Ape

Lesser apes live in Asia in evergreen tropical rainforests and monsoon forests. Siamangs prefer to live 80 to feet 25 to 30 m in the air in the trees found in Malaysia and Indonesia. A group of apes is called a tribe or a shrewdness. All apes are very social. Gibbons, for example, live in small family groups of two to six individuals. Siamangs are so close that they almost never wander more than 30 feet 10 m apart, according to the San Diego Zoo.

Gorillas live in family groups that can include as many as 30 members. Chimpanzees are the most social of all the apes, and live in communities with 15 to individuals. During the day ape families eat, play and protect each other. At night they sleep in nests made from branches or foliage on the ground or in trees. Gibbons are monogamous, which is very rare in the animal kingdom. Apes are herbivores for the most part, but they also may eat small animals or bugs to supplement their diet.

Gibbons, for example, eat mostly fruit, but they also munch on leaves, flowers and insects. Orangutans eat a fruit diet that is supplemented with vegetation, invertebrates, mineral-rich soil and small vertebrates. Apes have offspring much like humans. They have live births after a gestation period of around eight and a half to nine months and typically give birth to only one or two babies at a time.

They also breastfeed their young for an extending amount of time, like humans. Unlike other animals, apes take care of their young for many years. Apes also take much longer to mature than other animals. Some apes can take as long as 12 to 18 years to fully develop into an adult.

Homininae gorillas, hominoids and chimps. The Western gorilla, for example, is listed as critically endangered due to hunting and outbreaks of ebola.

According to the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, humans' and gorillas' bodies are so much alike, diseases can be transmitted from humans to gorillas and vice versa. As infants, gorillas are given the same as inoculations humans. Gibbons are very good jumpers. They can leap around 30 feet 9 meters at one time, according to the University of Michigan. The lifespan of an ape is quite long. As zoological knowledge developed, it became clear that taillessness occurred in a number of different and otherwise distantly related species.

Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark was one of those primatologists who developed the idea that there were trends in primate evolution and that the extant members of the order could be arranged in an ".. Within this tradition "ape" came to refer to all members of the superfamily Hominoidea except humans.

The cladogram of the superfamily Hominoidae shows the descendant relationships of the extant hominoids that are broadly accepted today. Traditionally, humans were considered neither apes nor great apes, but today they are recognized as having emerged deep in the phylogenetic tree of apes. Thus, there are at least three common, or traditional, uses of the term "ape": Modern biologists and primatologists use monophyletic groups for taxonomic classification; [11] that is, they use only those groups that include all descendants of a common ancestor.

Some scientists now use the term "ape" to mean all members of the superfamily Hominoidea, including humans. For example, in his book, Benton wrote "The apes, Hominoidea, today include the gibbons and orang-utan Scientists broadly, other than paleoanthropologists, may use the term " hominin " to identify the human clade , replacing the term " hominid ".

See terminology of primate names. See below, History of hominoid taxonomy , for a discussion of changes in scientific classification and terminology regarding hominoids. Below is a cladogram with extinct species. It is indicated approximately how many million years ago Mya the clades diverged into newer clades.

Facts About Apes

The lesser apes are the gibbon family, Hylobatidae, of sixteen species; all are native to Asia. Their major differentiating characteristic is their long arms, which they use to brachiate through trees. Their wrists are ball and socket joints as an evolutionary adaptation to their arboreal lifestyle. Formerly, all the great apes except humans were classified as the family Pongidae , which conveniently provided for separating the human family from the apes; see The "great apes" in Pongidae. As noted above, such a definition would make a paraphyletic grouping of the Pongidae great apes.

Current evidence indicates that humans share a common ancestor with the chimpanzee line—from which they separated more recently than from the gorilla line; see Gorillas the outgroup. The superfamily Hominoidea falls within the parvorder Catarrhini , which also includes the Old World monkeys of Africa and Eurasia. Within this grouping, the two families Hylobatidae and Hominidae can be distinguished from Old World monkeys by the number of cusps on their molars ; hominoids have five in the "Y-5" molar pattern, whereas Old World monkeys have only four in a bilophodont pattern. Further, in comparison with Old World monkeys, hominoids are noted for: These are anatomical adaptations, first, to vertical hanging and swinging locomotion brachiation and, later, to developing balance in a bipedal pose.

Note there are primates in other families that also lack tails, and at least one, the pig-tailed langur , is known to walk significant distances bipedally. The front of the ape skull is characterised by its sinuses, fusion of the frontal bone, and by post-orbital constriction. Although the hominoid fossil record is still incomplete and fragmentary, there is now enough evidence to provide an outline of the evolutionary history of humans.

Previously, the divergence between humans and other living hominoids was thought to have occurred 15 to 20 million years ago, and several species of that time period, such as Ramapithecus , were once thought to be hominins and possible ancestors of humans. But, later fossil finds indicated that Ramapithecus was more closely related to the orangutan; and new biochemical evidence indicates that the last common ancestor of humans and non-hominins that is, the chimpanzees occurred between 5 and 10 million years ago, and probably nearer the lower end of that range; see Chimpanzee—human last common ancestor CHLCA.

