Replies to post #94391 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

Are Whales Smarter Than We Are?

Cetacean brains, such as those of dolphins (left) and humpback whales (right), have even more cortical convolutions and surface area than human brains do. Does that mean they're smarter?
Jan 15, 2008
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=are-whales-smarter-than-we-are [with comments]

[fuagf]

New hominin found via mtDNA
Posted by Alla Katsnelson
24th March 2010

A previously unknown human ancestor may have coexisted with Neanderthals
and early modern humans, German researchers report online in Nature today.


Denisova cave from the outside
Image: Bence Viola

For the first time, the scientists identified the novel hominin using mitochondrial gene sequencing of bone fragments, not fossils. The genomic analysis also revealed a hitherto-unknown migration from Africa to Eurasia just under one million years ago. "It's such a surprise," said Terence Brown, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Manchester, who was not involved in the study. "You start to think, how complete is our knowledge of ancient human ancestors?"

"While most of us are convinced that other humans existed, the idea that we might be able to identify them is rather a different thing," said Guido Barbujani, a population geneticist at the University of Ferrara, Italy, also not a co-author. "In this case, the remarkable achievement is that [the analysis] is off just a single bone," he said.

Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues sequenced mitochondrial DNA they extracted from a fragment of bone found in Denisova Cave in the mountainous steppe of Siberia. Based on its size, the fragment appears to be the pinky finger of a small child, and carbon dating of other artifacts found at the same archaeological level date it at around 40,000 years old.

Researchers use mtDNA to date ancient samples because it is much more abundant than nuclear DNA -- a cell has just two copies of the nuclear genome but thousands of copies of the mitochondrial genome. Still, extracting mtDNA pure enough for sequencing from samples that old, and making sure the samples aren't contaminated by the researchers themselves, is no easy task. Last year, Pääbo's lab published a method for extracting and enriching ancient mtDNA, as well as the complete mtDNA sequences of five Neanderthals. They applied the same technique to the present sample.

Mitochondrial DNA acts like a molecular clock; by measuring accumulated mutations, researchers can assign approximate ages to sequences. The researchers compared the new mtDNA to the sequence in 54 humans from the present time; a sequence from an early modern human sample, about 30,000 years old, found in Russia; six compete Neanderthal mtDNA sequences; a bonobo mtDNA sequence; and a chimpanzee mtDNA sequence. Their analysis showed that the new fragment's sequence differed significantly from modern human sequences, differing by almost twice as much as the Neanderthal mtDNA differed from humans'. The results suggest the hominin diverged from a common ancestor well before Neanderthals and modern humans did -- about one million years ago.

"At the moment with existing data there seems no doubt that this is a new human form," said Barbujani.

Homo erectus, the first hominin to move from Africa to Eurasia, did so 1.9 million years ago. After that, two known migrations occurred: Neanderthals are thought to have left Africa between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago, while early modern humans -- immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens -- took a later wave, migrating some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. However, because the lineage of the hominin whose finger was found in the cave split off before Neanderthals and early modern humans arrived, the researchers speculate that that this new human form must have moved to Eurasia after H erectus but before Neanderthals -- probably a couple of hundred thousand years after the divergence.

"It was amazing to clearly see something else coming out of Africa between these two points," said Pääbo in a press briefing yesterday. In hindsight, though, he said, this should perhaps not be surprising. "There might have been more or less continuous gene flow" out of Africa, he suggests, rather than distinct migration. "The picture might be a much more complex one" than the data had so far suggested.

"I think the really interesting bit is, what the hell is it?" said David Lambert, an evolutionary biologist at the Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Lambert added that he is not yet convinced the sample is an entirely new hominin.

Pääbo noted in the briefing that it's impossible to say whether the new hominin is a new species. "There's no metric where you can say, this percentage of divergence is a new species," he said. The researchers are now trying to sequence as much nuclear DNA as they can recover from the bone fragment, and expect to have results in a few months, said Pääbo. That analysis would help clarify the relationship between the Denisova hominin, Neanderthals, and early modern humans.

"This is high tech stuff," said Brown, who wrote an accompanying commentary on the study in Nature, adding that just four or five labs around the world had the expertise to perform such feats of sequencing on ancient DNA. "The ability to discover these things using DNA really opens things up."

