Latest news with #chimpanzees
The Sun
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Ozzy Osbourne sells five of his paintings for huge sum to save endangered chimps
OZZY Osbourne has sold five of his paintings — to save endangered chimps. The Black Sabbath frontman created the pictures with the help of the apes in a sanctuary. 1 One painting called Paranoid, which he made with chimp Janice at the Florida Save the Chimps centre, fetched £13,820. He also collaborated with three other chimps, Kramer, Sable and Sophie on, on the acrylic on canvas works. The five pictures raised a total of £54,040. They were sold by Omega Auctions in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside. Ozzy, 76, who once bit the head off a bat at a concert in 1982, said: 'I paint because it gives me peace of mind. "But I don't sell my paintings. 'I've made an exception with these collaborations as it raises money for Save the Chimps, a sanctuary for apes rescued from labs, roadside zoos and wildlife traffickers.' Save the Chimps provides refuge and lifetime care to hundreds of chimpanzees. The apes receive top-notch veterinary care, nutritious meals, and a variety of social enrichments - including painting.
BBC News
14-07-2025
- Science
- BBC News
'They hold hands, they embrace, they kiss': The woman who changed our view of chimps
In 1960, Jane Goodall began her groundbreaking field study by living among chimpanzees in Tanzania. In 1986 she told the BBC how similar chimps and humans really are. On 14 July 1960, 65 years ago this week, a young English woman with no formal scientific background or qualifications stepped off a boat at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to begin what would become a pioneering study of wild chimpanzees. Her discoveries would not just revolutionise our understanding of animal behaviour but reshape the way we define ourselves as human beings. Although she was just 26 years old at the time, Jane Goodall had long dreamt of studying and living with animals. "Apparently, from the time I was about one and a half or two, I used to study insects, anything, and this gradually evolved and developed and grew and then I read books like Dr Dolittle and Tarzan, then it had to be Africa that was my goal," she told the BBC's Terry Wogan on his talk show in 1986. Upon finishing school, Goodall took a secretarial course while working as a waitress and as a film production assistant to fund her childhood ambition. By 1957, she had finally saved enough money to travel to see a friend in Nairobi, Kenya. While there, she arranged to meet the renowned Kenyan-British palaeoanthropologist Professor Louis Leakey, merely with the hope of talking to him about animals. Leakey, whose secretary had recently left, was so impressed by Goodall's quiet determination and extensive self-taught knowledge of African wildlife that he offered her a job as his assistant at the natural history museum. Leakey would then become Goodall's mentor. "It was he who said, 'Well, I'm looking for someone to go and study chimpanzees because of the light their behaviour may shed on understanding early human behaviour,'" she told Wogan. Leakey viewed her lack of an academic science background as an advantage rather than a hindrance, believing her observations wouldn't be hemmed in by pre-existing scientific theories. Goodall would not be alone on her trip to the Gombe Reserve. To comply with the colonial safety regulations of the time, her mother Vanne came along as a chaperone. "Initially I wasn't allowed to be on my own," she told the BBC. "The British government as it then was said, 'No, this is absolutely almost amoral for a young girl to go out in the bush.' So, I had to choose a companion, and my mother came with me for three months." The first months proved to be tough going, with both Goodall and her mother, who were staying together in an ex-army camping tent, developing malaria. Even when Goodall was well enough to venture into the reserve, she could only go out with a local escort, and often at the sound of their approaching footsteps, the chimpanzees would simply vanish into the undergrowth. But as she learnt the forest trails and became used to moving through the dense terrain, "the authorities decided, well, I was crazy and I was OK", she said. Once she started hiking on her own in the forested hills, she began to catch sight of the elusive primates through her binoculars from a peak overlooking two valleys. It was then that Goodall began to adopt an unorthodox immersive approach. Each day she would edge ever nearer to their feeding area with the hope of being able to sit among the chimpanzees and study them up close in their natural habitat. Chimps use tools and communicate like humans "I wore the same-coloured clothes every day and I think the most important thing was I never pushed it," she told BBC's Witness History in 2014. "I never tried to get too close. I would wait by a fruiting tree, where I knew the chimpanzees were coming, and when they left, I didn't follow them. Not to start with, because I felt that was pushing my luck. So gradually they came to accept that I was harmless." As the apes lost their wariness of her, Goodall was able to sit for hours, patiently observing their behaviour and their hitherto unrecognised complex social system. She discovered that the chimpanzees were not in fact vegetarian as previously thought, but omnivorous, and would communicate with each other to hunt for meat. She was able to witness the closeness of their family bonds and how each animal's individuality would influence their behaviour. "In chimp society, a female can be mated by all the males, or she can be led away and kept by one, and the males have very close bonds," she told Wogan. "They patrol the boundary of the community territory, they keep strangers out, they bring young new-blood females in, and all of them act as nice, tolerant, gentle, protective fathers to all the infants