How much have baboons and geladas hybridized during their evolution?
A recent paper from Jerilyn Walker and coworkers in the journal BMC Mobile DNA reports that today’s baboons and geladas may have mixed in their history more ...
All posts tagged with primates
Probabilistic calls of the titi monkeys
A fascinating paper in Science Advances today looks at the way that a small platyrrhine monkey species conveys information about predators in its vocal commu...
Link: Long-read on Cayo Santiago
The New York Times Magazine today has a long-read article about Cayo Santiago, the island just off Puerto Rico where a large colony of rhesus macaques was in...
Link: Archaeology of nonhuman tool use
Scientific American is previewing an article by Michael Haslam from their March issue, “The Other Tool Users”. The article focuses on the use of archaeologic...
Genomes and the complicated history of baboons
Today, Science Advances has released a paper by Jeffrey Rogers and coworkers on the genome diversity of six species of baboons: “The comparative genomics and...
Did hominins associate with antelopes?
Last summer in the South African Journal of Science, faunal specialist Shaw Badenhorst published a short commentary with an interesting question for early ho...
Are these moustached monkeys a species unto themselves?
I ran across a news article from the BBC by Paul Rincon, about a proposed taxonomic revision to patas monkeys in northeastern Africa: “Moustached monkey is s...
Scientists working to understand how monkeys rebound in wake of yellow fever epidemic
My University of Wisconsin–Madison colleague, Karen Strier, has studied the muriqui monkeys of Brazil for her entire career. Now, the in small patch of fores...
Incidental capuchin flake manufacture
This is a nice article by Ed Yong about Michael Haslam’s research documenting how capuchin monkeys incidentally make stone flakes as a side effect of their n...
Link: Captive monkey microbiomes are more like humans
Ed Yong writes about an examination of the microbiomes of different monkey species in captivity versus wild populations: “Captivity Makes Monkey Microbiomes ...
Link: About aye-ayes
The Pacific Standard has a very good story by Jason Bittel about aye-ayes: “The Aye-Aye and the Finger of Death”. The story focuses on the interesting behavi...
Link: Evolutionary rate of viruses within our genomes
Carl Zimmer has a nice post today discussing the evolution of endogenous retroviruses in primates: “Our Inner Viruses: Forty Million Years In the Making”. Fr...
Music and monkeys
BBC Earth is running a story by Colin Barras looking at the origins of music in ancient humans and possible perceptual preadaptation to music in other primat...
Notable: Baboon migration to Arabia
Notable paper: Kopp GH, Roos C, Butynski TM, Wildman DE, Alagaili AN, Groeneveld LF, Zinner D. (2014). Out of Africa, but how and when? The case of hamadryas...
The three-color primates
The Scientist has a nice article about the evolution of trichromatic vision in primates: “The Rainbow Connection”. Trichromacy in anthropoid primates is a gr...
Monkey pyrophiles
Nicole Herzog and colleagues spent half a year following a troop of vervet monkeys during the controlled burn season at Loskop Dam Nature Reserve in South Af...
Forget EQ. Forget ‘Machiavellian intelligence’.
Evan MacLean and colleagues write this week in PNAS about the evolution of self-control.
Muriquis and human behavior
Smithsonian magazine has a long profile article about my UW-Madison colleague Karen Strier: “Humans would be better off if they monkeyed around like muriquis...
Primate mating patterns
Ecology, diet, competition, and ease of movement all affect the size of primate groups. The structure of primate groups is primarily affected by the mating s...
Group life in primates
Primates form different kinds of groups. While there is variation within every species, each species has its own typical range of group sizes. Primate groups...
How do primates move around?
The diversification of the first primates from other early mammals took place partly because the ancestors of the primates came to inhabit a unique environme...
The highest award in anthropology?
Incredible! The primatologist Franz de Waal has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his, well, applied work:
Anthropology 105, lecture 7: Eyes
Out of all the lectures in the course, this was one of my favorites to put together. I return to the topic of evolutionary developmental biology, first raise...
Lost pregnancies in geladas after male takeovers
Ed Yong reports on new research from Eila Roberts, with Jacinta Beehner’s research group at the University of Michigan, who was able to show that the rate of...
Incisors
The incisors are the front teeth. They are basically flat and have a blade-like occlusal surface. Each quadrant has two incisors.
