Posts tagged "apes"

OK, gorilla. You wanna join our dance crew? Let's see what you got, b-boy. DJ Dilla, drop a beat!

Ohhhhh, dip! That gorilla is goin' off. I never saw an ape with moves like that. Well, non-human apes anyway.) Of course you can join our crew. Man, you make even Billy da Kid's moves look wack. Come here for a second. Can you show me that one thing you did...?

There are a few things going on in this video that really add some juice to the narrative. First, we love that the clip opens on a shot of the baby bird to establish what's going to happen, then pans up to the orangutan to show him picking his nose and eating his boogies. It really lowers your expectations for what this ape is capable of accomplishing. Then he immediately confounds your expectations by not only noticing and trying to save the bird, but adorably doing it using a tool (the leaf). Then there's a wonderfully tense moment when the orangutan picks up the bird and everyone gasps because they assume he's going to eat it or otherwise destroy it. But no, he gingerly sets it on the ground. Did you, like the people in the crowd, think he was going to eat the bird? Why don't you take a good, hard look at yourself, and ask yourself why you're always prejudging orangutans?

Talk about a fun job: Primatologist and psychologist Marina Davila Ross led a team that tickled infant and juvenile apes as well as human babies, recording more than 800 laughs. (Can't you just hear it now? "Sorry honey, I just had a long day tickling baby chimps.") This certifiably adorable study found that all great apes – gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans – laugh.

It was previously thought that chimps' chuckles were too different from humans' (exhaling and inhaling vs. humans' exhale-only laugh) to count as true laughter. The tickle study, however, found evidence that gorilla giggles share key traits with human laughter – their exhaling breaths during laughter lasted three to four times longer than during normal breathing. And primatologist Frans de Waal pointed out that primate laugh occurs in playful contexts, further underlining its similarity to the human laugh.

While Aristotle theorized that laughter is what separates humans from animals, it seems that our laughter has simply evolved along with us. Evolution explains the differences between human and ape laughter. Now the only question left is: do apes fake-laugh at their in-laws' lame jokes?