Social Skills: Kids vs. Apes. By Ari Daniel Shapiro Posted 10.04.12 NOVA scienceNOW We humans are exceptionally good at manipulating our environment, but what makes us so successful compared with other primates? Our intelligence? Our opposable thumbs? A clever experiment conducted in Africa and Europe suggests another answer: our social skills. Listen to the story. To see what sets humans apart, anthropologist Victoria Wobber challenges young apes and children to do the same tasks. On a warm afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a few dozen kids and adults have found refuge on a shaded playground. "There are a number of kids playing on slides," she says, watching all the activity. The scene is so familiar that it's hardly remarkable. "Look at the boy using a shovel to get the sand into that container," she says.
Anthropologist Victoria Wobber, at a playground near her office at Harvard University. An elegant experiment Wobber came up with a way to unravel these questions as part of her Ph.D. work at Harvard University. Evolution. Here then is the beta version of my strip about evolution. This is a chapter of the book Science Stories which will be out from Myriad Editions next spring. I'm sure there'll be mistakes here, so do feel free to point them out, so that I can make the necessary changes. Thank you. Note Oct 2013.
Hi All. A fully corrected version of the strip is now part of a book called Science Tales, out from Myriad Edtions in the UK, and AbramComicArts in the US and Canada, where its known as How To Fake A Moon Landing. BBC Nature - Great apes may have 'mid-life crisis', a study suggests. 19 November 2012Last updated at 20:00 By Jeremy Coles Reporter, BBC Nature Do chimpanzees experience a midlife low in happiness? Chimpanzees and orangutans may experience a "mid-life crisis" like humans, a study suggests. An international team of researchers assessed the well-being and happiness of the great apes. They found well-being was high in youth, fell to a low in midlife and rose again in old age, similar to the "U-shape curve" of happiness in humans.
The study brought together experts such as psychologists, primatologists and economists. Results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "What we are testing is whether the U-shaped curve can describe the association between age and well-being in non-human primates as it does in humans," psychologist and lead author Dr Alexander Weiss of the University of Edinburgh told BBC Nature. Testing times Dr Weiss said that the similarities between humans, chimps and orangutans go beyond genetics and physiology. Human evolution. Human evolution is the evolutionary process leading up to the appearance of modern humans. While it began with the last common ancestor of all life, the topic usually covers only the evolutionary history of primates, in particular the genus Homo, and the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of hominids (or "great apes").
The study of human evolution involves many scientific disciplines, including physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, ethology, linguistics, evolutionary psychology, embryology and genetics.[1] The earliest documented members of the genus Homo are Homo habilis which evolved around 2.3 million years ago; the earliest species for which there is positive evidence of use of stone tools. The brains of these early hominins were about the same size as that of a chimpanzee, although it has been suggested that this was the time in which the human SRGAP2 gene doubled, producing a more rapid wiring of the frontal cortex. History of study[edit] Before Darwin[edit] Human evolution. Virtual library.