Evolution (Monkeys,Apes)

Almost Human

A recent article in National Geographic Shows the way we evolved. I believe in Evolution. but everyone has their opinions. Enjoy!!

On the Savannas of Senegal, chimpanzees are hunting bush babies with spearlike sticks. This hothouse of chimp "technology" offers clues to our own evolution.

Daybreak is sudden and swift, as though an unseen hand had simply reached out and raised a dimmer switch. Cued by the dawn, thirty four chimpanzees awaken. They are still in the nest they built the previous night, in trees at the egde of an open plateau.
A wild chimpanzee does not get out of bed quietly. Chimpanzees wake up hollering. There are technical names for what I'm hearing - pant-hoots, pant-barks, screams, hoos - but to a new comer's ear, its just a crazy, exuberant, escalating, racket. You can't listen without grinning.

They're savanna-woodland chimps, found in eastern Senegal and across the border in western Mali. Unlike their better-known rain forest kin, savanna-woodland chimps spend most of their day on the ground. There is no canopy here. The trees are low and grow sparsely. It's an environment very much like the open, scratchy terrain where many early humans evolved. for this reason, chimpanzee communities like the Fongoli group - named for a stream that runs through it's range - are uniquely valuable to scientists who study the origin of our species.

Yet it is impossible to spend any time with chimpanzees and not be struck by how similar they are to us.

I've been keeping a list of things I have seen or heard Pruetz say drive home this point in unexpected ways. I had not known that chimpanzee yawns are contagious - both among each other and humans. I had known that chimps laugh, but I did not know that they laughed at each other, or get upset when someone else laughs at them.
I knew that captive chimps spit, but i hadn't known that, like us, seem to consider spitting the most extreme expression of disgust - one reserved, interestingly, for humans. I knew that a captive chimp might care for a kitten if you gave one to it, but I had not heard of a wild chimpanzee taking one in, as Tia did with a genet kitten. The list goes on. Chimps get up in the middle of the night for snacks. They lie on their backs and do "the aeroplane" with their children. They kiss, shake hands and pick their scabs off before they're ready.
The taboo on anthropmorphizing seems odd, given the closeness - evolutionary, genetic and behavioral - between chimpanzees and humans is the very reason we study chimps so obsessively. Some thousand-plus studies have been published on chimpanzees. As for the chimps, they are ot as intreiged by the ape-human connection. While we have been observing them, they have largely ignored us, occasionally shooting a glance over one shoulder as they move through the brush.

Roach,2008

Readers comments: I thought this was a really good article, I didn't put all of it in but I tried to cut it down to the most interesting stuff!!
Give me yor comments of what you think about this article and your views on Evolution. Thanks!!