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Dr Moya-Sola with colleagues discovered the fossil specimen of Pierolapithecus in Spain in 2002. They estimated that the hominid lived about 11.9 million years ago, arguing that it could be the last common ancestor of modern great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas and humans... the shape of the specimen’s pelvis indicates that Pierolapithecus lived near the beginning of the great ape evolution, after the lesser apes had started to develop separately but before the great ape species began to diversify... “The ilium – the largest bone in the pelvis – of the Pierolapithecus is wider than that of Proconsul nyanzae,...

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi defended his rancorous anti-Semitic comments, claiming that they were taken out of context. Morsi asserted in September 2010 that peace negotiations are "a waste of time and opportunities" as Arabs and Muslims get nothing out of engagement with "the descendants of apes and pigs." An Egyptian television shown this month aired the remarks, which were translated and distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). "I was talking about the practices and behavior of believers of any religion who shed blood or who attack innocent people or civilians. That's behavior that I condemn," Morsi said,...

When you arm Islamists, you become a willing participant in your own undoing. When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here: Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path! You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates that Muslims “must not forget to...

Where does human savagery come from? The animal behaviorist Marc Bekoff, writing in Psychology Today after last month's awful events in Newtown, Conn., echoed a common view: It can't possibly come from nature or evolution. Harsh aggression, he wrote, is "extremely rare" in nonhuman animals, while violence is merely an odd feature of our own species, produced by a few wicked people. If only we could "rewild our hearts," he concluded, we might harness our "inborn goodness and optimism" and thereby return to our "nice, kind, compassionate, empathic" original selves.

What makes us human? Some say that it is the development of language, though others argue that animals have language as well. Some say that it is our ability to use tools, though many animals are able to use rocks and other objects as primitive tools. Some say that it is our ability to see death coming. Now, researchers believe that they have found the definitive difference between humans and other primates, and they think that the difference all comes down to a single gene. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland attribute the split of humanity from apes...

Adult Chimpanzee Fatally Mauls Baby Chimp at LA Zoo The unnamed infant was born March 6 to Gracie, who is being allowed to keep the infant overnight to grieve, zoo officials said. The first chimpanzee baby born at the LA Zoo in 13 years was mauled to death Tuesday by an adult chimp in front of a crowd of visitors, including children, zoo officials said. The unnamed infant was born March 6 to Gracie, who is being allowed to keep the infant overnight to grieve, zoo officials said. When the adult male chimp began attacking the infant, zoo staff were...

Bill Maher on Monday called the GOP the “Party of the Apes” and ripped Republicans for not repudiating Rep. Allen West — who, the comedian suggested, should be taken to a mental hospital. “[T]he idea that the blame for our government’s dysfunction is equally shared by the parties just is a giant, steaming mound of horsesh*t and anyone who has paid attention to politics over the last 20 years knows it. Or as I like to call it, ‘The Rise of the Party of the Apes,’” the host of HBO’s “Real Time” wrote on his blog. Maher singled out two...

In the two-hour CGI Special “Mermaids: The Body Found,” Animal Planet dives deep into the idea that mermaids may have been real, and, even better -- related to humans! “It’s a very radical theory on human evolution, but we have approached an age-old myth and really chased its origins,” Animal Planet honcho Charlie Foley told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “It has been compiled in a way that is very compelling, making us think that mermaids might not just be mythical creatures.” The show unravels mysterious underwater sound recordings and presents a bone-chilling argument for the Aquatic Ape Theory, which suggests...

Eagerly he collects wood from the ground, snaps the branches into small pieces and carefully balances them in a pile. Then, taking care not to burn himself, he gently strikes a match and gets ready for a fry-up. Like all red-blooded males, Kanzi loves messing around with a barbecue. But then, as these extraordinary pictures show, Kanzi is no man. He is a bonobo - pygmy chimpanzee - and his love of fire is challenging the way that we think about our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. For although bonobo apes and larger chimpanzees use twigs and leaves as...

DNA Study Contradicts Human/Chimp Common Ancestry by Brian Thomas, M.S. | Nov. 15, 2011 Evolutionary biologists argue that since human and chimp DNA are nearly identical, both species must have evolved from a common ancestor. However, creation scientists have pointed out that their DNA is, in fact, very dissimilar. The vast majority of each species' DNA sequence is not genes, but instead regulated gene expression. A new report unmistakably confirmed that the regulatory DNA of humans is totally different from that of chimps, revealing no hint of common ancestry. Biologist John F. McDonald, of the Georgia Institute of Technology's School...

