Pretty interesting article on chimpanzee cultures

[Superhobo]

- From National Geographic -

You would think that primatologists, more than other scientists, would be comfortable with the shifting boundaries between chimpanzee and human. Their gene sequences are around 95 to 98 percent the same. (This is less meaningful than it sounds. Humans share more than 80 percent of their gene sequence with mice, and maybe 40 percent with lettuce.) A recent exploration of the human and chimpanzee genomes, undertaken by David Reich and colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggests that chimpanzees and early hominins may have interbred after the two lines initially split. Yet there seems to be a lingering discomfort with findings that, as Pruetz puts it, "chip away at our superiority."
Since the earliest days of primatology, discoveries of chimp behavior that threaten to undermine the specialness—the apartness—of human beings have met with rancorous resistance. Many anthropologists bristled at the first references to chimpanzee "culture"—a concept widely accepted today. Jane Goodall's first reports of chimps making tools (for termite fishing) were as contentious in their day as more recent claims of teaching chimps to use language. At the Great Ape Trust, in Des Moines, Iowa, a bonobo named Kanzi has learned to communicate through symbols. Kanzi commands about 380 symbols and shows signs of understanding their meaning. When he was frightened by a beaver, an animal for which he had no symbol, he selected the symbols for "water" and "gorilla" (an animal that scares him). Critics say the communications are purely conditioned behavior. Novel uses of symbols—e.g., "water gorilla"—are dismissed as coincidence.

An exception to these attitudes has long been found at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University. Japanese primatology is consistent with the Buddhist precept that humans are a part of the natural world, not above or separate from it. At the Mind of the Chimpanzee conference in Chicago last year, Tetsuro Matsuzawa spoke of primatology's early years, when scientists "didn't know how much close we are." He added, with unabashed awe: "So close, like horse and zebra." In the background of one Japanese researcher's slides was what looked to be a chimp wearing glasses. I turned to the man next to me. "I'm sorry," I said. "I must be losing my mind. Was that chimp wearing glasses?" The man told me the Japanese primatologists had noticed the chimp was nearsighted and had him outfitted with prescription lenses. (I later learned he was wrong: This chimp was just playing with the glasses. There once was a research chimp whose caretakers ordered her glasses, but that was in the U.S., not Japan.)

No one around Fongoli is sending chimps to the optician, but the animals are accorded a remarkable amount of respect by locals. Kerri Clavette, Pruetz's intern, interviewed villagers about their beliefs regarding chimpanzees and whether they hunted them. Among the region's main tribes—the Malinke, Bedik, Bassari, and Jahanka—chimps, compared with monkeys, have an elevated, almost human status. "Chimpanzees came from man, as they have similar hearts," a villager told Clavette. Behaviors normally associated with a baser nature—such as walking on all fours—were given a respectful spin: "Chimpanzees walk on their knuckles to keep their hands clean to eat with." Chimpanzee origin myths feature humans running off into the woods for some reason—war, fear of circumcision, fear of being punished for fishing on Saturday—and staying there so long that they turn into chimpanzees.

More here.

 

[Captain_BluTac]

This just reminds me that Jim Cronin is dead.

 

[Superhobo]

We won't forget.

 

[Captain_BluTac]

We won't forget.

Alison, finally went back to work in January though, which is good. t:

 

[Superhobo]

Yes.