzees, humans and our next-closest ancestor, the gorilla, as well as orangutans.

They used a well-known type of calculation that had not been previously applied to genetics to come up with their own "molecular clock" estimate of when humans became uniquely human.

"Assuming orangutan divergence 18 million years ago, speciation time of human and chimpanzee is consistently around 4 million years ago," they wrote in their study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Genetics, available online at http://genetics.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document& doi=10.1371/journal.pgen.0030007#toclink4.

"Primate evolution is a central topic in biology and much information can be obtained from DNA sequence data," Dr. Asger Hobolth of North Carolina State University said in a statement.

The theory of a molecular clock is based on the premise that all DNA mutates at a certain rate. It is not always a steady rate but it evens out over the millennia and can be used to track evolution.

Experts agree that humans split off from a common ancestor with chimpanzees several million years ago and that gorillas and orangutans split off much earlier. But it is difficult to date precisely when, although most recent studies have put the date at somewhere around 5 million to 7 million years ago.

Hobolth and colleagues from the University of Aarhus in Denmark and the University of Oxford in Britain looked at four regions of the human, chimpanzee, and gorilla genomes.

They used a statistical technique called the hidden Markov model, developed in the 1960s and originally applied to speech recognition.

What they found directly contradicts some other recent research. They found evidence that it took only 400,000 years for humans to become a separate species from the common chimp-human ancestor.

Just last May, David Reich of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School's Department of Genetics found evidence that the split probably took 4 million years to occur, although his team put the final divergence at just 5.4 million years ago.

Reich's study of chimpanzee and human DNA suggested that the early ancestors of humans and the ancestors of chimpanzees may have interbred for a long time before they separated.

Experts have long known that humans and chimpanzees share much DNA, and are in fact 96 percent identical on the genetic level.

And one year ago, Soojin Yi and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology said they found genetic evidence that chimpanzees may be more closely related to humans than to gorillas and orangutans.

Their look at the molecular clock showed humans evolved one unique trait just a million years ago -- our longer life span and our long childhood that means humans reach sexual maturity very late in life compared to other animals.

Other experts in genetics were not immediately available to comment on Hobolth's report.