Here’s Rupert Wyatt, director of the blockbuster movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes in a recent interview: “(The script) had become very different and much more exciting to me. It became less a story of domesticization of a pet and more about an uprising and a Che Guevara story.” Here’s the Associated Press review of “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”: “Raised much like a human child by a researcher, with help from a veterinarian, Caesar becomes a Che Guevara-style revolutionary, leading a rebellion of apes against their human oppressors.” Ground control to Director Wyatt:

They're not just talking apes -- they're metaphors. Of science run amok, an underclass shrugging off its chains, and how humans treat beings that are lower on the evolutionary scale.

A bizarre report of Taliban insurgents training monkeys and baboons to shoot at U.S. and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan seems unrealistic at best, according to an expert. The story that appeared this month in the Chinese People's Daily suggested that insurgents used a reward-and-punishment system to train macaques and baboons to target soldiers wearing U.S. military uniforms. The Taliban supposedly "taught monkeys how to use the Kalashnikov, Bren light machine gun and trench mortars," the People's Daily wrote.

L.A. "teacher" Ron Gochez strikes again. Gochez, who for some unknown reason remains a teacher at Santee H.S. Complex in Los Angeles, is at it again in this video, railing against the police as "apes of repression", calls L.A. the "occupied territories of Mexico" and says he "represents" a "Mexican revolutionary organi...zation". He must teach one heck of a "history" class to young minds full of mush in L.A. This 2007 video adds to the prior footage of Gochez' racist, anti-Semitic and seditious rantings. If Gochez had been a Caucasian teacher who called for a white uprising against the U.S....

This is so timely: And funny!!! “The Evolution Interpreter: Generic Transition Form Fossil Discovery Article” Over the years I’ve read copiously on the subject of origins. I’ve noticed the media pronouncements on the subject of new fossils and evolutionary theory form a startlingly repetitive pattern. To save the over-worked and increasingly bankrupt news media I’ve undertaken to serve them with a generic news story that can be copy-and-pasted with few modifications and reused as frequently as desired. New Fossil Discovery Is Transition Form, Provides Proof of Evolution! University of ________ Scientists say they’ve found a “missing link” in the early...

A "missing link" between humans and their apelike ancestors has been discovered. The new species of hominid, the evolutionary branch of primates that includes humans, is to be revealed when the two-million-year-old skeleton of a child is unveiled this week. Scientists believe the almost-complete fossilised skeleton belonged to a previously-unknown type of early human ancestor that may have been a intermediate stage as ape-men evolved into the first species of advanced humans, Homo habilis.

Endogenous retroviruses are the remnant DNA of a past viral infection. Retroviruses (like the AIDS virus or HTLV1, which causes a form of leukemia) make a copy of their own viral DNA and insert it into their host's DNA. This is how they take over the cellular machinery of a cell and use it to manufacture new copies of the virus. Sometimes, the cell that get’s infected by such a virus is an immature egg cell in the ovary of a female animal. Such cells can be stored in a state of suspended animation or dormancy for as much as...

In this epsiode of the Conscience of Kansas radio program we talk about the 2009 halloween special. We also talk at length about my new article on a return to the planet of the apes. It is a very interesting show. We invite you to listen and comment on the show!

The Davises are like any other family, only instead of a son, they raised a chimpanzee. For thirty years, everything was going swell. Then something far stranger — and horrifying — happened. Just as horrifying — if not more so — than the chimpanzee attack in Connecticut on Monday.

It's easy to snickeringly dismiss the recent disclosure that the late hotelier Leona Helmsley not only left $12 million to her dog but nearly all of the rest of her estate - an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion (yes, billion) - to dogdom. No correlation, after all, has ever been evident between wealth and sanity. Apes may resemble humans, but they never get punished for stealing a banana. Photo: Courtesy Great Ape Project More significant by far was another recent bit of animal news, the Spanish parliament's June 25 vote in support of extending the right to life and...

By Jerry Markon and Ben Hubbard Washington Post Staff Writers Tuesday, July 15, 2008; Page B01 A Saudi-funded academy in Fairfax County used textbooks as recently as 2006 that compared Jews and Christians to apes and pigs, told eighth-graders that these groups are "the enemies of the believers" and diagrammed for high school students where to cut off the hands and feet of thieves, a Washington Post review of the books has found. Saudi officials acknowledged that the textbooks used at the Islamic Saudi Academy had contained inflammatory material since at least the mid-1990s but said they ordered revisions in...

