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paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

apes

  • Quote: Huxley on traveler's tales and primate discovery

    Sat, 2013-01-05 22:42 -- John Hawks

    Thomas Huxley devoted his 1863 book, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature, to describing what was then known about the anatomy and biology of the living apes, including gibbons, orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Earlier descriptions of these primates had spawned endless confusion. Huxley showed (brilliantly) how the confusion resulted from incorrect accounts of the primates from travelers and the study by European anatomists of mostly juvenile skeletons carried away shipboard from the tropical homes of these primates. After this long discussion, he wrote, with great charity:

    Once in a generation, a Wallace may be found physically, mentally, and morally qualified to wander unscathed through the tropical wilds of America and of Asia; to form magnificent collections as he wanders; and withal to think out sagaciously the conclusions suggested by his collections: but, to the ordinary explorer or collector, the dense forests of equatorial Asia and Africa, which constitute the favourite habitation of the Orang, the Chimpanzee, and the Gorilla, present difficulties of no ordinary magnitude: and the man who risks his life by even a short visit to the malarious shores of those regions may well be excused if he shrinks from facing the dangers of the interior; if he contents himself with stimulating the industry of the better seasoned natives, and collecting and collating the more or less mythical reports and traditions with which they are too ready to supply him. In such a manner most of the earlier accounts of the habits of the man-like Apes originated; and even now a good deal of what passes current must be admitted to have no very safe foundation.

    I just love the way that passage starts!

    Tags: 
    history of biology
    Thomas Huxley
    chimpanzees
    gorillas
    orangutans
    gibbons
    apes

  • Quote: Haeckel on our ape "heirlooms"

    Sat, 2013-01-05 22:14 -- John Hawks

    Ernst Haeckel, in the History of Creation, English translation in the Project Gutenberg version:

    Thus, from a careful examination of the comparative anatomy of the Anthropoides, we obtain a similar result to that obtained by Weisbach, from a statistical classification and a thoughtful comparison of the very numerous and careful measurements which Scherzer and Schwarz made of the different races of Men during their voyage in the Austrian frigate Novara round the earth. Weisbach comprises the final result of his investigations in the following words: “The ape-like characteristics of Man are by no means concentrated in one or another race, but are distributed in particular parts of the body, among the different races, in such a manner that each is endowed with some heirloom of this relationship—one race more so, another less, and even we Europeans cannot claim to be entirely free from evidences of this relationship.”

    Tags: 
    Ernst Haeckel
    history of biology
    apes

  • Perils of talking to apes

    Fri, 2012-09-28 10:28 -- John Hawks

    Barbara King comments on Koko, Kanzi and Panbanisha, "Thoughts On Three Famous 'Language Apes'".

    For decades, the Gorilla Foundation, run by the scientist Penny Patterson, has maintained — based on Koko's own use of sign language — that Koko would like to have a baby. Recently the Foundation posted this video clip, in which Koko is presented, verbally and in diagram form, with four complicated choices about "family planning."

    Patterson, at the end of the clip, affirms her interpretation that Koko grasped all of the options presented to her. The idea is that Koko, by pointing to one of the four diagrammed choices, can and should help make decisions that involve the reproductive activities and the welfare of other gorillas. This raises ethical issues, to say the least.

    We haven't come to the apes in my Biology of Mind course yet, but we were discussing the nineteenth-century origins of ethology yesterday. The initial move toward a science of animal behavior was possible because anthropomorphic accounts of animal behavior were set aside. The apes pose a recurring challenge to the rejection of anthropomorphism, because some of their behavioral capabilities really are homologous with ours. The cognitive border between ape and human may be a no-mans land, with one or two traits occasionally crossing the frontier to the other side. King's last word is fitting -- an ape can never grasp the complexities of the human world...yet neither can we fully grasp the complexities of theirs.

    Tags: 
    apes
    chimpanzees
    gorillas
    cognition
    behavior
    language evolution

  • Orangutan loris capture and meat-eating

    Fri, 2012-01-20 16:38 -- John Hawks

    Madeleine Hardus and colleagues [1] describe long-term observations of hunting by Sumatran orangutans.

