A large group of wild monkeys swarmed a boat after being fed in Thailand. Footage shows monkeys swimming through shallow waters off the coast of Pattaya toward the raft on August 24. Others waited along the sandy shoreline and attempted to climb aboard. The animals continued gathering around the boat as food was distributed. Source link
Wild sooty mangabey monkeys can bend the middle of their feet almost as much as chimpanzees flex their ankles while climbing trees. The finding shows that a monkey-like foot could still support difficult vertical climbing, complicating ideas about the ancestor shared by humans and chimpanzees. The research does not reveal what that ancestor looked like, but it could change how scientists interpret fossil feet and climbing ability. A monkey-like foot may not have stopped the ancestor of humans and chimpanzees from climbing straight up tree trunks. New field measurements show wild sooty mangabeys can bend their midfeet almost as much as chimpanzees flex their ankles. Humans and chimpanzees split from that shared ancestor about 6 million to 7 million years ago, leaving a long-running debate over how it moved through forests. The research comes from scientists at The Ohio State University. The team studied sooty mangabeys in Ivory Coast, whose feet lack chimpanzees’ highly flexible ankles. “People are making behavioral inferences from fossils, and some say a monkey can’t vertically climb as well as an …
A chimpanzee randomly hitting keys has about a 5% chance of typing “bananas” in its lifetime, but producing Shakespeare is another matter entirely. Even 200,000 chimpanzees typing one key every second until the universe ends would almost certainly never reproduce Shakespeare’s complete works. The calculation shows how infinity can make an event mathematically certain even when it is effectively impossible within the physical limits of our universe. A monkey can type “bananas” by chance. Shakespeare is another matter entirely. Once the infinite time promised by a famous probability theorem disappears, random typing runs into the hard limits of the universe. The Infinite Monkey Theorem says a monkey pressing keys randomly for an infinite amount of time would eventually reproduce William Shakespeare’s complete works. The idea is mathematically sound, but a University of Technology Sydney analysis argues that its familiar conclusion becomes misleading in a finite universe. Associate Professor Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta examined what happens when both monkeys and time are limited. Their study replaces infinity with estimated real-world limits. “The Infinite Monkey Theorem …
The first time I saw it, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. A northern white-cheeked gibbon at Shanghai Zoo was holding and caressing a mouse that had wandered into its enclosure. It wasn’t trying to eat it or chase it away. Instead, the gibbon treated the tiny rodent with remarkable gentleness. I couldn’t stop wondering why. Years later, while studying wild black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys in the mountains of south-west China, I watched playful juveniles repeatedly trying to climb onto the backs of domestic pigs. Again, these weren’t the kinds of interactions I expected to see between different species. A new study my colleagues and I conducted brings together 427 documented cases of primates interacting with other species, spanning several decades from the 1970s to 2025. Our findings reveal that these encounters are far more widespread than scientists had realised. Over the years, I had begun collecting reports of similar encounters from scientific journals, photographs, videos and observations shared by other primatologists. What initially seemed like a handful of quirky anecdotes gradually turned …
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. We humans love our pets, but we aren’t the only great apes who buddy up with other species. Researchers have documented multiple instances of primates forming bonds with different animals, but a recent study indicates these relationships may be even more common than expected. In a first-of-its-kind comprehensive review published in the journal Primates, anthropologists at the University of Oxford explored various instances of monkeys and apes carrying, grooming, playing, and sometimes actually adopting other creatures. The data pool sources 303 cases across available scientific literature, 66 primatologists surveys, and 58 media accounts describing cross-species interactions involving humans’ close relatives. Situations included tufted gray langurs (Semnopithecus priam) petting squirrels in Sri Lanka, snub-nosed monkeys (Rhinopithecus bieti) playing with domesticated pigs in China, and …