# Related stories:

First ancient human sequenced [10th February 2010] .. http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57140/

# Hobbit origins from head to toe [6th May 2009] .. http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55677/

# Ancient iceman had no modern kin [30th October 2008] .. http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/55145/

# Neanderthal DNA sequenced [15th November 2006] .. http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/36437/

http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57254/

Lol, we just might have a new human mate .. no taxes paid there .. lucky human, eh .. rotflmao!

[F6]

When It Comes to Sex, Chimps Need Help, Too


Viktor Koen

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: May 3, 2010

The human ego has never been quite the same since the day in 1960 that Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee feasting on termites near Lake Tanganyika. After carefully trimming a blade of grass, the chimpanzee poked it into a passage in the termite mound to extract his meal. No longer could humans claim to be the only tool-making species.

The deflating news was summarized by Ms. Goodall’s mentor, Louis Leakey: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

So what have we actually done now that we’ve had a half-century to pout? In a 50th anniversary essay [ http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/328/5978/579 ] in the journal Science, the primatologist William C. McGrew begins by hailing the progression of chimpanzee studies from field notes to “theory-driven, hypothesis-testing ethnology.”

He tactfully waits until the third paragraph — journalists call this “burying the lead” — to deliver the most devastating blow yet to human self-esteem. After noting that chimpanzees’ “tool kits” are now known to include 20 items, Dr. McGrew casually mentions that they’re used for “various functions in daily life, including subsistence, sociality, sex, and self-maintenance.”

Sex? Chimpanzees have tools for sex? No way. If ever there was an intrinsically human behavior, it had to be the manufacture of sex toys.

Considering all that evolution had done to make sex second nature, or maybe first nature, I would have expected creatures without access to the Internet to leave well enough alone.

Only Homo sapiens seemed blessed with the idle prefrontal cortex and nimble prehensile thumbs necessary to invent erotic paraphernalia. Or perhaps Homo habilis, the famous Handy Man of two million years ago, if those ancestors got bored one day with their jobs in the rock-flaking industry:

“Flake, flake, flake.”

“There’s gotta be more to life.”

“Nobody ever died wishing he’d spent more time making sharp rocks.”

“What if you could make a tool for... something fun?”

I couldn’t imagine how chimps managed this evolutionary leap. But then, I couldn’t imagine what they were actually doing. Using blades of grass to tickle one another? Building heart-shaped beds of moss? Using stones for massages, or vines for bondage, or — well, I really had no idea, so I called Dr. McGrew [ http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521535433 ], who is a professor at the University of Cambridge.

The tool for sex, he explained, is a leaf. Ideally a dead leaf, because that makes the most noise when the chimp clips it with his hand or his mouth.

“Males basically have to attract and maintain the attention of females,” Dr. McGrew said. “One way to do this is leaf clipping. It makes a rasping sound. Imagine tearing a piece of paper that’s brittle or dry. The sound is nothing spectacular, but it’s distinctive.”

O.K., a distinctive sound. Where does the sex come in?

“The male will pluck a leaf, or a set of leaves, and sit so the female can see him. He spreads his legs so the female sees the erection, and he tears the leaf bit by bit down the midvein of the leaf, dropping the pieces as he detaches them. Sometimes he’ll do half a dozen leaves until she notices.”

And then?

“Presumably she sees the erection and puts two and two together, and if she’s interested, she’ll typically approach and present her back side, and then they’ll mate.”

My first reaction, as a chauvinistic human, was to dismiss the technology as laughably primitive — too crude to even qualify as a proper sex tool. But Dr. McGrew said it met anthropologists’ definition of a tool: “He’s using a portable object to obtain a goal. In this case, the goal is not food but mating.”

Put that way, you might see this chimp as the equivalent of a human (wearing pants, one hopes) trying to attract women by driving around with a car thumping out 120-decibel music. But until researchers are able to find a woman who admits to being anything other than annoyed by guys in boom cars, these human tools must be considered evolutionary dead ends.

By contrast, the leaf-clipping chimps seem more advanced, practically debonair. But it would be fairer to compare the clipped leaf with the most popular human sex tool, which we can now identify thanks to the academic research described last year [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/fashion/28generationb.html ] by my colleague Michael Winerip. The researchers found that the vibrator, considered taboo a few decades ago, had become one of the most common household appliances in the United States. Slightly more than half of all women, and almost half of men, reported having used one, and they weren’t giving each other platonic massages.

