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Dryopithecus

Family tree of extinct apes reveals our early evolutionary history

16 March 2022

A new family tree of apes that lived in the Miocene between 23 and 5.3 million years ago reveals which are our close relatives and which are only distant cousins


chimpanzee

Chimpanzees seem to 'speak' in sentences of three or more calls

15 February 2021

The ability to combine multiple words to create new meanings is thought to be unique to humans, but a study of chimp calls hints that it isn't


orangutan

Orangutans create new ways to communicate with each other in captivity

4 February 2021

Using new expressions to convey meaning to other group members is a fundamental building block of complex language – and orangutans in captivity can do it


Orangutans

Orangutans and other great apes under threat from covid-19 pandemic

2 April 2020

Many great ape species are already in a precarious situation because of their dwindling numbers. Now they may also be at risk from the coronavirus pandemic


Plectrocebus parecis monkey

Monkeys hiding on a plateau in the Amazon turn out to be new species

20 December 2019

The Parecis plateau is home to a new species of titi monkey with grey, brown and white fur. It was known to local people, but scientists overlooked it for a century


Huge mysterious ape Gigantopithecus was a distant cousin of orangutans

Huge mysterious ape Gigantopithecus was a distant cousin of orangutans

13 November 2019

A pioneering technique has given us a glimpse at the family tree of Gigantopithecus, an extinct ape that was 2.5 metres tall and lived 300,000 years ago


Did apes first walk upright on two legs in Europe, not Africa?

6 November 2019

An extinct ape that lived in Germany 11.6 million years ago may have been bipedal – even though walking upright is the hallmark of more human-like species


monkey using stone tool

Some monkeys reuse their stone tools but others just chuck them away

25 October 2019

The monkeys on one Asian island reuse their stone tools many times – but on an island just 9 km away, the monkeys throw their tools away after a few uses


Baby apes

Mystery of why humans walk upright may be explained by surprise fossil

20 September 2019

We thought that walking on all fours like a gorilla is more primitive than walking on two legs as humans do. But new fossils suggest even very ancient apes walked upright


Chimpanzees and a child

We may have a basic form of sign language in common with chimpanzees

13 September 2019

People seem to be able to understand gestures made by chimpanzees, suggesting the signals may be remnants of a basic sign language used by our last common ancestors


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