inside that community." Instead of using a numbering system for her subjects, as was traditional in a research project, Goodall instead gave them names, recognising each animal's unique personality: She named one male chimp David Greybeard. It was while watching David Greybeard that she first saw him fashioning and using tools – activities that scientists had previously thought were exclusive to human beings. Indeed, at the time, toolmaking, which requires abstract thought to conceive of a tool's use in a future situation, was considered a defining characteristic of being human. "[Chimpanzees] use more different objects as tools than any creature except ourselves. For example, a little twig from which they may strip the leaves, thus they modify it, for feeding on termites," she told Wogan. "A long stick from which they peel the bark, feeding on a very vicious biting ant and they chew it. Crumpled leaves for supping water out of a little hole when they can't reach it with their lips, or for wiping blood off their bodies. And weapons: stones hurled, branches used for intimidation or for clubbing." At the time, the idea was revolutionary, challenging years of conventional scientific thinking. Since then, research has shown evidence of tool use across the animal kingdom, from the Indonesian octopus who uses coconut shells discarded by humans as armour against predators, to New Caledonian Crows who bend twigs and wires with their beaks to create hooks, enabling them to pull larvae out of tree bark. As Goodall sat silently observing the chimpanzees, she began to see how similar their familial bonds and their non-verbal communication were to those of humans. "If chimps meet after a separation, they hold hands, they embrace, they kiss," she said. Understanding of this commonality with humans raised "new questions about the way that we are bringing up our children in the West", she told Wogan. A common ancestor "Well, if we leave a child crying at night, if we leave a child for long hours in a playpen, if we take a child to a daycare centre where there is a constant turnover of people, we may bring up a child that is highly intelligent. But from our experience of chimps who've had difficult upbringings, there is a suggestion that that child when it is an adult may have difficulty in making close relationships with others – may find it harder to cope in a stressful situation. This is very important," she said. Goodall recognised how closely chimpanzees' ritualised behaviours and emotions can resemble our own. And how, like ours, their destructive and violent impulses could lead to brutal killings. "We discovered after the first 10 years that although chimps were very like us in their friendly ways, they're also like us in the fact they can become very aggressive. We found that under certain situations, there can be cannibalism and also an inter-community interaction that in some way is like a primitive form of human warfare," she said. More like this:• The first men to conquer Everest's 'death zone'• The man who created Charlie Brown and Snoopy• The powerful music biopic – with a CGI chimp hero In 1962, with Leakey's encouragement, despite not possessing an undergraduate degree, she began a PhD based on her exceptionally detailed findings. The same year, the National Geographic Society sent a Dutch wildlife photographer and film-maker, Hugo van Lawick, to document her work, which resulted in a 1965 documentary, Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees. Narrated by Orson Welles, the film helped showcase her discoveries to the wider public. Van Lawick would become her first husband, and in 1967, the year after she gained her doctorate, she gave birth to a son, Hugo, whom they nicknamed Grub. They built him a protective shelter to enable Goodall to remain with him and keep him safe while she continued her field work. "Chimpanzees are hunters just like we are," she told Wogan. "They hunt co-operatively, they hunt medium-size mammals. There had been records of them hunting human children, just as humans hunt chimps, and so when he was very tiny and this was before he could walk, he was in a sort of caged-in veranda, and we always had to have people with him." Goodall's trailblazing research into primatology presented evidence that humans are not separate from the rest of animal kingdom, but that Homo sapiens and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. Research has since shown that chimpanzees are incredibly genetically close to humans, sharing about 98.6% of our DNA. "This is the thing," said Goodall. "Behaviour we see in man today and chimp today was probably in that common ancestor, and therefore we can imagine Stone Age people having long friendly relationships between family members and using little twigs to feed and embracing one another. I like to think of that." -- For more stories and never-before-published radio scripts to your inbox, sign up to the In History newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
CBC
11-07-2025
- Science
- CBC
Chimps are sticking grass and sticks in their butts, seemingly as a fashion trend
