Great Ape Genetic Diversity and Population History
In the absence of any fossil information on our cousins, the great apes, here is their story from reading their genomes.
In the absence of any fossil information on our cousins, the great apes, here is their story from reading their genomes.
The Relevance of Chimpanzee Studies for Human Nature, and what primatologists have swept under the rug.
It all began when Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Then Darwin showed that we were nothing special – just another ape. Reading between the lines in Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene one detects a near satanic glee that the tooth and claw beast to which we had been reduced …
Having determined that the various mental illnesses were all reflective of evolved segments of normal emotion, and that the majority of these illness – the anxiety and depression disorders – reflected motivation by aversion to the fears of separation and being trapped, I concluded that much of normal human behavior is inhibitory of primate aggression …
Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed Ardi, is arguably the most significant fossil find in the history of paleoanthropology due to its completeness and antiquity – 4.4 M. years, just 1.6 M. years after the last common ancestor with Chimpanzees. The theoretician of the group, Owen Lovejoy hypothesized that the reduction in the size of the male canine …
