LIFE Apes

TWO RANGERS QUIETLY SAT ON A platform 25 feet up in a tree with a large pile of bananas and red buckets filled with milk. As I watched, a dozen orangutans quickly climbed and swung over to grab the fruit and stick their heads in the buckets for a drink. The orange-haired apes then lounged around, undisturbed by the humans alongside them. Half a mile further into Borneo’s Kabili-Sepilok rainforest it was much less hectic. The air felt humid. I could smell the earth and hear the droning sound of cicadas filling the forest as I avoided the leeches dropping from above. Up ahead I spied another feeding platform. The rangers there sat alone as they scanned the trees but saw no signs of orangutans eager to eat. One of…

Rain was falling, and the air pungent with the smell of rotten wood and wet vegetation as Jane Goodall made her way through the forest’s dense undergrowth. She realized that she could get closer to the chimpanzees she was observing during bad weather, since they bothered less about this strange, two-legged creature living nearby when it was cold and damp. “I could feel the water trickling through my hair and running warmly into my neck. I was looking for a group of chimps I had heard before the rain began,” Goodall recalled in her 1971 book In the Shadow of Man. Suddenly she saw a black shape just a few yards in front of her. It was Goliath, a high-ranking ape from the Kasekela community of eastern chimpanzees. Goliath didn’t…

WATCHING A GIBBON SWINGING across a rainforest canopy, one is reminded of the popular 19th-century song “The Man on the Flying Trapeze” and the lyric “He floats through the air with the greatest of ease.” A gibbon zipping along is a truly glorious, albeit brief, sight. It’s lean, attenuated body arches across 50 feet of open sky, effortlessly grabs a branch, shoots up again, and again, and then vanishes. Many witnessing such a sight would think they had seen a high-flying monkey. Despite popular perception, gibbons, thank you, are not monkeys. Part of the Hylobatidae family, there are some 20 different species of gibbon, all lumped together in a group called the lesser apes (a misleading designation). The great and lesser categories are sort of like boxing’s weight classes. All…

BARBARY MACAQUES Before the Ice Age, Barbary macaques ranged as far north as Germany and Great Britain. They are now only found in Morocco and Algeria, as well as on the Rock of Gibraltar—a troop of 200 live there, descendants of some brought there possibly 1,000 years ago. Legend has it that as long as the macaques, Europe’s only monkey, inhabit Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, the disputed territory will remain under British rule. When their numbers fell to just seven in 1942, a panicky Prime Minister Winston Churchill had five females brought from Morocco to maintain Britannia’s dwindling empire. GELADA With a crimson, hourglass-shaped patch across their chests, these maned creatures are appropriately known as the bleeding-heart monkey. Unlike other primates, whose rumps change color to indicate…

AT THE END OF THE 2011 FILM RISE of the Planet of the Apes, medical researcher Will Rodman races through Muir Woods outside of San Francisco in search of Caesar. Rodman raised the genetically enhanced chimpanzee from infancy, and views him as a son. Deep in the forest in the shadows of the redwoods, Rodman finds Caesar and his band of escaped bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. He implores him, “Please, come home.” Caesar pulls Rodman’s head close and whispers into the stunned human’s ear, “Caesar is home.” It is a great scene and—spoiler alert—what follows in the sequels doesn’t bode well for humanity. Of course, apes that speak are science fiction. But there is much in common between humans and apes. Our DNA is about 98 percent the same,…

THEY STOOD JUST THREE FEET SIX inches tall and were quickly dubbed Hobbits, after the diminutive Middle Earth creatures in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. A team of Australian and Indonesian researchers unearthed their remains in 2003 in a stalactites-festooned cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. This species of protohuman, which they named Homo floresiensis, was a new discovery. They had protruding brow ridges and a chimpanzee-sized brain similar to those found in Homo erectus—a form of early human that vanished about 110,000 years ago—as well as that of australopithecines, which went extinct more than 1 million years ago. Researchers determined at that time that these Hobbit people arrived on Flores about 700,000 years ago, had stone tools, hunted and cooked an extinct dwarf elephant known as…