The first advertising campaign for non-human primates

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20618-the-first-advertising-campaign-for-nonhuman-primates.html

Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner had an epiphany last year. At a TED talk, the two New York advertising executives learned that captive monkeys understand money, and that when faced with economic games they will behave in similar ways to humans. So if they can cope with money, how would they respond to advertising?

Read on...

Is the Hobbit's brain unfeasibly small?

25 January 2010 BioMed Central Limited

Homo floresiensis, a pygmy-sized small-brained hominin popularly known as ‘the Hobbit’ was discovered five years ago, but controversy continues over whether the small brain is actually due to a pathological condition. How can its tiny brain size be explained? Researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Biology have tackled this question in the context of a comprehensive assessment of the evolution of brain and body size throughout the larger primate family.

Nick Mundy and Stephen Montgomery, from the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University, UK, and colleagues from Durham University used previously published data from living and extinct species to reconstruct the pattern of brain and body mass evolution in primates. According to Nick Mundy, “Our results provide robust confirmation for the suggestion that strong evolutionary trends have governed the expansion of the primate brain. In contrast, body size evolution has not tended to increase in primates, implying brain and body mass have been subject to separate selection pressures and supporting the findings of previous studies in other taxonomic groups that these two highly correlated traits can show differences in their patterns of evolution”.

Brain expansion began early in primate evolution and has occurred in all major groups, suggesting a strong selective advantage to increased brainpower in most primate lineages. Despite this overall trend, however, Mundy and his colleagues have identified several branches/lineages within each major group that have shown decreasing brain and body mass as they evolve, for example in marmosets and mouse lemurs. According to Mundy, “We find that, under reasonable assumptions, the reduction in brain size during the evolution of Homo floresiensis is not unusual in comparison to these other primates. Along with other recent studies on the effects of ‘island dwarfism’ in other mammals, these results support the hypothesis that the small brain of Homo floresiensis was adapted to local ecological conditions on Flores."

http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcbiol/

Full bibliographic information
Reconstructing the ups and downs of primate brain evolution: implications for adaptive hypotheses and Homo floresiensis
Stephen H Montgomery, Isabella Capellini, Robert A Barton and Nicholas I Mundy
BMC Biology (in press)

(Submitted by Tim Chapman)

Hobbit species may not have been human

Cheryl Jones September 30, 2009
Article from: The Australian

AFTER five years of arguments over the so-called hobbits, the University of New England paleoanthropologist who formally described the tiny new hominin species from the Indonesian island of Flores is facing another wave of controversy.

This time, Peter Brown could raise the ire of some of the scientists who supported him in an academic debate that degenerated into an international scandal.

Brown, who initially placed the species in the human genus Homo and named it Homo floresiensis, is considering stripping the hobbits of their human status.

More remains have been found, and the species is now represented by six to nine individuals, depending on how the partial skeletons are put together. The skeletons range in age from 17,000 to 95,000 years.

And a big body of research, including Brown's own, since the publication of the first papers on the find has forced a rethink of his initial classification.

In a paper accepted for publication in an upcoming special Homo floresiensis edition of the Journal of Human Evolution, Brown and colleague Tomoko Maeda, also of UNE, say the hobbits' lineage left Africa "possibly before the evolution of the genus Homo". (The root of the human family tree stretches back about two million years to Homo habilis, or Handy Man, in Africa.)

Brown says assigning the Flores hominin to a different genus would worry some scholars. "They will think it somehow marginalises Homo floresiensis; that it's a clear statement that it is not a member of our genus, and it's extinct, so we don't have to worry about it any more," he says. "That's nonsense, because it's part of the broader evolutionary story of our species."

The hobbit drama started when an Australian and Indonesian team led by archeologist Mike Morwood, now of the University of Wollongong, and Radien Soejono of the Indonesian Centre for Archeology published details of the discovery of the 18,000-year-old partial skeleton, LB1, in the British journal Nature in 2004.

The 1m-tall hominin, discovered at the Liang Bua cave site in 2003, had a low, receding forehead and no chin. Its brain capacity was well under the 500cc of the typical chimp, yet it had stone tools, had possibly tamed fire and had hunted the dwarfed elephant-like stegodon and giant rats.

Brown initially argued that the hominins had evolved on Flores from Homo erectus, then thought to be the species that had left 840,000-year-old stone tools at another Flores site. Like many island species, the hobbits had dwarfed under evolutionary pressure in an environment with limited food and few competitors.

The classification struck at the heart of the debate over two competing models of human evolution, the "out of Africa" and multiregionalist theories.

The out of Africa model states that modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa up to 200,000 years ago. Our species then dispersed across the globe, replacing the descendants of earlier migrants, classified variously as Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, who left Africa more than a million years ago. The modern human wave washed through southeast Asia, reaching Australia about 50,000 years ago.

Multiregionalists contend that our species evolved in various regions from the earlier African migrants. Interbreeding pushed the species in the same evolutionary direction.

In this scheme, the Africanists' different Homo species are lumped together. Multiregionalism cannot accommodate two different human species in the same region concurrently. The Flores hobbit had overlapped with modern humans, at least in the region, so Brown's assignment of it to Homo challenged the multiregionalist model.

