primates

When gorillas smell danger, they run around and call out to the rest of the primates in the jungle to warn them something evil is coming. And when one of their own dies, they mourn for days while beating themselves up in sadness for failing to save that gorilla, even if the cause of death was natural. And when one colony is mourning, their chilling echoes migrate to other colonies _ and those neighbors, even if they are territorial rivals, will also grieve with them. When faced with a common danger, rivals turn into allies. And when faced with death, the loss of just one gorilla becomes the loss of the entire jungle.

Interestingly, bonobo percussionists prefer a tempo of 280 beats per minute, the syllabic rate at which most humans speak.

I__ been traveling in Asia long enough to know that monkeys there are nothing like their trombone-playing, tambourine-banging cousins I__ seen on TV as a kid. Free-living Asian primates possess a characteristic I found shocking and confusing the first time I saw it: self-respect. If you make the mistake of holding the gaze of a street monkey in India, Nepal, or Malaysia, you__l find you__e facing a belligerently intelligent creature whose expression says, with a Robert DeNiro__ike scowl, __hat the hell are you looking at? You wanna piece of me?_ Forget about putting one of these guys in a little red vest.

If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?

Never call anyone a baboon unless you are sure of your facts.

As I sit, my back leaning against a damp, moss-covered tree trunk, my eyes sweeping the canopy above, my ears straining to catch the crack of a distant branch that betrays an orangutan moving in the treetops, I think about how we humans search for God. The tropical rain forest is the most complex thing an ordinary human can experience on this planet. A walk in the rain forest is a walk into the mind of God.

Much of human behavior can be explained by watching the wild beasts around us. They are constantly teaching us things about ourselves and the way of the universe, but most people are too blind to watch and listen.

There__ nothing like a friendly handshake to establish social cooperation, but the bonobo handshake takes erotic politics to a whole new level.

Getting even was the basis of many primate semantic confusions, such as"expropriating the expropriators," "an absolute crime demands an absolute penalty," "they did it to me so I can do it to them," and, in general, the emotional mathematics of "one plus one equals zero" (1 + 1 = 0).The primates were so dumb they didn't realize that one plus one equals two (1 + 1 = 2) and one murder plus one murder equals two murders, one crime plus one crime equals two crimes, etc.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

A century ago, people laughed at the notion that we were descended from monkeys. Today, the individuals most offended by that claim are the monkeys.

Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs - don't leave home without them.

No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.