    The paper is straightforward in its description of the hunting observations: They hunt slow lorises, the practice is rare, it occurs at times when their other preferred foods are scarce, some individuals hunt but most don't, and food sharing among individuals other than mother-infant pairs wasn't observed. This isn't the first time hunting has been reported by wild orangutans, what it does is report a longer-term observation of one hunting female, tying this case to earlier observations.

    I'm pointing to the paper because it includes some discussion about the requirements of meat eating for early hominins. These orangutans take a long time to chew up a slow lorus.

    Orangutans used more than twice the amount of time (160.9 g/h) to eat the same amount of meat than chimpanzees (348 g/h) (Wrangham 2009; Wrangham and Conklin-Brittain 2003). Other chimpanzee data shows that this species is able to consume meat at much higher rates, i.e., 1.9±1.2 kg/h (Gilby 2006). This difference between orangutans and chimpanzees may suggest that higher sociality in chimpan- zees influences intake rates, where individuals are surrounded by conspecifics when eating meat, and where meat is a highly preferred food item and stealing occurs (Boesch and Boesch 1989; Goodall 1986; Stanford 1999).

    I'll point out that orangutans may make a better model for early hominin jaw mechanics than chimpanzees do, because the sizes of jaw musculature and teeth are more comparable. Neither orangutans nor australopithecines have teeth that look well-made for reducing fibrous, tough meat into smaller pieces. Recent humans have been able to cook meat, which reduces its mechanical resistance to chewing. Early hominins didn't cook, so getting some high fraction of their caloric requirements from meat (even if only seasonally) might have taken a lot of time.

    According to orangutan data (ingestion rate of 185 kcal/h), Australopithecus africanus would have had to chew for ca. 2 h to achieve 25% of these caloric requirements purely from meat (Table III, orangutans×A. africanus), while achieving the remaining 75% of its caloric requirements from food sources with faster chewing/intake rates, e.g., leaves or insects. This constitutes a considerable period of the day for orangutans, which spend ca. 6 h/d feeding (Morrogh-Bernard et al. 2009), and does not include the time necessary for the collection of vertebrate prey.

    That sounds like a lot of chewing time, but it's not an insuperable barrier. The isotopic values for A. africanus and A. robustus suggest the possibility of up to 25% meat consumption, although they may have gotten C4 plant input by several different food sources (e.g., corms, edible stems, aquatic animals) as well as meat. Altogether, the chewing time analysis shuts off one line of argument that early hominins would have faced extreme constraints preventing them from moving to a more meat-intensive diet before the control and routine use of fire.

    References

    1. Hardus ME, Lameira AR, Zulfa A, Atmoko SUS, Vries H, Wich SA. Behavioral, Ecological, and Evolutionary Aspects of Meat-Eating by Sumatran Orangutans (Pongo abelii). International Journal of Primatology. 2012.
    Tags: 
    orangutans
    diet
    apes
    hunting
    meat
    A. africanus
    Synopsis: 
    A discussion of early hominin meat-eating emerges from observations of orangutan hunting

  • Meet Aegyptopithecus

    Tue, 2011-10-18 00:15 -- John Hawks

    At this station are casts of Aegyptopithecus zeuxis. This species comes from the Oligocene, approximately 30 million years ago. It is from the Fayum fossil beds of Egypt.

    Your mission is to determine which superfamily or superfamilies of primates are the closest living relatives of this fossil. Consider the teeth most closely, as they are most likely to lead you in the right direction.

    Study terms: 
    Oligocene
    Aegyptopithecus
    Aegyptopithecus zeuxis
    Fayum
    Tags: 
    Anthropology 105
    explainer
    laboratory
    Aegyptopithecus
    apes

  • Ugandapithecus skull found

    Fri, 2011-08-19 08:30 -- John Hawks

    A brief report earlier this month from Agence France-Presse describes a new discovery of Ugandapithecus, worked on by Brigitte Senut and Martin Pickford: "20-million-year-old ape skull unearthed in Uganda".