A group of chimpanzees in Zambia have resurrected an old fashion trend with a surprising new twist. Fifteen years after a female chimpanzee named Julie first stuck a blade of grass into her ear and started a hot new craze among her cohort at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage, an entirely new group of chimps at the refuge have started doing the same thing. "We were really shocked that this had happened again," Jake Brooker, a psychologist and great apes researcher at Durham University in England, told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. "We were even more shocked that they were doing their own spin on this by also inserting the grass and sticks in a different orifice." The chimps, he says, have been putting blades of grass and sticks into their ears and anuses, and simply letting them dangle there for no apparent reason. The study, published in the journal Behaviour last week, sheds new light on how social-cultural trends spread and change among our primate cousins, much like they do among humans. They learned it from us. Some of it, anyway In fact, the researchers suspect the chimps learned the behaviour from people — the ear part, that is. The two groups of chimps who display the behaviour don't have any contact with each other. But they do share some of the same human caretakers. And those caretakers, the study notes, reported that they sometimes use match sticks or blades of grass to clean their ears when working at the animal sanctuary. The chimps, Brooker says, "have potentially copied it from a human who was walking by the enclosure, or one of the caregivers who was just going about their daily lives." "Like with all cultures, things change over time and they get refined and new quirks and new traditions pop up," he said. Chimpanzee influencers In this case, the team traced the "new quirk" to a male chimp named Juma, who seems to have originated the grass-in-butt variation. From there, the study shows, it spread rapidly to most of his groupmates within a week. The same thing happened to Julie's group. She started putting grass in her ear in 2010, and pretty soon, seven other chimps were doing the same. The phenomenon even continued after Julie died in 2013. The researchers observed Julie's group again for this new study, and found that two chimps, including Julie's son, were still wearing grass in their ears. Much like humans, Brooker says the chimps appear to be willing to suffer for the sake of fashion. "You see when they're learning this behaviour that it's quite uncomfortable," he said of the ear grass. "They shake their head and they rub the ear a little bit as if they're trying to get used to it." Once they adjust, he says, they appear largely unbothered. He likened it to people getting their ears pierced. "There's not a clear benefit that wearing earrings really brings, but some kind of social cultural reason," he said. "I feel like it's similar with the grass in the ear." It's an apt comparison, says Julie Teichroeb, a primatologist at the University of Toronto who wasn't involved in the study. "It just looks like an earring, you know, like a fashionable way to present yourself," she said. 'They spend a lot of time looking at each other's butts' And as for Juma's grass-in-butt variation? Teichroeb says it's possible they're doing it to make themselves more attractive to potential mates. Females, in particular, she noted, display a swelling on their rear ends to indicate when they're receptive to a little hanky panky. "They spend a lot of time looking at each other's butts," she said. "So it's kind of not surprising maybe that they were innovating this way to sort of decorate their butts." Cultural differences are common among primates, and other animals too, but they often boil down to different methods of accessing food and other resources. Because the Chimfunshi chimps have human caretakers who feed them, Teichroeb says they may have more free time to develop purely social trends. "We think of, like silly, little pointless cultural ideas that spread amongst people," she said. "Learning that animals have these kinds of same, pointless little behaviours that become fads and become viral, I think it really shows how closely related we are to them, how much kinship we actually share." Brooker says it reminds him of the orcas who have recently been spotted wearing salmon on their heads like a hat — a behaviour last reported in the '70s. "It re-emerged 40 years later, like flared jeans," Brooker said. In that case, scientists also theorize the trend could be related to an abundance of food after many years of scarcity. Weird as this study was, Brooker says it's only the second most surprising behaviour he's observed in chimpanzees. The most surprising, he says, was when he happened upon two male chimps engaging in "."
Times
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Unlike you chimps, I always do my own thing
No doubt you saw the story about the monkeys in Zambia who put blades of grass in their ears as a fashion thing. Chimps, I think they were. Yes, I know they're apes, not monkeys. But they're bloody monkeys. Like ponies are horses and whales are fish and tomatoes are vegetables. Up my end of the food chain, I'm not going to worry about offending no monkey. It's not like I'm being racist. They're just monkeys. I am human, I am king, and chimpanzees are whatever I say they are. If they want to argue with me, they can evolve some more and come back to the table. I say what I want, and I do what I want. I go my own way. I don't have to call chimps 'apes' just because everyone else does. Any more than I'm going to read Fifty Shades of Grey or Harry goddam Potter just because ten million other monkeys have. Everyone reading the same old rubbish just because it's popular is how you end up with The Salt Path. And if I were an ape, let me tell you, I wouldn't be putting a blade of bloody grass in my ear just because Bonzo was doing it. I would have more dignity. Bonzo, after all, is also throwing his faeces around, eating bugs off his best mate's arse and frantically whacking off in public. • Chimpanzees fall for futile 'fashions', just like humans But when the story broke about a chimp sticking a blade of grass in its ear at some nature reserve and then five others picking up the habit within weeks, people went wild. Not as wild as chimps, leaping around like idiots, spanking their own heads with their ridiculously long arms and screeching, with their lips peeled back round their ears, but very much the modern media equivalent. 'Primatologists believe it may say something profound about the origins of human culture,' wrote our science editor, and within minutes I was being asked on the radio what hilarious things I had done in my life just because everyone else was doing them. None, I told them. I am not a monkey. 