Leaf-clipping, meanwhile, has remained a local fetish among chimpanzees. The sexual strategy has been spotted at a colony in Tanzania but not in most other groups. There has been nothing comparable to the evolution observed in distributors of human sex tools: from XXX stores to chains of cutely named boutiques (Pleasure Chest, Good Vibrations) to mass merchants like CVS and Wal-Mart.

So let us, as Louis Leakey suggested, salvage some dignity by redefining humanity. We may not be the only tool-making species, but no one else possesses our genius for marketing. We reign supreme, indeed unrivaled, as the planet’s only tool-retailing species.

Now let’s see how long we hold on to that title.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/science/04tier.html [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/science/04tier.html ]

---

and see (items linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=30170562

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=32587035

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=7586181 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=3038949

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=25094268

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=34548322

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39476605 and preceding

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=9293185 and preceding

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=6380154 (and preceding)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=42157776 and preceding

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=41661915

[fuagf]

hopebuilding .. People and elephants learn to live together in Cambodia
Page history last edited by Rosemary 2 mos ago

Tuy Sereivathana, who introduced innovative low-cost solutions to mitigate human-elephant conflict in Cambodia and empowered local communities to cooperatively participate in endangered Asian elephant conservation, is one of the 2010 winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. .. http://www.goldmanprize.org/2010/asia .. "I want wild elephants and local communities to live together in harmony,” he says. “Protecting and conserving elephants means we also provide home for other species to live." This story about Tuy, along with two pictures of his work taken by Tuy, comes from the Goldman Environmental Prize website:

Insert: Video from link above ..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwpDd9LdofI

Elephants and Development



Cambodia has a long history of peaceful coexistence between people and elephants. Its most famous building, the spectacular Angkor Wat temple, was built out of stone and marble with the help of elephants in the 12th and 13th centuries. Elephants, then abundant in Southeast Asia, served as the critical heavy machinery, carrying building materials and providing the necessary force to hoist pulleys and move stone.

Long revered in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, elephants continue to hold deep meaning for followers of those religions today. In Khmer history following the Angkor period, several kings believed that possessing rare white elephants could bring glory for the country. However, despite their cultural significance, after a period of unregulated development, Cambodia’s wild elephant population has dwindled significantly.

Cambodia is a country in transition, having emerged from a violent and isolated past under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and subsequent conflicts between the Khmer Rouge and Cambodian government in the 1980s. Now, growing as a constitutional monarchy, Cambodia has experienced a dramatic increase in population and an explosion of unregulated development. This has placed enormous strain on the country’s natural resources, particularly its now-fragmented rainforests.

Migration routes of endangered Asian elephants have been disturbed by this development, leading to conflicts between local communities and elephants. With their habitat decreasing, elephants are destroying farms as they look for food on the edges of the forests. Many rural farmers have been forced to relocate as a result of development in other parts of the country, tilling small tracts of land on the forests’ edges to feed their families. Desperate farmers have, in the past, killed elephants to protect their crops. These migrant farmers have no experience living in wildlife areas and no bond with the forests or the elephants. They are extremely poor, have little education and no political power to resolve land and livelihood conflicts.

Human-Elephant Conflicts Resolved



Tuy Sereivathana (Vathana) was born in 1970, the same year that Cambodia entered into a period of extreme political upheaval. In 1975 his family fled from the city and the brutal Pol Pot regime to the rural village where Tuy’s father’s family lived. Tuy’s parents, both well-educated, taught school in the mornings to the local children and farmed in the afternoon to make ends meet. During his childhood years in the countryside, Tuy developed a deep respect for nature and was particularly fascinated with elephants. Later, when he was awarded a scholarship to attend university in Belarus, he focused on forestry studies and returned to Cambodia committed to working to conserve his country’s natural resources.

As a ranger with Cambodia’s national parks, Tuy worked throughout the country, connecting with rural communities and learning more about elephant migration and ecosystems. In Prey Proseth and Trang Troyeng, two communities not far from Tuy’s ancestral home where 30,000 people live on the forest’s edge, he became aware of the lack of capacity within these communities to manage the human-elephant conflict they faced.

