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Of course, when Hollywood stars or politicians have extramarital affairs, the whole world rumbles. But if we peek into human biology, anthropology and sociology, the monogamous human appears as a very weird notion. We are mammals, and if we look to the mammalian world, just 3 to 5% of the about 5,000 species of mamma... |
12 April 2008
06:00 GMT |
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The complex human speech is one of the most important traits that differentiate us from animals. It relies on our large brains, however it is not a question of size but of brain wiring, as showed by a new research published in "Nature Neuroscience." Since the 19th century, the Broca nucleus in the frontal cortex and ... |
27 March 2008
06:14 GMT |
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Walking on two feet is one of the main traits of the human being. A new study published in the journal "Nature" shows that the six-million-year-old Kenyan hominin could have been the first species able to walk bipedally, based on bone anatomy."This provides really solid evidence that these fossils actually belong to ... |
21 March 2008
04:30 GMT |
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It seems so human, still laugh is not specific to humans. Monkeys, rats and dogs have already been found to enjoy a good "laugh". But it is hard to penetrate into their mind to see what a rat or dog could think when "laughing". Perhaps they think we, humans, are ugly... Anyway, laughing seems to be connected to a hi... |
17 March 2008
09:34 GMT |
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In the end, the first ape to walk on two feet was not the human, nor the Australopithecus, but a primate that lived 10 Ma ago. And not in Africa! Oreopithecus bamboli lived during the Miocene in an island on the current territories of Sardinia and Tuscany (Italy). Oreopithecus is believed to have evolved from Dryopit... |
21 February 2008
08:47 GMT |
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Monkeys, rats and dogs were found to have already enjoyed a good "laugh". What a rat or dog could think when "laughing", it's hard to say. But it seems that we, humans, have been able to laugh for many millions of years, and not since we turned into humans. A new research published in the Biology Letters shows t... |
3 January 2008
04:28 GMT |
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Why did humans' ancestors start to walk on two feet? The debate is more vivid than that if it was Britney Spears or not in her last video, and only in the last year it has come with several theories, from bipedal (two feet) walking in the tree of the orangutans, to energy saving. Now, add a new one: Lia Amaral, ... |
17 December 2007
06:24 GMT |
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You may wonder how pregnant women, with those continuously growing bellies, don't lose balance, toppling over. A new Harvard research published in "Nature" has found some evolutionary tricks: slight differences from men in the lower backs and hip joints enable women to cope with pregnancy. And the adaptive patte... |
13 December 2007
03:58 GMT |
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Yeah, right, humans are the smartest beings of the planet, and all the other animals are dumb. Including our closest relatives. But, a new research, published in "Current Biology", showed that young chimpanzees have an astonishing higher short-term memory capacity than human adults."There are still many people, inclu... |
4 December 2007
05:06 GMT |
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Yeti, also called the "abominable snowman", represents the most fascinating legend of the Himalaya. Stories tell about a huge ape-like creature, bipedal (walking on two feet), with small ears and long red hair. And the stories do not originate from the territory of Himalaya, but they also come from the mountains of ... |
3 December 2007
02:56 GMT |
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Men dream on being polygamous, some do it unofficially, and in Muslim countries they do it legally; but, a new research, published in the journal "Science", shows that some early humans could have had "harems", such as male gorillas and orangutans have. This mating pattern in modern apes emerges when males mature lat... |
30 November 2007
03:05 GMT |
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Gorillas split from the branch that evolved towards humans and chimps about 10 million years ago, thus gorillas are equally related to us as to chimps. Gorillas have been split in two species. Western gorillas (Gorilla gorilla) have silverback males (the male leader of a gorilla family has the back whitish) with a ve... |
26 November 2007
16:05 GMT |
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Homosexuality is regarded as being unnatural, but that's a paradox: nature abounds in examples of homosexual behavior in animals. Various explanations have attempted to explain homosexuality in both humans and animals. Some researches point that genes conferring homosexuality in men could deliver more fertile fe... |
17 November 2007
05:50 GMT |
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You cannot live without French fries and chips, can you? Well, it seems this has something to do with our remote ancestry. Anthropologist Adriana Hernandez-Aguilar of the University of Southern California has found for the first time proofs that chimps dig by using tools in order to eat tubers, roots, and bulbs, a fi... |
14 November 2007
03:06 GMT |
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The lack of fossils had forced scientists to make complicated hypotheses about how apes emerged in Africa 22 million years ago, migrated to Europe and Asia, disappeared from Africa, migrated back in Africa from Europe and from that lineage humans, chimps and gorillas appeared. But a new 10-million-year old jaw bone a... |
13 November 2007
05:27 GMT |
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Human are primates. Our closest relatives are the apes, monkeys and lemurs. But the question is: which group of mammals is closest to primates?A new genetic research claims to have closed the debate: it's not the tree shrews, once even included amongst the primates, but the colugos, also called flying lemurs, sq... |
2 November 2007
03:56 GMT |
