Wtf is this? Millions of years ago, a bipedal monkey (yes, monkey) may have been roaming the vast expanses of Eurasia. Was it on a similar evolutionary trajectory to our own?
I can sense a new scy fy franchise based on this stuff. Or make that Manga!
Kinda funny (or maybe not) that many people on YouTube who comment the film franchise "Planet of the APES" refer to the main non-human characters as MONKEYS.
There´s even a joke in one of the films about exactly this kind of linguistic confusion. LOL!
Some slightly disturbing studies suggest (but don´t definitely prove - yet) a connection between autism or social anxiety disorder and...wait for it...the bacterial biome in our guts! Not only that, bacteria may have caused or at least enhanced our evolution towards intelligence, either by somehow stimulating the intelligence itself, or by doing something to the energy metabolism of our primate ancestors which made it possible for them to develop bigger brains.
Chapter two of the saga "we are controlled by micro-organisms"...
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| Krishna and Darwin dancing with a chimpanzee (an ape, I know) |
Just have to quote this from Richard Carrier´s essay "Is 90% of all EvoPsych false?" (published at his blog in 2015). This is...hysterical!
>>>Worse, this paper, in attempting to defend EvoPsych, actually cites the pseudoscientific “gendered toys” papers as if these were an example of good science, when in fact they are precisely the kind of pseudoscience critics are attacking as inane.
>>>In Gerianne Alexander & Melissa Hines, “Sex Differences in Response to Children’s Toys in Nonhuman Primates,” Evolution & Human Behavior 23.6 (1 November 2002) and Janice Hassett et al., “Sex Differences in Rhesus Monkey Toy Preferences Parallel Those of Children,” Hormones & Behavior 54.3 (August 2008), they claimed even monkeys showed the same sex difference in toy choice as 21st century American children: girls play with Dolls, Cooking Pots, and Teddy Bears, boys play with Trucks, Police Cars, and Balls. In the first study, more specifically: a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog (in the second study, wheeled toys and plush toys)—not one of which would be meaningful to a monkey, of any gender.
>>>Never mind that monkeys don’t know what trucks and cars and dolls and pots are or do, that trucks and cars and cooking pots didn’t exist in the ancient environment we evolved in, that human boys play with dolls as often as girls (I never went anywhere without my G.I. Joe, whom I also dressed; today, kids play with Action Figures, as did I), and that the Teddy Bear was originally a boy’s toy. Culture is seriously confounding here, and the thesis illogical.
>>>It is impossible that monkeys evolved to have a cognitive preference for cooking pots or police cars. To even presume so is pseudoscience. (And why are we studying monkeys, our most distant primate ancestors, when we actually have sex-difference studies of tool use and play in our much closer cousins the Chimpanzees? Oh, right, because those results don´t support the sexist assumptions of these researches…though, of course, humans still aren’t Chimpanzees, either.)
Those were some damn smart monkeys, for sure! :D
Stupid research disproves a thought experiment which was stupid to begin with. It never disproved evolution, since evolution isn´t "random" in the same sense as the monkeys with the typewriter. That being said...sure, the origins of life might be more interesting, for if *that* isn´t random, some kind of panpsychism or pantheism becomes a distinct possibility.
A lot of stuff like this on YouTube: recaps of science fiction films, perhaps AI-generated? The recaps, I mean. This way, you don´t have to waste two hours of your life watching an entire B-movie, LOL.
The first recap is of a recent Russian movie, "Forsaken", which actually could be interesting. The plot revolves around a failed mission to Mars which is turned into a succesful reality TV show by an unscrupulous broadcasting corporation - unfortunately a very realistic scenario! There is also a kind of pseudo-philosophical message (of course, it´s a Russian film) which sounds like a mixture of Gnosticism and atheist materialism. *We* created the universe to become conscious of ourselves...only to go astray and do evil instead. Hence, we - not some gods or aliens - are the creators. But note that this message is revealed to the stranded cosmonaut by a god-like being on Mars...
The other recap is of "A Sound of Thunder", which seems to be a more typical American science fiction/horror film. Time travel, temporal paradoxes, "the butterfly effect", that kind of thing. Evolution goes haywire as reptiloid baboons descend on an unsuspecting US city amid an invasion of primordially tropical plant species. Note the nod to global warming.