In response, Tuy began developing his community-based model, spending time with the farmers in their fields and building their trust. He taught villagers how to use hot chilies, native plants, fences, fireworks and fog horns to ward off elephants. He demonstrated the benefits of crop rotation and diversification. Tuy encouraged farmers to alternate rapidly-growing crops such as cucumbers, which can be harvested several times a year before the elephants discover they are ripe. With this type of system, only one of many annual harvests would be damaged in the event of an elephant raid into a farmer’s field. More importantly, he fostered cooperation among the farmers to work together as a community, encouraging them to organize overnight guard groups to protect the fields.

Tuy was also able to revive in the communities the national and religious pride attached to the Asian elephant, as many Cambodians revere elephants as sacred Buddhist symbols. Because Tuy understood the dynamics of this environmental problem, he was able to develop simple, effective strategies and practical solutions at the grassroots level.

During this time, Tuy, affectionately known as “Uncle Elephant” in the communities he works with, left his position as a National Parks officer under the Cambodian Ministry of Environment in 2003 to assume the role of Human Elephant Conflict Team Leader for the Cambodian Elephant Conservation Group, a project co-sponsored by Fauna & Flora International, the Cambodian government and community organizations. Tuy later became full-time manager of the project in 2006.

Four schools created

In 2008, Tuy helped set up schools and brought teachers to the isolated communities dealing with human-elephant conflict. He saw this as another opportunity to embed the elephant and wildlife conservation message into the community. With support from Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the Los Angeles Zoo and International Elephant Foundation (IEF), Tuy was able to set up four schools. One day per week, these schools teach 250 children about the natural environment, elephants and other wildlife, and how to live in harmony with nature.

Since his work began, Tuy has seen significant success. At the start of the decade, elephant killings due to crop raids were not uncommon. As a result of Tuy’s involvement with the project, there has not been a single confirmed elephant death due to human-elephant conflict since 2005.

As elephant populations throughout Asia continue to decline, Tuy’s program has brought hope to local communities and bettered the prospects of endangered Asian elephants in Cambodia. Tuy’s model is now being used in neighboring communities and is being considered in other countries with human-elephant conflicts such as Vietnam and Indonesia.

The Goldman Environmental Prize, .. http://www.goldmanprize.org/theprize/about .. created in 1990 by San Francisco philanthropists Richard N. Goldman and his late wife, Rhoda H. Goldman, annually honors grassroots environmental heroes from the six inhabited continental regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, Islands and Island Nations, North America, and South and Central America. The Prize recognizes individuals for sustained and significant efforts to protect and enhance the natural environment, often at great personal risk. Each winner receives an award of $150,000, the largest award in the world for grassroots environmentalists. The Goldman Prize views “grassroots” leaders as those involved in local efforts, where positive change is created through community or citizen participation in the issues that affect them. Through recognizing these individual leaders, the Prize seeks to inspire other ordinary people to take extraordinary actions to protect the natural world.

For another story about how community and farmer education programs are saving elephants, see:

Chillies keep elephants out, give southern African farmers new income

Award-winning African chilli sauces support Elephant Pepper Trust's work
In southern Africa and increasingly around the world, chilli peppers are keeping marauding elephants alive and out of farmers’ fields while chilli sales raise farmers’ incomes and the sale of exotic chilli sauces helps supports the educational work. The win-win solution to Africa’s growing farmer-elephant conflicts is the brainchild of an American zoologist, Dr. Ferrel Loki Osborn, who has been working in Zimbabwe and Zambia since the early 1990s. .. http://hopebuilding.pbworks.com/Chillies-keep-elephants-out%2C-give-southern-African-farmers-new-income .. much more ..

http://hopebuilding.pbworks.com/People-and-elephants-learn-to-live-together-in-Cambodia

In his article Appleby points out how this trans-species commonality has traditionally been a problem for humanism, but that a more inclusive view of human beings as part of the natural world may actually help us better understand ourselves as well as our nonhuman cousins.

Thus in allowing ourselves to imagine the inner life of the elephant, to allow that they have one and that it can be scarred by the way it is treated in a way analogous to human trauma, we can develop both a deeper understanding of the quality of our relations to them and a deeper understanding of ourselves.

I'm happy to see that my humanist friends are opening their vision to incorporate other species in the qualities they admire. Rather than creating a division between "man and beast" it's far more inspiring to view all living beings as sharing a biological continuity. Understanding our "bestial" nature needn't undermine our positive qualities, if anything it can help us create conditions that limit those behaviors while emphasizing others. In the human zoo we've designed for ourselves we need all the good ideas we can muster.