A Saudi-funded academy in Fairfax County used textbooks as recently as 2006 that compared Jews and Christians to apes and pigs, told eighth-graders that these groups are “the enemies of the believers” and diagrammed for high school students where to cut off the hands and feet of thieves, a Washington Post review of the books has found. It seems that some pretty smart kids go there. And the school's track record is pretty good, if you don't count the one kid who bypassed college, joined al-Qaeda, and tried to kill President Bush.

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male. Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from...

Madrid, Jun 27, 2008 / 01:08 pm (CNA).- The civil rights watchdog website HazteOir.org reported this week that Spain’s Socialist Party and the Green Party of Catalonia have grated orangutans, chimpanzees, gorillas and other apes the “inalienable right” of “companions of humanity.”The Committee on the Environment, Agriculture and Fishing of the Spanish Congress approved a proposal that would press the Zapatero administration to support the Great Ape project in order to guarantee apes the right to life, liberty and the right not to be tortured.  The final text of the proposal was drafted by Green party and Socialist lawmakers,...

Compared to their sex-mad, peace-loving Bonobo counterparts, chimpanzees are often seen as a scheming, war-mongering, and selfish species. As both apes are allegedly our closest relatives, together they are often depicted as representing the two extremes of human behaviour. Orlaith Fraser, who will receive her PhD from LJMU's School of Biological Sciences in July 2008, has conducted research that shows chimpanzee behaviour is not as clear cut as previously thought. Her study is the first one to demonstrate the effects of consolation amongst chimpanzees. In her recently published article, Fraser analyses how the apes behave after a fight. Working with...

MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans. Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans. "This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity," said Pedro Pozas,...

Great Apes Think Ahead: Conclusive Evidence Of Advanced Planning CapacitiesIn a series of four experiments, Mathias and Helena Osvath investigated whether chimpanzees and orangutans could override immediate drives in favor of future needs, and therefore demonstrate both self-control and the ability to plan ahead, rather than simply fulfill immediate needs through impulsive behavior. (Credit: iStockphoto/Michael Steden) ScienceDaily (Jun. 19, 2008) — Apes can plan for their future needs just as we humans can – by using self-control and imagining future events. Mathias and Helena Osvath’s research, from Lunds University Cognitive Science in Sweden, is the first to provide conclusive evidence...

South Africa's crime problem has taken a new twist. A gang of baboons is being blamed for a series of break-ins. The chacma baboons, which live wild in the Cape peninsula, have been raiding people's homes for food and causing thousands of pounds in damage.

Female chimpanzees 'sell' sex for fruit By Auslan Cramb, Scottish Correspondent Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 11/09/2007 Female chimpanzees are "selling" sex to the males that gather the most fruit, according to new research. Behavioural psychologists found that female chimps mate with the males that give them the most fruit, while male chimps steal "desirable" fruits such as papaya from farms and orchards in a bid to woo potential mates. Oranges, pineapples and maize are among the most sought after crops, with bananas proving far less popular. The scientists also discovered that the chimp that gathered the most fruit in the...

Science Daily — Apes bite and try to break a tube to retrieve the food inside while children follow the experimenter's example to get inside the tube to retrieve the prize, showing that even before preschool, toddlers are more sophisticated in their social learning skills than their closest primate relatives, according to a report published in the 7 September issue of the journal Science. Chimpanzees participated in a comprehensive battery of tasks comparing their physical and social cognitive abilities to those of 2-year-old human children. (Credit: Image courtesy of MPI EVAN/JGI-USA) This innate proficiency allows them to excel in...

A reorganization of workers at the Swedish Tax Authority is partly shaped on studies of apes, according to a leaked internal report. Employees are not flattered by the comparison. The tax authority is currently undergoing its largest reorganization for many years. One of the foundations of the restructuring plan is a report which says that studies of apes show that people work best in groups of 150. The reorganization was announced earlier in the summer. Work is being moved from small towns to larger towns and cities. Around 1,350 people are affected by the move. Economies of scale are a...

Don't stare at the apes, zoo tells visitors By Martin Banks Last Updated: 1:15am BST 16/04/2007 Most people visit zoos to see the animals - but visitors to Antwerp Zoo in Belgium are being told not to look at the apes. Instead, visitors are now confronted with signs telling them that making prolonged eye contact with the apes leaves them sad and withdrawn. Zoo staff reckon staring can result in the creatures becoming less sociable. A spokesman said: "We are saying to visitors that, if our apes hold eye contact with them, then they should look away for a bit...

