Humans aren’t the only primates with a medicine cabinet, it seems. In a new paper published today, scientists document a male orangutan named Rakus using a plant with known medicinal properties to help heal his facial wound. While there have been other recent accounts of animals using medicine in the wild, this…
The largest primate in our family tree went extinct hundreds of thousands of years ago, and its existence has been known to humankind for less than a century. Now, a team of researchers has reviewed the ancient records and devised a more specific extinction window for our huge fallen relative, Gigantopithecus blacki,…
You may think Nebraska and China have little in common, but the two places definitely share one ancient similarity: the presence of a 30-million-year-old primate lineage which headed to North America millions of years before modern human ancestors would evolve.
Researchers studied videos of great apes spinning and found that the animals are deliberately getting dizzy; the team believes that the behavior may have implications for humankind’s occasional exploration of altered states of mind.
Researchers studying macaques in one of Thailand’s national parks made a surprising discovery: While cracking nuts, the monkeys make stone flakes that look an awful lot like the flakes that scientists have attributed to ancient human. The finding means that some of the material held up as the earliest evidence of…