Interestingly, the bad guys in *both* films are evil capitalists.
Make of this content what you wish.
"The Leopard Rocks" is a documentary about leopards living in the Aravalli mountains of Rajasthan in northwestern India. I´m not an expert on leopards, but apparently the big cats in this particular region are unusually gregarious. They live in caves in the hills and supposedly never attack the humans in the area.
The documentary tries to paint a picture of primitive shephards living in balance with Nature, but this is obviously a truth with some modification. The area is advanced enough to have a large dam providing water during the dry season, the lack of suitable prey animals for the leopards suggests human impact on the surrounding environment, and when leopards sneak into the villages to abduct and kill farm animals, the local business community pays the poor farmers money in compensation so they won´t hunt the leopards. Why? Because of tourism, that´s why.
The balance around the Leopard Rocks seem very precarious.
Other highlights include Hanuman langurs (yes, they really do live around a temple on one of the rocks), the striped hyena (they, too, are gregarious in this particular region), the mongoose, peacocks, parakeets and antelopes. Frankly, the langurs and the temples were more interesting than the big cats, but that´s me!
End of reflections.
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| Credit: SajjadF |
A fascinating post by Robert Mathiesen over at JMG´s blog Ecosophia just now:
>>>Chimpanzees and Baboons have each been observed showing behavior that is most easily interpreted as their being overcome by awe or some other numinous experience in nature. Here is the primatologist Barbara Smuts on her own observations:
>>>“One experience I expecially treasure. The Gombe baboons were travelling to their sleeping trees late in the day, moving slowly down a stream with many small, still pools, a route they often traversed. Without any signal perceptible to me, each baboon sat at the edge of a pool on one of the many smooth rocks that lined the edges of the stream. They sat alone or in small clusters, completely silent, gazing at the water. Even the perpetually noisy juveniles fell into silent contemplation. I joined them. Half an hour later, again with no perceptible signal, they resumed their journey in what felt like an almost sacramental procession. I was stunned by this mysterious expression of what I have come to think of as baboon sangha. Although I´ve spent years with baboons, I witnessed this only twice, both times at Gombe. I have never heard another primatologist recount such an experience. I sometimes wonder if, on these two occasions, I was granted a glimpse of a dimension of baboon life they do not normally expose to people. These moments reminded me how little we really know about the ‘more-than-human world’.” — Smuts, “Encounters with Animal Minds,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8 (2001), 293–309.
>>>Oveer the last 15 or so years, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture has been publishing academic studies of what seems very much like religious behavior or numinous experience in some species of animals, notably non-human primates. James R. Harrod goes so far as to speak of “chimpanzee religion” in at least one of his articles, and Paul Cunningham makes a good case for what he calls “animal spirituality.”
>>>Since very many species of animals, including non-human primates, have rituals of behavior that serve to maintain their social orders, it seems to me reasonable to suppose a multi-step development over evolutionary time that led to human religions: (1) unsought experiences of awe and other sorts of numinous experience, and (2) ritualized behavior developing in response to such experiences, as it does in response to many other sorts of animal experience. From these develop (3) more or less well organized systems of ritual response, or ceremonies, which are to be exhibited at appropriate times and/or places (leading to calendars and maps of various sorts). And eventually, humans –being human! — eventually try to think about their behavior of this sort, developing philosophies and theologies as a sort of [inherently inadequate, IMHO] intellectualization of their experience. All this, of course, is very much IMHO — basically, just my own [inherently inadequate] intellectualization.
I´ve heard of Jane Goodall´s observation of chimpanzees worshipping waterfalls, and also of corvid funerals, but this one was new. Maybe God is the Lord of the Animals, after all...
| Nice try, cladistician! |
A propos an old creationist tune and the utterly infuriating character of cladistic terminology.
So humans are apes...or are we australopithecines? Apes are monkeys, butterflies are moths, and soon all insects will be crustaceans. And yes, all land-lubbing vertebrates are really lobe-finned fish. Not sure why rabbits aren´t treeshrews, but I´m sure research is ongoing.