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An international movement is growing to grant human rights and "personhood" to apes. In Austria, judges must decide whether a British woman should become legal guardian of a chimpanzee, and in Spain, members of parliament are being urged to grant apes the right to life, freedom and protection from torture, reports BBC News magazine. Ian Redmond of the U.N.'s Great Apes Survival Project contends apes are special because they are so closely related to humans – chimpanzees and bonobos, for example, differ by only 1 percent of DNA. Redmond argues the great apes have the human quality of self-awareness...

Should apes have human rights? By Tom Geoghegan BBC News Magazine Apes and humans have common ancestors but should they have the same rights? An international movement to give them "personhood" is gathering pace. What would Aristotle make of it? More than 2,000 years after the Greek philosopher declared Mother Nature had made all animals for the sake of man, there are moves to put the relationship on a more equal footing. Judges in Austria are considering whether a British woman, Paula Stibbe, should become legal guardian of a chimpanzee called Hiasl which was abducted from its family tribe in...

A BRITISH Muslim school is teaching children that Jews are “repugnant apes” and Christians “pigs”, a former teacher claims. Colin Cook, 57, says when he raised his concerns to chiefs at the Saudi government-funded King Fahad Academy in West London he was told: “This is not England. It is Saudi Arabia.” Some of the 1,250 pupils at the faith school are alleged to have been heard idolising Osama bin Laden, praising 9/11 and saying they want to “kill Americans”. Mr Cook — himself a Muslim — warned yesterday: “The school could produce a dangerous harvest. “It is clearly racist and...

Cultured Cousins? January 31, 2007 by Kirsten Vala Looking at apes, tools, and human evolution Many animals have been observed using tools: Dolphins use sponges when fishing, crows use sticks to forage for insects in dead wood, capuchin monkeys use stones to break open nuts. A wild chimpanzee in a nest (or bed or sleeping platform), essentially a simple shelter. This is a constructed artifact, a simple example of elementary technology, which happens to be a great ape universal. (© W.C. McGrew) Apes use tools. So what? What does that tell us about human evolution? As it turns out, observing...

YET more evidence is in that the Ebola virus is spreading in a wave across Africa - putting the world's last big populations of lowland gorillas directly in its path. In 2003, an outbreak of Ebola struck gorillas living in the Congo. Bats in the area at that time were also carrying the virus, researchers recently discovered (New Scientist, 3 December 2005, p 20). That meant either the virus had always been lurking in bats, and spread to the gorillas, or that the bats were newly infected as the epidemic crossed their territory. Now researchers have found that the bat...

To be a "good" Muslim! Part I http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1726241/posts Part II http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1727912/posts Part III http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1728361/posts Dehumaize victims of Islamic terror, especially Israeli men, women & children as "tanks". Never apologize for the continuing exposed (Like Muhammad Aldura, Reuters "images", Jenin "numbers" & added bodies) long tradition of lying, faking, inventing hoaxes, faking images, etc. but rather be already busy with preparing the next one. Islamic violence and bloodshed is always ahead of West's "reprisal", in other words, Bin Laden, Muhammad Atta, etc. have massacred Americans on 9/11/2001 was because the US will eventually go into Afghanistan afterwards, Islamists almost succeeded with...

One of the fastest-evolving pieces of DNA in the human genome is a gene linked to brain development, according to findings by an international team of researchers published in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Nature. In a computer-based search for pieces of DNA that have undergone the most change since the ancestors of humans and chimps diverged, "Human Accelerated Region 1" or HAR1, was a clear standout, said lead author Katie Pollard, assistant professor at the UC Davis Genome Center and the Department of Statistics. "It's evolving incredibly rapidly," Pollard said. "It's really an extreme case." As a...

Durham, N.C. -- The great apes are the smartest of all nonhuman primates, with orangutans and chimpanzees consistently besting monkeys and lemurs on a variety of intelligence tests, Duke University Medical Center researchers have found. "It's clear that some species can and do develop enhanced abilities for solving particular problems," said Robert O. Deaner, Ph.D., who led the study as part of his doctoral dissertation. "But our results imply that natural selection may favor a general type of intelligence in some circumstances. We suspect that this was crucial in human evolution." The study was published online August 1, 2006, in...

