Nearly 3,000 chimpanzees, gorillas, bonobos and orangutans are illegally killed or stolen from the wild each year, according to a new report (pdf) from the United Nations Environmental Programme’s (UNEP) Great Apes Survival Partnership (GASP). The report, released to coincide with this week’s meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild [...]

Crested gibbons are the world’s most endangered primates, and the world needs to take action immediately if we are to save these lesser apes from extinction, according to scientists who spoke last week at the International Primatological Society Congress in Kyoto, Japan. There are just seven species of crested gibbon, all of which are endangered. [...]

A set of descriptions last year of a 4.4-million-year-old hominid dubbed Ardipithecus ramidus pegged the primate as a human ancestor that lived in ancient African woodlands. Now some researchers aren’t so sure that "Ardi" lived in the forest—or even belongs exclusively in the human line. Before Ardi, common evolutionary wisdom held that our ancestors began [...]

Editor’s Note: While I’m on vacation, I’ve arranged a series of guest posts from other writers who routinely cover animal behavior and cognition. Today’s post, about the controversial mirror self-recognition test in primates, comes from the blogger at Serious Monkey Business. Follow her on twitter: @SrsMonkeyBiz. I have a confession: one of my favorite things [...]

What is culture? One simple definition might be: a distinctive behavior shared by two or more individuals, which persists over time, and that ignorant individuals acquire through socially-aided learning. There are at least four different ways to learn a particular behavior or problem-solving strategy. That is to say, there are four different ways to learn. [...]