At least in Swedish, the apes (as in chimps, rillas, orangs, gutsick gibbons and the siamang) can bask in human glory, and I really do mean Homo (pardon my Latin). Per Wikipedia, Hominidae is called "människoapor" (human-apes or man-apes) while Hominoidea is called "människoartade apor" (human-like apes). Note that both categories also include Homo itself.
I´m sure Jacko down at the zoo loves to be called human-like (sounds almost teleological), but alas, if Anatomically Modern Män is amused, could be another thing entirely. After all, humans aren´t just *like* humans, they in fact *are* shmucking humans.
Time to put an end to the reign of autistic nerds in science, or what?
"Stop calling me monkey, you cladistic dumkopf, I have nothing in common with baboons, makakas and other truly HIDEOUS creatures, and oh, could you please stop calling yourselves apes when you´re already at it, you haven´t been apes for freakin´ ten million years, stop it already!"
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| Not a howler monkey! Credit: psrdotcom |
25 years ago, Darwinist nerds would sperge on and on about humans *not* being descended from apes, but from "other primates" (whatever that means). This apparently intended as some kind of polemic against creationism.
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"Primates" is a 2020 BBC mini-series about apes, monkeys and prosimians. Some humans (mostly primatologists) have been thrown in for good measure, too! Most of the documentary is standard fare: spectacular footage of non-human primates from all over the world, and calls to save them for posterity. Good for a boring Christmas holiday, but perhaps not *that* interesting...
However, I did notice a few things.
In the Congolese hills, the Virunga National Park - with a rare population of mountain gorillas - is protected by "park rangers", actually a heavily armed uniformed militia. The park rangers have been repeatedly attacked by rebel groups operating in the region. But why would humans volunteer to protect gorillas against guerillas, risking their lives in the process? The BBC interviews a ranger who claims to have a spiritual bond with the gorillas. Maybe he has.
However, there is a much more mundane explanation. The rangers are recruited from the local population and paid by international organizations. Eco-tourism from Western nations is another source of income. Also, the local communities get a share of the profits. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but it *does* mean that the rangers have a very vested *human* (Homo sapiens sapiens) interest in protecting the gorillas. They are simply protecting their own sources of income. Since the rebels are presumably Hutu expats or expellees from Rwanda, some kind of ethnic dimension can´t be ruled out either. The people in the Virunga area are literally defending their homeland against foreign intruders. See how I managed to de-romanticize the whole situation? When the Western money stops coming, the mountain gorillas are bush meat, if you ask me...
Another uncomfortable fact. As I have repeatedly pointed out on this blog, even Native peoples deplete their resource bases if given half the chance. Research carried out at Koram Island off the coast of Thailand shows that monkeys, specifically crab-eating macaques, do exactly the same thing! The monkeys are tool-users: they use heavy stones to crack open oysters. The tool-use leads to over-exploitation of the oysters, which tend to become smaller and less abundant as a result. Imagine what would happen if some primate started to use tools consistently...wait...
Edenic ecological balance doesn´t even exist among tool-using freakin´ *animals*, it seems.
"Primates" does contain other interesting information, to be sure. We get to meet a team of animal rescuers trying to "retrain" young orphaned orangutans for a life in the wild (the orphans are used to human "foster parents" and have therefore lost these skills). As part of their project, the human trainers have to take climbing lessons in really tall trees! Another team tries to reintroduce pet gibbons into the wild. Gibbons are popular as exotic pets, but many of them are snatched from the wild and essentially trafficked as part of the illegal animal trade. The gibbons shown in the docu are rescued and taken back to their original habitat.
So perhaps there is some hope, after all. However, I have to say that what really caught my attention was the somewhat more pessimistic facts, some of which BBC doesn´t really want the viewers to confront...
Scientists actually experiment with these kinds of things...
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Since I don´t have anything else to write about, listen to this (from all-knowing Wikipedia):
"In traditional and non-scientific use, the term "ape" excludes humans, and can include tailless primates taxonomically considered monkeys (such as the Barbary ape and the black ape), and is thus not equivalent to the scientific taxon Hominoidea."
Even worse, "cladistically speaking", humans and apes *are* monkeys. So now what?
And all this time I assumed that "ape" means ape and "monkey" means "all the other damn creatures throwing feces at one another", but apparently the chimp out is worse than I expected...