Gorillas infecting each other with Ebola 17:00 10 July 2006 NewScientist.com news service Debora MacKenzie Lowland gorillas are catching the devastating Ebola virus not just from the virus's normal host, thought to be bats, but also from each other. So conclude Damien Caillaud and colleagues at the University of Rennes in France, who began watching 377 gorillas in Odzala National Park in Congo in 2001. "Maybe 30 are left now" of that original group, Caillaud told New Scientist.(There are other gorillas in the park that were not in the study group, which was defined by their use of the observation...

MADRID - Spain's parliament is to declare support for rights to life and freedom for great apes on Wednesday, apparently the first time any national legislature will have recognized such rights for non-humans. The resolution prompted criticism and ridicule at first. Parliament is to ask the government to adhere to the Great Ape Project, which would mean recognizing that our closest genetic relatives should be part of a "community of equals" with humans, supporters of the resolution said. The move in a country better known for bull-fighting would follow a string of social reforms which have converted Spain from one...

Christians still 'swine' and Jews 'apes' in Saudi schools By Harry de Quetteville, Middle East Correspondent (Filed: 25/06/2006) Saudi Arabia has been accused of continuing to foster religious hatred in its schools, despite its repeated assurances since the September 11 attacks that it would rewrite textbooks that refer to Jews as "apes" and Christians as "swine". The charges come after Freedom House, a non-partisan American research group which monitors civil rights worldwide, examined textbooks that it smuggled out of Saudi Arabia. The group found that despite promises of change from leading Saudi officials, including Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and...

SPAIN could soon become the first country in the world to give chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and other great apes some of the fundamental rights granted to human beings under a law being proposed by members of the ruling Socialist coalition.The law would eliminate the concept of "ownership" for great apes, instead placing them under the "moral guardianship" of the state, such as in the case for children in care, the severely disabled and those in comas, said the MP behind the project, Francisco Garrido. Great apes held in Spanish zoos would be moved to state-built sanctuaries, unless there was a...

By studying chimpanzee droppings in remote African jungles, scientists reported yesterday, they have found direct evidence of a missing link between a chimpanzee virus and the one that causes human AIDS. Scientists have long suspected that chimpanzees are the source of the human AIDS pandemic because at least one subspecies carries a simian immune deficiency virus closely related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. But because the simian virus, known as S.I.V.cpz, was identified in chimpanzees in captivity, researchers could not be sure that the same simian virus existed among these apes in the wild. It does, the team...

Researchers taping calls of the putty-nosed monkey in the forests of Nigeria may have come a small step closer to understanding the origins of human language. The researchers have heard the monkeys string two alarm calls into a combined sound with a different meaning, as if forming a word, Kate Arnold and Klaus Zuberbühler report in the current issue of Nature. Monkeys are known to have specific alarm calls for different predators. Vervet monkeys have one call for eagles, another for snakes and a third for leopards. But this seems a far cry from language because the vervets do not...

Chimpanzees are supposed to be the "good" apes, cute and funny, the hairy little people depicted in thousands of films and TV shows. But recent news out of western Africa shows they can be brutally fierce. A chimp attacked and killed a Sierra Leone man who was driving Americans to a wildlife refuge Sunday. Another man lost part of his hand in the attack. Some news reports said a group of up to 20 chimps that had broken out of their enclosures gang-attacked the men, while other stories have pinned responsibility on one animal, possibly a chimp named Bruno, the...

The Socialist Party is trying to pass a parliamentary initiative that includes simians in the category of "people" and, thereby, grant them legal and moral protection. Under the measure, apes would be put on a par with handicapped people. Spain's Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, defended the initiative as the "next logical step in the evolution of Spanish socialism." "The boundary between man and ape is an arbitrary one," said Zapatero. "Many in the human race share a large number of traits with the apes. Where should we draw the line? Why should we draw a line?" Zapatero said...

MADRID, April 26, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Amnesty International is shocked that the governing socialists in Spain have put forward legislation to grant great apes ‘human rights’.  The same government which stripped from unborn human children the right to life and permits destructive research on human embryos, has put forward legislation to grant great apes the rights the rights to life, freedom and to not being tortured, according to a report by Deutsche Presse-Agentur.Environment Minister Cristina Narbona, protested that the government was not giving apes human rights. “We are not talking about granting human rights to great apes,' but about...

How can humans and chimpanzees, who share about 99 percent of the same genes be so different? Scientists in the United States and Australia say changes in the gene expression, not just genes, is a big part of what separates humans from their nearest relatives. Gene expression is the process by which genes are turned on or off. Not all of the estimated 30,000 genes in humans are activated at the same time in every cell. "We think gene expression is a major part of what separates chimps and humans," said Kevin White, an associate professor of genetics, ecology and...