Facts About Apes

Apart from humans and gorillas, apes eat a predominantly frugivorous diet, mostly fruit, but supplemented with a variety of other foods. Gorillas are predominately folivorous , eating mostly stalks, shoots, roots and leaves with some fruit and other foods. Non-human apes usually eat a small amount of raw animal foods such as insects or eggs. In the case of humans, migration and the invention of hunting tools and cooking has led to an even wider variety of foods and diets, with many human diets including large amounts of cooked tubers roots or legumes.

Although there had been earlier studies, the scientific investigation of behaviour and cognition in non-human members of the superfamily Hominoidea expanded enormously during the latter half of the twentieth century. Major studies of behaviour in the field were completed on the three better-known "great apes", for example by Jane Goodall , Dian Fossey and Birute Galdikas. These studies have shown that in their natural environments, the non-human hominoids show sharply varying social structure: Their diets also vary; gorillas are foliovores , while the others are all primarily frugivores , although the common chimpanzee does some hunting for meat.

Foraging behaviour is correspondingly variable. All the non-human hominoids are generally thought of as highly intelligent, and scientific study has broadly confirmed that they perform very well on a wide range of cognitive tests—though there is relatively little data on gibbon cognition. The use of tools has been repeatedly demonstrated; more recently, the manufacture of tools has been documented, both in the wild and in laboratory tests.

Imitation is much more easily demonstrated in "great apes" than in other primate species. Almost all the studies in animal language acquisition have been done with "great apes", and though there is continuing dispute as to whether they demonstrate real language abilities, there is no doubt that they involve significant feats of learning.

Chimpanzees in different parts of Africa have developed tools that are used in food acquisition, demonstrating a form of animal culture. Cladistically , apes, catarrhines, and extinct species such as Aegyptopithecus and Parapithecidaea , are monkeys [ citation needed ] , so one can only specify ape features not present in other monkeys. Apes do not possess a tail, unlike most monkeys.

Monkeys are more likely to be in trees and use their tails for balance. While the great apes are considerably larger than monkeys, gibbons lesser apes are smaller than some monkeys. Apes are considered to be more intelligent than monkeys, which are considered to have more primitive brains.

The history of hominoid taxonomy is complex and somewhat confusing. Recent evidence has changed our understanding of the relationships between the hominoids, especially regarding the human lineage; and the traditionally used terms have become somewhat confused. Competing approaches to methodology and terminology are found among current scientific sources.

Over time, authorities have changed the names and the meanings of names of groups and subgroups as new evidence—that is, new discoveries of fossils and tools and of observations in the field, plus continual comparisons of anatomy and DNA sequences—has changed the understanding of relationships between hominoids. There has been a gradual demotion of humans from being 'special' in the taxonomy to being one branch among many. This recent turmoil of history illustrates the growing influence on all taxonomy of cladistics , the science of classifying living things strictly according to their lines of descent.

Today, there are eight extant genera of hominoids. They are the four genera in the family Hominidae, namely Homo , Pan , Gorilla , and Pongo ; plus four genera in the family Hylobatidae gibbons: Hylobates , Hoolock , Nomascus and Symphalangus. In , Carl Linnaeus , relying on second- or third-hand accounts, placed a second species in Homo along with H. Homo troglodytes "cave-dwelling man". Although the term "Orang Outang" is listed as a variety - Homo sylvestris - under this species, it is nevertheless not clear to which animal this name refers, as Linnaeus had no specimen to refer to, hence no precise description.

Linnaeus may have based Homo Troglodytes on reports of mythical creatures, then-unidentified simians , or Asian natives dressed in animal skins. He placed the three genera Homo , Simia and Lemur in the order of Primates.

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The troglodytes name was used for the chimpanzee by Blumenbach in , but moved to the genus Simia. Linnaeus's inclusion of humans in the primates with monkeys and apes was troubling for people who denied a close relationship between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Linnaeus's Lutheran archbishop had accused him of "impiety". Accordingly, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in the first edition of his Manual of Natural History , proposed that the primates be divided into the Quadrumana four-handed, i.

This distinction was taken up by other naturalists, most notably Georges Cuvier. Some elevated the distinction to the level of order. However, the many affinities between humans and other primates — and especially the "great apes" — made it clear that the distinction made no scientific sense. The greater number of naturalists who have taken into consideration the whole structure of man, including his mental faculties, have followed Blumenbach and Cuvier, and have placed man in a separate Order, under the title of the Bimana, and therefore on an equality with the orders of the Quadrumana, Carnivora, etc.

Recently many of our best naturalists have recurred to the view first propounded by Linnaeus, so remarkable for his sagacity, and have placed man in the same Order with the Quadrumana, under the title of the Primates. The justice of this conclusion will be admitted: In the second place, we must remember that nearly all the other and more important differences between man and the Quadrumana are manifestly adaptive in their nature, and relate chiefly to the erect position of man; such as the structure of his hand, foot, and pelvis, the curvature of his spine, and the position of his head.

As discussed above, hominoid taxonomy has undergone several changes. Genetic analysis combined with fossil evidence indicates that hominoids diverged from the Old World monkeys about 25 million years ago mya , near the Oligocene-Miocene boundary. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the branch of primates which includes humans.

For other uses, see Ape disambiguation. For an obsolete term for apes which excludes humans, see Pongidae. For an explanation of very similar terms, see Hominidae. Life timeline and Nature timeline. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources.

Ape Conservation in Africa

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