Primate classification and phylogeny
Our relationship to other kinds of primates is in part reflected by the pattern of similarities and differences we share with them. This pattern of similarit...
Primate extractive foraging and tool use
An important difference among some primate species is their ability to get foods that are hidden or protected by natural defenses. A little cleverness may yi...
Primate vertebral numbers
Between the skull and the sacrum, humans have 24 vertebrae. Well, most humans, anyway. Sometimes humans have a few more or less.
Meet Daubentonia madagascarensis
The aye-aye is possibly the world’s strangest primate. The species is native to Madagascar, and falls into the family of all primates from that island, the l...
Will a Jurassic placental mammal make the molecular clock make sense?
A new paper in Nature by Zhe-Xi Luo and colleagues Luo:Jurassic:2011 reports the discovery of a 160-million-year-old early mammal, Juramaia, which they attri...
Monkey numerical distractions
This study has been out for a few weeks, and I’ve been meaning to put up a short comment about it: “Representational format determines numerical competence i...
The real "junk" DNA
Let me be honest: when I started doing paleoanthropology, I really did not expect I’d be talking about Neandertal penises.
Quote: Barbara J. King on anthropology
Barbara J. King has written a short essay about why she loves anthropology:
Spider monkey followers
Anthony Di Fiore writes in the NY Times “Notes from the field” feature about his work with spider monkeys in Ecuador: “Spider monkey fathers and sons”.
Field primatology
Noah Snyder-Mackler’s continuing series in the NY Times’ “Scientist at Work” blog has been providing a journal of his fieldwork on gelada baboons.
Mirror macaques
Carl Zimmer reports on last week’s study showing rhesus macaques apparently passing the “Gallup test” for mirror self-recognition. I was talking about this i...
Scanning the ape fecome
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 fro...
Mental mismatches
A Primate of Modern Aspect (“The sexuality wars, featuring apes”) writes about some of the reactions to the new book, Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of...
Hauser update
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an “internal document” from the Marc Hauser investigation: “Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard”. T...
Mailbag: The capuchin australopithecines
Re: australopithecine tools:
Marc Hauser misconduct findings
Maybe by now everybody has seen the story about Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser:
Stress on Sapolsky
Jonah Lehrer in Wired has a long profile of Robert Sapolsky and his work on stress in baboons: “Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine”
Were there Cretaceous anthropoids? Part 3: Ghost lineages
I’ve been giving the background to the question, “Were there Cretaceous anthropoids?” (“The problem in a nutshell”, “What is an anthropoid?”)
Vietnam langur notes
Conservation biologist Eleanor Sterling is running a blog of field notes from a survey for langurs in Vietnam, in the NY Times “Scientist at Work” blog zone.
Were there Cretaceous anthropoids? Part 2: What is an anthropoid?
This is the second post in a series, “Were there Cretaceous anthropoids?”
Were there Cretaceous anthropoids? Part 1. The problem in a nutshell
The evolution of early primates is a field that has developed rapidly in the last fifteen years. Many of the central issues were reviewed earlier this year b...
Shaken by a monkey-maker
The end of the Eocene was a rough time for a lot of Earth’s flora and fauna – it is recognized as a major extinction event, the Grande Coupure. Substantial g...
Quote: Higher-level taxa
I ran across this passage in a book chapter by D. Tab Rasmussen, covering early catarrhine evolution. I think it captures an important point about the fossil...
Mailbag: Music and language
Question:
Primate smell decay
Matthew Cobb wrote recently about olfactory receptor evolution in primates: “You smell like a chimp.. and like a marmoset”.
"Naughty Neandertals" did what?
Gretchen found this one:
SIV and long-term primate health surveillance
Carl Zimmer’s post about simian immunodeficiency virus (“AIDS and the virtues of slow-cooked science”) gives some thoughts about the relation of big-budget l...
Primate genomics: the Duffy (FY) gene, malaria, and baboons
Jenny Tung of Duke University and colleagues report in Nature (online early) that yellow baboons have evolved a Duffy antigen-related defense against a baboo...
Look to the baboons; there will you your insights find!
Clifford Jolly's review article in the 2001 Yearbook of Physical Anthropology pretty much covers every aspect for which baboons make an analogy for human ev...