    "This is the first time that the complete skull of an ape of this age has been found ... it is a highly important fossil and it will certainly put Uganda on the map in terms of the scientific world," Martin Pickford, a paleontologist from the College de France in Paris, told journalists in Kampala.

    Ugandapithecus is a large Early Miocene ape, probably related to Proconsul. A 2009 paper by Pickford and colleagues [1] (open access) does a nice job of showing the anatomy with photographs and describing how the different samples of Ugandapithecus, some of which represent different species, differ from Proconsul. It will be very interesting to see how the new skull adds to the record of this ape genus.

    References

    1. Pickford M, Senut B, Gommery D, Musiime E. Distinctiveness of Ugandapithecus from Proconsul. Estudios Geológicos. 2009;65(2):183 - 241.
    Tags: 
    Miocene
    Africa
    Uganda
    apes
    Ugandapithecus

  • Scanning the ape fecome

    Mon, 2010-09-27 17:00 -- John Hawks

    Donald McNeil, Jr., has written up some background detail about last week's story that falciparum malaria came from gorillas: "A finding on malaria comes from humble origins". It's one of many research findings coming out of a systematic collection of fecal samples from African ape field projects:

    Dr. Hahn, a virologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is an expert not in malaria but in S.I.V., or simian immunodeficiency virus, the precursor to the virus that causes AIDS in humans. But she has made deals with primate researchers all across Africa who collect fecal samples for their own projects, to have them take extras for her.

    They go into vials with a special solution, called RNAlater, that preserves the nucleic acids of all the cells in the sample — which includes not only what apes eat, but cells sloughed off their gut linings, which contain all the things infecting them. She has systematically sequenced the genes of many of those infective agents: S.I.V., simian foamy virus, hepatitis and now malaria parasites.

    Poop metagenomics. I wonder to what extent pathogens in meat may pass through the gut with DNA intact. Probably not a big issue with African apes, as meat consumption is fairly sporadic even in chimpanzees. But you'd want to be cautious doing certain things with carnivores.

    Tags: 
    primates
    apes
    chimpanzees
    disease
    metagenomics
    Africa
    bonobos
    conservation
    gorillas

  • Quote: Huxley and the gorilla mystique

    Tue, 2010-09-21 08:30 -- John Hawks

    Thomas Henry Huxley, in Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature:

    If I have abstained from quoting M. Du Chaillu's work, then, it is not because I discern any inherent improbability in his assertions respecting the man-like Apes; nor from any wish to throw suspicion on his veracity; but because, in my opinion, so long as his narrative remains in its present state of unexplained and apparently inexplicable confusion, it has no claim to original authority respecting any subject whatsoever.

    It may be truth, but it is not evidence.

    Bulldog, indeed.

    Tags: 
    apes
    history of biology
    Thomas Henry Huxley
    gorillas
    quotes

  • Swimming orangutans

    Thu, 2010-03-25 15:30 -- John Hawks

    New Scientist is running a gallery of orangutans interacting in water. These are orphaned orangutans that were relocated to an island and have since been observed to interact with water in all kinds of unusual ways -- snatching fish, sex in water, trawling for sunken fruit.

    Others in the group have found drier means of crossing water: they've learned how to build bridges. "They deliberately bend slender trees over and use them as bridges to travel over broad stretches of water," says [Anne] Russon. "The trees remain partially bent after the first use, and after several uses they stay permanently bent into these positions." And although each bridge is engineered by a single orang-utan, the structure is used by all the orang-utans on Kaja. "Nothing like this has been seen anywhere else," says Russon.

    The introduction notes that these behaviors are rarely observed, and that many zoo orangutans have drowned in "moats" meant to enclose them. Several of the behaviors seem to be driven by individuals using the water to prevent competition from others.

    Tags: 
    culture
    orangutans
    apes
    non-human primates

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Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.