Rival researchers led by veteran Indonesian paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob, a multiregionalist, "borrowed" the Liang Bua excavators' LB1 specimen in 2004, causing a storm in the international scientific community. Jacob later returned the remains but, to Brown's horror, the precious type specimen - the material on which the formal species definition is based - had been damaged.

A row erupted in the media. Multiregionalists, including Alan Thorne of the Australian National University and Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide, argued that LB1 was not a new human species but a modern human with a brain disorder (called microcephaly) that gave it a tiny skull.

Much research since has tested claims that the hobbits were sick modern humans, healthy pygmies or sick pygmies. Several papers made or countered claims of disorders such as cretinism or congenital hypothyroidism.

Various international teams have exhaustively compared hobbit anatomy with that of ancient hominins and with sick and healthy modern humans.

Evidence has been mounting that the hobbits' direct ancestor preceded Indonesian Homo erectus, says Brown, an Africanist.

Some teams, including one led by the ANU's Debbie Argue, dispute the disease theories but leave Homo floresiensis in the human genus, albeit close to the base of the family tree. Others say hobbits are more closely related to our more distant ancestors the australopithecines, epitomised by Lucy, a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis from Ethiopia.

In their latest research, Brown and Maeda compared two Homo floresiensis lower jawbones and the attached teeth, along with an isolated hobbit premolar, with those of more than 2000 modern humans as well as ancient hominins. They took in data from the 1.8 million-year-old Dmanisi skeletons from the Republic of Georgia, thought to be from a species intermediate between Homo habilis and Homo erectus or its close relative Homo ergaster.

Until now, the Dmanisi material was thought to represent the first hominin species out of Africa.

Mandibles and teeth are powerful diagnostic features because they are preserved preferentially in the fossil record, Brown says. "Because we have lots of this type of information, we have developed methods for interpreting it and comparing it between species."

The two drew some of the data from the scientific literature but made many measurements themselves. They scrutinised about 40 characteristics, including the thickness of tooth enamel, measured in fractions of a millimetre, the shape of tooth crowns and their roots, and diagnostic parts of the chin region. Deep statistical analysis put Homo floresiensis way outside the range of modern humans, including microcephalics.

Combined with other anatomical evidence, the results ruled out Asian Homo erectus as the progenitor. Both jawbones shared characteristics with Australopithecus and early Homo, and were closer to them than the Dmanisi skeletons were. The ancestral hobbits must have left Africa before the hominins who reached Dmanisi, Brown and Maeda reasoned.

"What will come from this is either the redefining of the genus Homo or the argument that this species has so many unique characteristics and so many features shared with australopithecines that it probably belongs in its own genus," Brown tells HES.

If the hobbits wind up outside Homo, it will mean they were never a threat to multiregionalism anyway.

That such a primitive species got to an island so far from the African homeland and survived there until a volcanic eruption wiped it out 17,000 years ago would make the Flores find even more spectacular than previously thought.

Far from being marginalised, the species Brown describes as "out of time and out of place" might just have played a big role in hominin evolution: "Surely it's possible that in some part of Asia, an isolated group of australopithecine-like hominins evolved in a particular direction - towards Homo floresiensis - and spread backwards towards Africa."

Cheryl Jones is a science journalist and co-author of The Bone Readers: Atoms, Genes and the Politics of Australia's Deep Past, published by Allen & Unwin.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,24897,26143116-12332,00.html

Chimp's stone throwing at zoo visitors was 'premeditated'

Chimp's stone throwing at zoo visitors was 'premeditated'
9-Mar-2009

Researchers have found what they say is some of the first unambiguous evidence that an animal other than humans can make spontaneous plans for future events. The report in the March 9th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, highlights a decade of observations in a zoo of a male chimpanzee calmly collecting stones and fashioning concrete discs that he would later use to hurl at zoo visitors.

"These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," said Mathias Osvath of Lund University. "It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including life-like mental simulations of potential events. They most probably have an 'inner world' like we have when reviewing past episodes of our lives or thinking of days to come. When wild chimps collect stones or go out to war, they probably plan this in advance. I would guess that they plan much of their everyday behavior."

While researchers have observed many ape behaviors that could involve planning both in the wild and in captivity, it generally hasn't been possible to judge whether they were really meeting a current or future need, he added. For instance, when a chimp breaks a twig for termite fishing or collects a stone for nut cracking, it can always be argued that they are motivated by immediate rather than future circumstances.

And that's what makes the newly described case so special, Osvath said. It is clear that the chimp's planning behavior is not based on a "current drive state." In contrast to the chimp's extreme agitation when throwing the stones, he was always calm when collecting or manufacturing his ammunition.

Osvath said he thinks wild chimps in general, as well as other animals, probably have the planning ability demonstrated by the individual described in the study. Indeed, experiments conducted recently with other captive chimpanzees have shown they are capable of making such plans. (Some have argued, however, that those findings could be the result of experimental artifacts.)

"I think that wild chimpanzees might be even better at planning as they probably rely on it for their daily survival," Osvath said. "The environment in a zoo is far less complex than in a forest. Zoo chimps never have to encounter the dangers in the forest or live through periods of scarce food. Planning would prove its value in 'real life' much more than in a zoo."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-03/cp-cst030209.php