[fuagf]

Gorilla warfare

Yes, it is old, found while going through old things and thankful it brought me
back to you excellent article. I guess for now i'll be happy to just be a human.


Under siege ... a silverback in Virunga National Park.

Photo: Jerome Delay .. January 4, 2009

The gorillas are safer now than they were before. It was during the government control that so many were killed.

Past some of the greenest hills, poorest villages and roughest roads in Africa, a machete-wielding ranger hacks his way deep into the jungle until a canopy of giant ferns and bamboo eclipses the sun.

Antelopes, elephants and hippos once thrived here in Africa's oldest national park. Decades of poaching have left little more than a few families of mountain gorillas. And civil war rages just kilometres away, the latest twist in a conflict that has ensnared eastern Congo for 12 years.

Unlike 250,000 of their human neighbours who have had to flee the latest fighting, the gorillas appear untouched so far. But they haven't escaped altogether. Aware that gorillas at times draw more global attention than the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, rebels and the Government are engaged in a kind of guerrilla war over who should control the park.

It's a struggle that bears many hallmarks of this region's conflict, including ethnic rivalry, resource exploitation and a scramble to curry international favour. When rebels seized control of the Virunga National Park's gorilla sanctuary in 2007, rangers who cared for the animals were caught in the middle. Some fled with Government troops; others stayed behind and continued doing their jobs.

After a two-hour hike, the ranger, one of those who stayed, stops suddenly and makes a throat-clearing grunt - something like a noise you would make to catch the attention of day-dreaming shop assistant.

"A-hem!" To the giant silverback seated nine metres away, it translates roughly the same, a kind of "excuse me" to alert the animal that humans are approaching. The bored-looking gorilla glances up and grunts back, giving rangers the OK to come closer.

A female, who rangers say is pregnant and called Lulengo, reclines on a patch of grass, picking nits off her shoulder. The dominant silverback, with an enormous head and hands, noisily crunches bamboo trunks in his yellow teeth as easily as if they were celery stalks. Another female scurries away with a year-old baby clutching her back.

The family is one of seven living here. Mountain gorillas once numbered in the thousands. Only about 700 remain worldwide, including 200 in Virunga.

The rest were poached for food or trophies, such as gorilla-hand ashtrays. A few families have become popular wildlife attractions. In neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda, tourists pay $725 an hour to observe one of man's closest cousins.

Concerned that gorillas might disappear completely from the wild, the United Nations has declared 2009 as the Year of the Gorilla and developed plans to protect them.

Ten gorillas were killed in 2007 before the Congolese Wildlife Authority pulled out of the gorilla sanctuary, and rebels under Laurent Nkunda took over.

Some argue that Congo's gorillas have been safer under rebel control - not because rebels are enlightened animal-lovers but because unpaid and hungry soldiers and militiamen hunted animals for meat and destroyed habitat by engaging in illegal charcoal production for cash.

Virunga's previous park director was fired and arrested in 2007 after being implicated in a ring that was believed responsible for the killings of five gorillas before the rebels seized the park. The massacre apparently was intended as a warning to officials to halt their campaign against poaching and deforestation.

"The gorillas are safer now than they were before," said Pierre-Canisius Kanamahalagi, one of about 30 rangers who stayed behind. "It was during the government control that so many were killed."

Guide Benjamin Nsana, 40, said six governments and rebel groups have controlled the park during the 15 years he has worked there. "We're not political," he said. "We work with whoever controls the park."

Rangers who stayed behind insist the gorillas are prospering under their care, with several recent births and the discovery, they say, of a new family.

Newly installed park director Emmanuel de Merode, a long-time conservationist and Belgian national, said such reports must be verified, but he agreed that the gorillas had fared better than people and other animals.

While thousands of residents have been forced into displacement camps and the hippo population has plummeted from 30,000 to 300, the number of mountain gorillas here has increased 19 per cent since 1996 despite the conflict and the poaching, thanks largely to conservation efforts.

"It's been an incredible success story," said De Merode, who was hired by the Government in August to restore the park authority's credibility.

"Wildlife has suffered a lot, [but] there are a few exceptions, and it looks like mountain gorillas are among the exceptions."