'Sure,' they said. 'But what crazy item of clothing did you wear in your teens just because it was all the rage?' None, I said. I already told you, I'm not a monkey. I have never worn any item of clothing for any reason, at any age, except that it kept the rain off and didn't itch too much (I am also able to wear pants, in case you were wondering, after the Gregg Wallace revelations). 'Fashionable haircut?' They asked. Nope. Never had one of those. In fact, I grew a short beard in 1998 purely because no other man in England wore one at that time. People said, 'That's risky, girls don't like beards.' But I told them, 'Wrong, most girls don't like beards. But the small number who do will have no one to go to but me.' It's not that I am a deliberate contrarian. I just do not believe that my fellow men make their best decisions as a group. If I did, I would have a tattoo, like everyone else. All these morons with their 'sleeves' and misspelt Sanskrit, their slag tags and their tramp stamps, they could no more explain why they got them than those chimpanzees could tell you why they put grass in their ears. But at least the chimps can take the grass out when they're bored with it. Even a monkey wouldn't stick it in so deep it stayed there forever. By the same token, I don't read popular books or go to popular films or listen to popular music. Or any kind of music. Or dance. Because music and dance are grunting communal activities contrived to unite us at the lowest common denominator of the species. To turn us, in short, back into monkeys. Keep us in our place. I've never been to a festival or even a so-called 'gig', because a place where everyone is on the same wavelength, marching to the same beat, gives me the willies. Same reason I've never been to a Nazi rally. Or on a march or any sort of protest. Yes, I can see that you've all got the protest grass in your monkey ears, but I'm fine as I am. • Rewriting Orwell's rules for the perfect pub — with London's best landlord I don't go to stand-up comedy either, because if everyone around me is laughing, I don't just laugh along like a chimpanzee, I look first for a weapon and then for the exit. Load of middle-class Norberts whooping like monkeys because Jack Whitehall is saying something hilariously true about the hummus aisle at Waitrose? That's a blade of grass that is not going in this earhole, no matter how many of you do it. Did you vote for Brexit? Me neither. Nobody did. And yet everyone did. Because while individually we are a smart, perceptive species, collectively we are an idiot. And my children don't put grass in their ears either, thank God. Do your kids have smartphones? Mine don't: 14 and 12 and they don't want them. Because they have looked around and seen what morons it has made of their peer group. They've seen the grass in the other monkeys' ears and said 'no thanks'. Friends ask me, 'Don't you want your kids to be normal? Don't you want them to fit in?' And I reply: 'With whom? The other monkeys? The ones in evolutionary reverse? Er, no.' I sometimes wonder where my reluctance to stick grass in my ear began. I wonder if it's because if you grow up short, Jewish, myopic and left-handed in a tall, gentile, right-handed, well-sighted world, you're already missing so many blades of grass there is no point trying to catch up. The only blade of grass I ever did put in my ear was the booze blade. That did help me briefly get into the music/nightclub/social thing. Off my noodle on gin, I at least looked like I had grass in my ears. But that turned out not to be good for me in other ways. • Ozzy Osbourne's masterstroke: painting with a band of chimps And then if you end up a writer, well, it's no good having the same blade of grass in the same ear as everyone else. No one will pay you for that. If you want to make the big bucks, you've got to have a huge, long, curly-wurly blade of bright blue neon sticking out of your ear, so that all the other monkeys shout, 'Hey, Bonzo, have you seen what Coren's got in his ear this week? It's massive! And blue! And completely wrong but funny and kind of compelling! That's the thing about Coren: he puts things in his ear that other people are afraid to put in their ears, that's why I buy The Times.' But am I happy? I have looked down all my life on all you monkeys with grass in your ears, whooping and hollering and flinging your poo around, and been paid well to do it. But I do sometimes wonder if I might have had a better time just sticking a blade in my own lughole and getting on with it. Listen to Giles discussing his columns on his podcast, Giles Coren Has No Idea
BBC News
10-07-2025
- Science
- BBC News
Chimpanzees follow trends just like we do
Humans copy each other with fashion fads and crazes all the time, and it turns out some chimps do too. The latest fashion trend for a group of chimpanzees in Zambia? Sticking grass in their ears. Fierce!Scientists from the University of Durham observed the primates copying each other, and saw the trend growing, despite it seemingly serving absolutely no purpose - other than to look super stylish of course. The team say it shows our closest relatives have even more human-like culture than we first thought. It's not the first time this kind of behaviour has been seen in chimpanzees at the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage Trust. Over 10 years ago researchers saw a female chimp from a completely different group start wearing grass in her ear and one by one, others adopted the trend. It's very similar to how fashions and trends emerge in humans. Dr Jake Brooker from Durham University, said: "This isn't about cracking nuts or fishing for termites – it's more like chimpanzee fashion."It mirrors how human cultural fads spread: someone starts doing something, others copy it, and it becomes part of the group identity even if it serves no clear purpose."