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Cutting and burning forests are a menace to our living relatives: apes and monkeys. The last refuge of the primates is attacked, but they can also be victims of pouching and illegal wildlife trade. Constructions of roads inside the forests exposes the primates to human exploitation even more. "Primates in Peril: The ... |
29 October 2007
08:12 GMT |
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Everybody is familiar with the chimpanzees, but how many know that there are two species: the common chimpanzee and the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee? The term "pygmy" for bonobo is a misnomer, as bonobo has the same size as a common chimp. They are quite similar (only that a bonobo is somehow slender), live in groups o... |
25 October 2007
14:06 GMT |
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1. Gibbons are the smallest living apes. They are restricted to the southeastern Asia (Indochina, and three big islands of Indonesia: Borneo, Sumatra and Java). Gibbons split from the line that evolved towards humans over 10 million years ago. Experts say that all living gibbons evolved from one species, 2 million ye... |
22 October 2007
14:06 GMT |
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1. The Orangutan is the only Asian ape, closely related to humans, chimps and gorillas, from which they split more than 8 million years ago. Today they live in the islands of Borneo and Sumatra (southeastern Asia). Till recently, they were believed to represent the same species, but DNA analysis showed there are two ... |
18 October 2007
13:06 GMT |
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We pride ourselves on our high intelligence and we say that this is the main trait that sets us apart from apes. But why are we more intelligent? A new research made by a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig on 106 juvenile and adult chimpanzees (living in sanctuaries in Uganda an... |
11 September 2007
05:58 GMT |
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This was indeed one of the most interesting species in our evolution: a mix between an orangutan and a gorilla. A new research shows that an extinct ape could swing from both branches and walk along on all fours. But it is not clear if this is just an evolutionary dead end or a key step in the evolution of the tree-d... |
10 August 2007
03:21 GMT |
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The evolution from ape to man is a complicated one, as there was not a direct line from our earliest ancestor to us, but a branched one, with many dead ramifications. Various families of primates differentiated 25-28 MA years ago (thus the oldest apes have this age) and the genera differentiation of the primates is n... |
6 August 2007
14:06 GMT |
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The general conception is that chimps are smart, orangutans are dumber. But orangutans come with big surprises in many cases. It was proved that they have the same ability as chimps to learn the sign language. A new research shows that captive orangutans "play charades" to communicate with humans, pointing that the a... |
3 August 2007
02:51 GMT |
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When Toumai ("Hope of Life" in the local Goran language) was found in Chad (Africa), that changed all the theories about human evolution. This ape-like human lived 7 million years ago in a forested area, sharing its habitat with other monkeys and apes and always alert to cats, crocodiles and pythons. It spent probabl... |
2 August 2007
14:31 GMT |
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Humans and apes have the same number of bones in their feet: 26. These bones are connected to one another by ligaments, connected to muscles by tendons which interact at 33 joints. But the moment we chose bipedalism (walking on two feet), our problems started. Just a wrong trip or jump and we sprain our ankles or hip... |
1 August 2007
04:13 GMT |
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"He got friendly holding my hand/She got friendly down in the sand". Yeah, humans are the most social monkeys. But we do not establish friendships with anybody, we generally try to find out how trustworthy and compatible with us certain persons are. A new research made by a team led by anthropologist Katerina Semende... |
31 July 2007
05:36 GMT |
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Humans, like animals, experience a fierce competition for sex. And this competition does not stop with mating, as a woman can be promiscuous. That's how sperm competition emerges. A new research has tried to see how sperm speed connects to the species' sexual behavior, while placing us amongst other primate... |
25 July 2007
14:36 GMT |
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80 % people experience back pains along their life. And in 90 % of the cases, this takes long to treat, over 6 weeks. The most frequent causes are diseases like arthrosis, muscular contracture, trauma, osteoporosis and inflammatory processes, the majority linked to back muscles and bones. Now a spine specialist has c... |
16 July 2007
06:33 GMT |
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We tend to see the apes that are closer to us as being more intelligent, like chimps and bonobos, while orangutans are seen like red clowns. This conception persists despite the fact that many tests have proven a high cognitive ability in this ape. Now they astonished scientists with an Aesop's fable-like situat... |
5 July 2007
03:49 GMT |
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What best characterizes a monkey or an ape?It's the big brain.But when researchers got a new fossil of a common ancestor of monkeys and apes (humans included), they found out that the 29 million-year-old creature has not such a big brain as expected. "The finding indicated that primate brain enlargement evolved ... |
15 May 2007
03:42 GMT |
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Look at the apes. These tree-dwelling creatures have extremely long arms (with a span up to 2m or 6 ft!) while their legs are short. That's why a "skinny" roughly 200 kg (500 pounds) male gorilla can be no taller than 1.7-1.8 m (5.5-6 ft). So, how to explain the inverse human anatomy, which may seem silly for a... |
14 March 2007
06:50 GMT |
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