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. Only a handful of species apart from humans are known to understand geometry. It’s considered so rare among other animals that most scientists have long assumed even our closest non-human primate relatives struggle to grasp the concept of shapes and space. But according to a new study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some monkeys may not only have a solid handle on geometrical ideas—they cognitively process them in the same way as humans. “What surprised us wasn’t just that monkeys could do the task. It was that monkeys, children and adults seemed to think about geometric relationships in fundamentally the same way,” Jessica Cantlon, a study co-author, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), explained …
Piers had been in China for all of two days in 2009 when he was used as a “white monkey” for the first time. He had travelled to a village in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, to attend a friend’s wedding and had stopped in the village to try a special crab dish at a small restaurant. Weeks later, a Chinese guest who had been at the wedding told him the restaurant had had an uptick in business because the locals had heard that a laowai, a foreigner, had been seen dining there, so people had assumed this restaurant must be good. Piers realised the boss had deliberately seated him in a way to attract attention: “I knew we were sitting outside in a premium spot, but I didn’t pick up on what was going on.” When foreigners in China are used this way, they are called a baihouzi, a white monkey. They’re hired to help Chinese businesses appear more desirable, the foreigner association conveying prestige and a sense that your product is universally regarded. The industry …
Gibraltar’s famous Barbary macaques have hit upon a clever but dirty solution to the perils of tourist handouts: swallowing soil to settle their stomachs after gorging on chocolate, crisps, ice cream and other junk food. A University of Cambridge study has, for the first time, documented regular “geophagy” – intentional dirt-eating – among the only free-ranging monkey population in Europe. Troops with the closest contact with holidaymakers eat far more soil, with rates spiking during the busy summer season. Researchers believe the high-sugar, high-fat, low-fibre snacks disrupt the monkeys’ gut microbiome and cause digestive misery. Eating dirt appears to act as a natural buffer, lining the gut, supplying minerals and beneficial bacteria, and limiting the absorption of irritating compounds. Dr Sylvain Lemoine, a biological anthropologist at Cambridge, explained: “Foods brought by tourists and eaten by Gibraltar’s macaques are extremely rich in calories, sugar, salt and dairy. This is completely unlike the foods typically consumed by the species, such as herbs, leaves, seeds and the occasional insect.” The behaviour lets the monkeys keep bingeing on calorie-dense …
Monkeys in Gibraltar have learned to eat soil to settle their stomachs from all the junk food they consume, research suggests. Scientists believe the dirt helps the monkeys line the gut to stop irritation from foods which are “extremely rich in calories, sugar, salt and dairy”. The soil also provides bacteria and minerals missing from junk food offered or stolen from tourists, such as chocolate bars, crisps and ice cream. The snacks have negative digestive effects for the macaques and can cause symptoms from nausea to diarrhoea, but the food is “as delicious for them” as it is for humans, according to a Cambridge University study. Animals in frequent contact with Gibraltar’s visitors were observed to eat more dirt, with this behaviour higher during peak holiday season. Image: A macaque monkey finishing a packet of M&Ms. Pic: Martin Nicourt/Gibraltar Macaques Project/PA The researchers think the behaviour is likely to have been learned socially as different troops of monkeys have preferences for certain types of soil. Experts said the soil acts as a “barrier” in the …
Monkeys can walk around a virtual world using a brain-computer interface Peter Janssen et al. 2026 Monkeys fitted with a brain-computer interface (BCI) successfully navigated a variety of virtual worlds using only their thoughts. Researchers hope the experiments will pave the way for people with paralysis to explore virtual worlds or more intuitively control electric wheelchairs in this one. Peter Janssen at KU Leuven in Belgium band colleagues implanted three rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta) monkeys with BCIs. Crucially, each animal got three implants, each consisting of 96 electrodes, positioned in the primary motor, dorsal and ventral premotor cortex. The first area is commonly used in BCI research and relates to physical movement, but the latter two are thought to be involved in planning movement in a higher, more abstract way. Electrical signals from the implants were then interpreted by an AI model and used to control VR avatars as the monkeys watched a 3D monitor. In experiments, the monkeys were able to control a sphere moving across a virtual-reality landscape from a fixed point of …
