"Is APE (Chimp) EVOLUTION Accelerating Again???" Topic

First . . . spear-using chimps
TMP link

Second . . . cave-dwelling chimps
TMP link

Third . . . lion-killing chimps
TMP link

A) Could their evolution have jump-started now that they are faced with possible extinction?

B) Are the weird ones of their kind the only chimps left?

C) Is some weird environmental group running Chimp-Camps, with paramilitary training?

D) Or have the chimps done this all along in their existence, and scientists just now began noticing their behavior?

Or do you propose a theory of your own?

CC

Whatever the truth, you'll be planning a game soon anyway, might as well just get on with it.

Are they infected with rage?

A,B,D: Being that (according to biologists) ape brains learn very little in the way of tools after age 4, I must say that there are some pretty innovative and violent natural-born chimp youngsters out there. This, of course, would beg the question "Why now?".

C: Either that, or some radical conservation team is giving the youngsters some serious combat training before releasing them into the wild. The team probably thinks that their efforts are the last chance the chimps will have for survival. Needless to say, if true, then all they are doing is making them just as crazy as we are, right?

Movies always portray their African-American brethren (like Caesar in POTA) to be the ones to teach the rest everything. I think that the African chimps are well underway on their own, don't you think?

CC

Lets hope they don't run across some old Cuban/Russian equipment out there. Then we have a major problem.

LOL.

"In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead."
- from "Beneath the Planet of the Apes"
link

CC

D this group must have been doing this for awhile for 'legends' to be made about it anyway baboons attack leopards so why shouldn't chimps.

I think Chimps have allways been so clever – it is humans that refused to observe and believe what theses ape were doing was smart

Just think of the difference between a 1st world city dweller and a 3rd world Amazonian tribe – each is smart enough to survive in their own environment though the technology used is centuries apart

Yep.

I think that ape conservationists of the 60s and 70s made everyone believe that these guys were all gentle and peaceful.

It fit their conservation agenda, didn't it? :)

CC

Nobody's found the black monolith yet…. ;)

Periods of global change have often spurred advancements in our own species; it seems viable to me that other animals might experience the same phenomenon. Let's say global warming was to cause a staple of the chimps diet to become unavailable or less available, to the point that they came to depend more on supplementing their diets with flesh. This turn towards hunting could easily result in a period of forced evolution. Hunting chimps are forced to learn new tactics to outsmart their prey, while less successful chimp males die off or are passed over as breeding stock.

Now if in X Years we enter another mini Ice age and start getting reports of bands of wild chimps hunting Elephants by driving them over cliffs…Well then the little s will be getting to big for their britches and the first Primate Wars won't be far off!

I think it's a case of monkey see, monkey do. With all those hundreds of scientists observing the monkeys we forget the monkeys/apes are watching back. They see us live in dwellings, use tools and eat meat.
They say that all those performing monkeys can't be released back into the wild cause they couldn't survive. In reality it is a safety protocol that stops them from teaching their primitive brethren all that they learned from the humans!

The spear thing isn't such a leap. Crows make tools. One is a barbed hook they use with their beaks to pull grubs out of holes in trees. Another is a sort of saw blade to cut open a fruit with a hard exterior.

If a smart bird can make and use tools, why not a primate?

Hmmm, Planet of the Birds?

"As a population becomes smaller, genetic drift plays a bigger role in speciation. A land animal like a brown bear might find itself locally reduced to a few dozen pairs on an Arctic island. That likely happened as the last Ice Age came to an end, and the Bering land bridge receded into the sea. In that circumstance, a beneficial trait appearing in an alpha male or two may change the color, size, swimming ability, cold resistance, or aggressiveness of the group in just a few generations. This would be an example of punctuated equilibrium. The small population size of many animals can make population bottlenecks more common than might otherwise be thought."

Population bottlenecks: link

Coelacanth1938,

If applied to human population bottlenecks, it has lots of implications about cultural and behavioral traits of modern man (traits that may have only seen in some prehistoric groups):
TMP link
TMP link

I like this inter-disciplinary style of thinking. Thanks!!!

CC

D

Those were not talking apes you saw …

Call me when they can Google ;)

Yeah, the chimps are evolving. At the risk of going off topic, humans are about the only animals not evolving (remember DEVO?). Sure we have random mutation going for us, but natural selection plays very little role in reproductive success these days. If I recall correctly, lots of chimps died from AIDS. That must have knocked out some bad genes from the pool.

Very interesting article indeed:

"Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla."
link

CC

Silly chimps. They should be domesticating the lions so that they can use them as cavalry…. ;)

LOL.

CC

Big, and possibly new, apes are involved.

CC
-----------------------------

Amman got hold of a photograph, taken by bush meat hunters, which appeared to show a huge chimpanzee. He found droppings several times larger than chimp dung and footprints bigger than a gorilla's.

He recounted what locals had told him about the animals. "Gorilla males will always charge when they encounter a hunter, and if you were charged by a gorilla you would never forget it, but there were no stories like that," Amman says.

Instead, these apes would come face-to-face with their human cousins, stare intently, then slide away quietly. No aggression, yet no fear either.

Then, in 2004, Shelly Williams, a primatologist affiliated to the Jane Goodall Institute, revealed the first recorded close encounter by a scientist with these creatures, in the New Scientist.

"We could hear them in the trees, about 20ft away – and four suddenly came rushing through the bush towards me," she wrote. "If this had been a bluff charge they would have been screaming to intimidate us.

"These guys were quiet, and they were huge." At first, she feared they were 'coming in for the kill', but perhaps sensing an unknown danger, they thought better of it and retreated.

She said the apes had a flat face, with a wide muzzle and – most strikingly – grey fur all over their face and bodies. It seems that Crichton's fictional grey killer apes had been found.

Excerpt from: link