The phrase
"ape relatives" refers to animals that are closely related to apes, like orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. They share similar characteristics and belong to the same group of animals called primates.
Full definition
How about something as simple as a separate tube for breathing through, thus eliminating choking hazards, or even the ability to make our own vitamin C, as pretty much every mammal except our
closest ape relatives can?
Hahn's lab studies
ape relatives of human pathogens such as HIV and malaria to gain a greater insight into the microbes that cause these diseases in humans.
Author Zanna Clay said that the findings show that «more research needs to be done on our great
ape relatives before we can make conclusions about human uniqueness.
Until now, we knew little about this bone's natural history, except that it is present in Old World monkeys and gibbons but generally not in our more
recent ape relatives.
For nearly 40 years, animal cognition researchers have had mixed results in showing that our
close ape relatives — and animals such as monkeys, jays, and crows — understood that their fellows had minds, a talent thought to come in handy in complex societies, where figuring out another's plans can help animals thrive.
Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig tested whether our closest
great ape relative — the bonobo — and our most distant — the orangutan — share our ability to plan for the future.
Most animals, including our great -
ape relatives, tend to make the same patterns of sound repeatedly.
A new study compared children's capacity to imitate behavior with the same capacity of humans» closest living great
ape relatives, the bonobos.
What we're finding is that deliberately trying to get somebody else's attention seems to be something human beings do that none of
our ape relatives do.
«Humans and our close
ape relatives are just the latest evolutionary experiments to come out of that petri dish.»
To fix the problem, researchers proposed that humans and their great -
ape relatives be combined into a single family, Hominidae, and members of the family Pongidae become the subfamily Ponginae.
Differences in how genes are controlled, or even the loss or disruption of certain gene regulatory elements, may explain why human ancestors evolved to be so different from their great
ape relatives.
None of which can fully explain why humans are so different from
our ape relatives.
With a last common ancestor 24 million years ago, monkeys have smaller brain cases than
apes relative to body size and a shorter life span.
Our great
ape relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas, take about 11 years to reach adulthood.
It doesn't exist in
our ape relatives the chimpanzee or orangutan, but there is some evidence it may have been there in early hominids Neanderthal and Denisovan.