Chimpanzee News - Evolution and Genetics
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Biology and Behaviour | Conservation and Threats | Captive Chimpanzees | Other Great Apes
Genetics helps to crack down on chimpanzee smuggling
22-01-2010 - ScienceDaily
The population of chimpanzees across western Africa has decreased by 75% in the past 30 years, due in part to widespread chimp hunting. New strategies are needed to curb this illegal activity, experts say.
Research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology suggests that genetics may provide valuable clues as to how to crack down on the animal smuggling trade, while also helping to safely reintroduce rescued apes into the wild.
A smuggler can get up to US $20,000 for a live chimpanzee on the international black market and around US $100 in the local market in Cameroon. It's perhaps not surprising then that despite the existence of enforced wildlife protection laws, smugglers in this poor country will risk the penalties.
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Scientists find big differences in Y chromosomes of men, chimps
14-01-2009 - SicenceFair
Couples, not male harems, are a story of human evolution, suggests a Wednesday study of the male chromosome. Male children result from a father's male sperm carrying a "Y" chromosome, resulting in the "XY" chromosome pairs that trigger masculinity in offspring. In the journal Nature, a team headed by David Page of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., compared the male chromosome in men and chimps and finds "that they differ radically in sequence structure and gene content, indicating rapid evolution during the past 6 million years." In particular they find the chimp Y chromosome is "considerably smaller and simpler than that of the human."
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Richard Wrangham: Cooking is what made us human
21-12-2009 - NewScientist
What was the central mystery of human evolution that you were trying to solve?
I was sitting next to the fire in my living room and I started asking the question, when did our ancestors last live without fire? Out of this came a paradox: it seemed to me that no human with our body form could have lived without it.
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Emerging disease: Looking for trouble
09-12-2009 - Nature
How do you persuade philanthropists to pay $1 million for every pathogenic human virus you discover? Anjali Nayar talks to 'virus hunter' Nathan Wolfe in Cameroon to find out.
Anjali Nayar
Every day, more than 100 patients line up for treatment outside the bare cement walls of a rural health clinic in the Niete forest of southern Cameroon. Most of them suffer from what virologist Nathan Wolfe calls "the usual suspects": malaria and typhoid. But every once in a while there is something a little different: a case that is tough to diagnose, or that doesn't respond as expected to medication. For the patients and the medics here, this presents a problem. For Wolfe, it is also an opportunity. "I get all excited," he says. "These areas are choc-a-block full of interesting, unusual viruses."
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Transcription factors guide differences in human and chimp brain function
07-12-2009 -
Eurekalerts
Humans share at least 97 percent of their genes with chimpanzees, but, as a new study of transcription factors makes clear, what you have in your genome may be less important than how you use it.
The study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that broad differences in the gene activity of humans and of chimpanzees, affecting nearly 1,000 genes, appear to be linked to the action of about 90 transcription factors.
Transcription factors are proteins that bind to specific regions of the DNA to promote or repress the activity of many genes. A single transcription factor can spur the transcription of dozens of genes into messenger RNA (mRNA), which is then translated into proteins that do the work of the cell. This allows specific organs or tissues to quickly ramp up a response to an environmental change or internal need.
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Why we outlive our ape ancestors
01-12-2009 - ScienceBlog
In spite of their genetic similarity to humans, chimpanzees and great apes have maximum lifespans that rarely exceed 50 years. The difference, explains USC Davis School of Gerontology Professor Caleb Finch, is that as humans evolved genes that enabled them to better adjust to levels of infection and inflammation and to the high cholesterol levels of their meat rich diets.
In the December issue of PNAS Early Edition, Finch reveals that these evolutionary genetic advantages, caused by slight differences in DNA sequencing and improvements in diet, make humans uniquely susceptible to diseases of aging such as cancer, heart disease and dementia when compared to other primates.
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Right-handed chimpanzees provide clues to the origin of human language
16-11-2009 - Science Centric
Most of the linguistic functions in humans are controlled by the left cerebral hemisphere. A study of captive chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre (Atlanta, Georgia), reported in the January 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex, suggests that this 'hemispheric lateralisation' for language may have its evolutionary roots in the gestural communication of our common ancestors. A large majority of the chimpanzees in the study showed a significant bias towards right-handed gestures when communicating, which may reflect a similar dominance of the left hemisphere for communication in chimpanzees as that seen for language functions in humans.
