Primates questions:
- Predatory chimps: Did they eat monkeys before the researchers arrived? Assumption is yes, and this behaviour has been observed in other priamtes elsewhere.
- How is troop rank achieved: Birth, combat and aggression, alliances
- Dominant members will be sleek (more grooming), larger(more food), and have many battle scars
- Prosimian examples: . . . . . lemurs
- Migration?: Baboons develop wanderlust as part of maturation (It is believed that this behaviour is instinctive and prevents inbreeding). They are not driven off
- exception: Young male gorillas will be chased out as competetion.
- How do they find new troops?: Sight, smell.. Often see/contact other troops
- Did early humans eat less meat due to limited availability or ?
- Fossil teeth (dentition (sp?)) are the evidence of diet, and some feces
- It is assumed that until tools, early hominids would have been too small to obtain meat.
- Sexual dimorphism: significant size difference in males and females
- This seems to explain why males of those species do more of the hunting.
film: cultural development in apes, chimps, oraungatans (sp)
- chimps: make different tools for different insects: ants, termites
- ivory coast chimps: wooden 'hammer' and 'anvil' and rocks to crack nuts
- learned: taught by mother, make take up to 6 y to perfect
- this is the beginning of culture
- tanganyikan chimps: lick rocks for salt and other minerals
- chimps: eat a non-nutritive herb for dyspepsia
- borneo O: learned to wash clothes from humans
- June: Chicago Zoo : paints with brushes, which she fixes
- June: determines when a painting is done and won't add to it.
June:
- Yerkes: painting chimps will choose art over food
- never draw on anything but paper or canvas
- given materials and allowed to watch others and experiment
- one of June's early paintings was entered in a Chicago art show and took 3rd
- paints everyday
- large canvases occasionally
- prints and originals in Lincoln Park Zoo shop
- various anecdotes about human-primate kinship
- Yerkes researcher kept warm by female gorilla overnight
- human child carried to safety in priamte pit at a zoo
- talk about Willie B. and his habitat
- reminder of gorilla strength
Communications, Language Training, and Apes
- image: collage of similar facial expressions between chimps and George W. Bush
- Can non-human primates understand syntax and grammar?
- early on, some facility was discovered, but doubts remained
- responses were appropriate, but conditioning was suspected
- Chimps were being taught symbols out of context
- Changed teaching methods: full commands, full sentences
- Primates were understanding syntax (order) concepts
- Subjects assembled their own, unparseable sentences
- novel formulations, new meanings
- "throw ball in water" -> did
- Koko: water-bird -> picture of duck
- chimp: green bananna -> cucumber
- inter-subject communication
- expressed desires, request objects from another place
- self-recognition in mirrors, monitors
- Indicated planned actions, spoke of future
- early on, some facility was discovered, but doubts remained
Kanzi (film clip)
- here in Atlanta, at Yerkes
- Sue Rumbaugh (sp?), .. .. , Emory and GA State
- bonobo chimps can't vocalize human sounds
- Mata, Kanzi's mother never quite picked this up, but Kanzi seems to have
- keyboard/table: match sounds to symbols
- follows commands without facial cues (welding mask)
- "take the vacuum cleaner outdoors"
- helper monkeys for paraplegics and quadraplegics
- do they show emotions? (film clip next time)
Wed: loose ends on priamates, start in on bipedialism
Quiz for today as a ho, go over answers on Wed