Rebels and Government officials tentatively agreed for the first time in November to work together in the gorilla sector. The agreement came a month after rebels seized the park's headquarters in nearby Rumangabo.

De Merode hopes to dispatch 41 park rangers to join the 30 who already work in the gorilla sector.

He also plans to re-establish five 24-hour patrol posts.

But it remains unclear whether the Government and rebels will be able to set aside their differences.

Park officials questioned the qualifications and political motives of rangers who stayed behind.

"These rangers are not fully trained in gorilla-monitoring," De Merode said. "They've been a little cavalier."

Government officials pressured all but one international conservationist group to suspend their work with the gorillas after the rebel takeover and discouraged tourism, saying the proceeds would fund the insurgency. Park officials have also accused rebels of killing and eating of two gorillas last year. Rebels contend that their soldiers are too disciplined to ever hurt gorillas. They accuse park officials of corruption and mismanagement, saying they exaggerate the threat to gorillas in a bid for international support.

"They need to lie for their fund-raising," said Babou Amani, deputy spokesman for Nkunda's movement, National Congress for the Defence of the People.

He said control of the gorilla sector fell into the rebels' lap during an offensive to seize strategic land near the Ugandan border. But he said they took the responsibility seriously.

"For us, gorillas are worth more than diamonds," Amani said.

To demonstrate their commitment, rebels have been organising visits, a kind of guerrillas' gorilla tour for journalists and others. A recent trip suggested that rangers are well-intentioned, if not always well-trained.

They observed many of the rules for human interaction, such as limiting visits to an hour. A sick ranger stayed behind to avoid spreading contagion.

On the other hand, rangers came within touching distance of a female gorilla rather than maintaining the recommended 3.6 metre distance.

Nsana, one of the rangers supervising the tour, said he hoped the Government and rebels would set aside their differences so all rangers could return to work.

"If everyone joined hands, that would be good for the Government and it would help us get more international aid," Nsana said. "Most of all, it would be better for the gorillas."

Los Angeles Times

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/conservation/gorilla-warfare/2009/01/03/1230681815049.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

[fuagf]

Meet Amban .. Monkeying around: We tell the story of how Ambam the walking gorilla took his first steps to global fame

By Liz Hull
Last updated at 10:15 AM on 29th January 2011

Tearing around in his nappy, draining his bottle of every last drop, he could be any other bouncy baby boy — but for the fact that he’s a little on the hairy side. And extremely strong. After all, how many infants have ripped the cat flap off the back door?

Yet, perhaps these enchanting family snaps provide vital clues to a story which has gripped the world in recent days — Ambam, the walking gorilla.

For here he is, 20 years ago, as a baby. And, as his adoptive mother discovered in a recent emotional reunion, the 34st titan still has very happy memories of his days as an honorary human.


Standing out: Ambam strolls in his enclosure at Port Lympne this week

Earlier this week, a film clip hit the internet showing Ambam walking round his home at Port Lympne Animal Park in Kent.

Since then, more than a million people have marvelled at this mighty silverback gorilla patrolling his enclosure like a ­proprietorial squire.

Ambam does not merely stand up like other apes do from time to time. He goes for a stroll. ‘British Gorilla Walks Like Man,’ declared Canada’s Montreal Gazette. Ambam is now big news from Malta to Adelaide.

More...

* Yes, he can walk. But just how close IS Ambam the gorilla to being human?
[url]www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1350765/Gorilla-walks-like-man-filmed-zoo-Kent-Ambam-silverback.html
[/url][tag]* Ambam, the swaggering silverback gorilla who walks around his pen on two legs[/tag]

But few people know Ambam as well as zookeeper Jo Wheatley. During his infancy, she was the nearest he had to a mother.

And she believes that the year he spent with her and her then partner, Colin Angus, explains why Ambam likes to walk tall.

A year after his birth at the nearby Howletts Zoo, Ambam had to be removed from his mother.

The little chap had almost died when he was struck down by a stomach bug.

So, at the age of one, he went to live with Jo, now 42, and her then partner Colin Angus at their cottage next to the zoo. And Ambam soon settled in.


Putting his feet up: Baby Ambam snatches 40 winks on Jo Wheatley's sofa, which he commandeered as his bed

Jo recalls that he learned to eat off plates and drink from a cup. Initially, he slept on the floor of the lounge with Colin beside him for comfort, before progressing to the sofa.