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Human-Chimp Gene Comparison Hints at Roots of Language
11-11-2009 - Wired Science
By comparing how a gene critical for language works in humans and chimpanzees, researchers have identified an entire network of genes involved in the incredible linguistic powers of Homo sapiens.
The findings don’t explain how language functions at the biological level, or exactly what changes were needed to put an otherwise unremarkable monkey on its chattering, Earth-dominating trajectory. But they do give researchers a foundation for investigating these questions.
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Malaria’s deadly leap from chimps to humans
09-11-2009 - The Boston Globe
The terrible transfer took only an instant.
One mosquito; one hot-blooded human target; one quick puncture of skin. Most likely, our distant ancestor reacted with no more than a scratch and a shrug.
Thus did malaria leap across the “species divide’’ between chimpanzees and humans, according to new research led by a University of Massachusetts at Amherst scientist.
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A new kind of ancestor: Ardipithecus unveiled
01-10-2009 - Science
Every day, scientists add new pages to the story of human evolution by deciphering clues to our past in everything from the DNA in our genes to the bones and artifacts of thousands of our ancestors. But perhaps once each generation, a spectacular fossil reveals a whole chapter of our prehistory all at once. In 1974, it was the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton "Lucy," who proved in one stroke that our ancestors walked upright before they evolved big brains. Ever since Lucy's discovery, researchers have wondered what came before her. Did the earliest members of the human family walk upright like Lucy or on their knuckles like chimpanzees and gorillas? Did they swing through the trees or venture into open grasslands? Researchers have had only partial, fleeting glimpses of Lucy's own ancestors—the earliest hominins, members of the group that includes humans and our ancestors (and are sometimes called hominids). Now, in a special section beginning on page 60 and online, a multidisciplinary international team presents the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor, 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus from Aramis, Ethiopia. |
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Tracing the origins of human empathy
25-09-2009 - The Wall Street Journal
Chimpanzees' Caring Behavior Toward Others Hints at the Emotion's Antiquity; the Mystery of the Contagious Yawn A pioneer in primate studies, Frans de Waal sees our better side in chimps, especially our capacity for empathy. In his research, Dr. de Waal has gathered ample evidence that our ability to identify with another's distress -- a catalyst for compassion and charity -- has deep roots in the origin of our species. It is a view independently reinforced by recent biomedical studies showing that our brains are built to feel another's pain. |
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Humans evolved from orangutans not chimpanzees, new theory says
06-09-2009 - Ottowa Citizen
Humans are more closely related to orangutans than chimps or gorillas, claims a controversial new theory that flies in the face of accepted science. According to scientists Jeffrey Schwartz and John Grehan, humans and orangutans may have evolved from populations of an orang-like ancestor, rather than the chimpanzee, which is the mainstream scientific opinion. Their work is published in the Journal of Biogeography.
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Why humans can talk and chimps can't
12-08-2009 - NewScientist
A brain region critical to speech and language ballooned after humans split from chimpanzees, a new study finds.
Named after French physician, Pierre Paul Broca, who identified the region in two brain-damaged patients incapable of uttering more than a few words, Broca's area usually occupies a much larger portion of the left half of the human brain than the right.
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Bipedal humans came down from the trees, not up from the ground
11-08-2009 - Science Daily
A detailed examination of the wrist bones of several primate species challenges the notion that humans evolved their two-legged upright walking style from a knuckle-walking ancestor.
The same lines of evidence also suggest that knuckle-walking evolved at least two different times, making gorillas distinct from chimpanzees and bonobos.
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Scientists Report Original Source Of Malaria
04-08-2009 - Science Daily
Researchers have identified what they believe is the original source of malignant malaria: a parasite found in chimpanzees in equatorial Africa.
UC Irvine biologist Francisco Ayala and colleagues think the deadly parasite was transmitted to humans from chimpanzees perhaps as recently as 5,000 years ago – and possibly through a single mosquito, genetic analyses indicate. Previously, malaria's origin had been unclear.
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