And he was walking even then. ‘From the outset he was a very unusual gorilla. He has always been adept at standing on his hind legs. He often preferred to be fed standing up, sucking on a bottle,’ says Jo.

It has been suggested that the reason Ambam walks like a Grenadier guardsman is that he is simply copying human beings.


Bouncing baby: Complete with nappy, a one-year-old Ambam is bottle fed by his doting 'mother' Jo

Jo explains that there are several other factors at work, quite apart from his life with her. After all, he is not the first ape to have been reared by humans.

‘He was different from other hand-reared primates because he already knew he was a gorilla when he came to live with us,’ she explains. ‘Not only that, but he also knew he was a very special gorilla because his mother and father were the dominant gorillas in their family group.

‘But the year he spent in our cottage must have had an effect on him — it made him an extra-special chap.’

Ambam even developed a fondness for ­television. ‘We showed him a video of himself hanging onto his mother soon after he was born and he was transfixed,’ recalls Jo, now a mother of two herself.

‘He would often sit down and watch ­television with us at night and learned how to turn it on and off himself.’


Look at me, Mum!: His first steps, with a little support from Jo

He was a genuine part of the family. The couple took him on days out to a local nature reserve in a baby sling and he enjoyed bicycle rides in a baby backpack. Fellow shoppers were astonished when he accompanied them to the local supermarket.

But childcare arrangements could be tricky. ‘Like having a baby, caring for him was a 24/7 job,’ she recalls, ‘and he quickly started behaving like any human toddler.

On one occasion I was on my way out to work and Ambam didn’t want me to go. He chased after me crying as I went out the back door and ripped off the cat flap.’

Ambam was, at least, spared one or two of the more conventional baby rituals. ‘We didn’t put him in the bath,’ says Jo.

‘Gorillas don’t really like water, but if one of us was in the tub he would come and stand up on his hind legs alongside and splash and bat the water.’


Little monkey: Ambam loved to steal other people's food

Mealtimes were unusual, too. ‘He was always trying to steal what we were eating. It was often a nightmare. Like toddlers he also enjoyed play fighting, although his rough and tumble was much rougher.’

At the end of his year with Jo and Colin, Ambam was returned to Howletts before moving to its sister zoo, Port Lympne.

And last year, Jo took her children, Molly, 11, and Jonathan, eight, to see how he was getting on. It was the first time she had seen him in nearly 20 years. ‘Ambam sat very ­quietly at first, but then he came right over,’ says Jo.

‘When we went to walk away he started to call and cry, which is really unusual for an adult gorilla. It was an upset kind of cry. I’ve no doubt he recognised me. And I felt quite emotional, I felt so proud of him.’’

The memories came flooding back again when Jo saw Ambam in her Daily Mail ­earlier this week and reached for her photo album.

‘It was a brave decision by the zoo to take him away from his mother and give him a chance as a baby. But to see him turn out so well-balanced — literally well-balanced in an upright position — has given me an immense sense of satisfaction.’


Garden games: Intimate and playful with his human family

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG-VY6JiyDU&feature=player_embedded

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1351612/Ambam-takes-steps-global-fame-gorilla-walks-like-man.html

Here is Amban's best upright behavior again ..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxDI3s21yf8&feature=related

From your .. Why I am Not a Humanist ..

I first read Russell's essay a few years after being confirmed as a Lutheran and, of the many reasons offered for his views, it was the moral argument that stuck with me:

You will find that in the Gospels Christ said: "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of this sort into the world.

Such arguments, along with the incompatibility of evolutionary biology with the Christian tradition, led me to abandon my faith.

[...]

Much of Appleby's article discusses the work of such theorists as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Cary Wolfe and Donna Haraway. I have read Foucault and Haraway the way a heron might swallow a bird [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDvt7pqp8WQ ]: as a task that doesn't come naturally but which you choke down because you already started. As you might imagine, it wasn't very satisfying. I find much of their writing needlessly opaque and I haven't read any of the other theorists that Appleby mentions. However, I think the larger issue is an important one.

Humanism is a response to theism and seeks to find a meaningful existence for our fellow human beings without the supernatural.

But I prefer to have a worldview that incorporates all of the natural world.