Socially-learned cultural behaviour thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, scientists at the University of Liverpool have found.

A 55-year-old orangutan named Nonja, who was believed to be the oldest living orangutan in the world both in captivity and the wild, has died at the Miami MetroZoo in Miami, Florida.

When it comes to choosing a place to live, male chimpanzees in the wild don’t stray far from home, according to a new report in the Dec. 27th Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The researchers found that adult male chimps out on their own tend to follow in their mother’s footsteps, spending their days in the same familiar haunts where they grew up.

Researchers at Duke University have demonstrated that monkeys have the ability to perform mental addition. In fact, monkeys performed about as well as college students given the same test.

Researchers have found no evidence that chimpanzees in the wild undergo menopause in the way that women do, according to a new report published online on December 13th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. That’s despite the fact that reproduction tends to peter out at a similar age in both species.

How many times a day do you grab objects such as a pencil or a cup? We perform these tasks without thinking, however the motor planning necessary to grasp an object is quite complex.

Young chimpanzees have an “extraordinary” ability to remember numerals that is superior to that of human adults, researchers report in the December 4th issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and University of Maryland report that a new vaccine that protects monkeys against the avian influenza virus is now a candidate for clinical trial in humans. They report their findings in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Virology.

Mankind’s closest living relatives – the world’s apes, monkeys, lemurs and other primates – are under unprecedented threat from destruction of tropical forests, illegal wildlife trade and commercial bushmeat hunting, with 29 percent of all species in danger of going extinct, according to a new report by the Primate Specialist Group of IUCN’s Species Survival Commission (SSC) and the International Primatological Society (IPS), in collaboration with Conservation International (CI).

When it comes to their social behavior, people sometimes act like monkeys, or more specifically, like rhesus macaques, a type of monkey that shares with humans strong tendencies for nepotism and political maneuvering, according to research by Dario Maestripieri, an expert on primate behavior and an Associate Professor in Comparative Human Development and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago.

Even early in adulthood, aging begins to slow the mind's growth -- but it does not have to stop it altogether, suggests a Princeton University study on the brains of adult monkeys.

According to paleontologic and molecular studies, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) is the closer relative to the humans (Homo sapiens) and that both lineages had a common ancestor at 5 to 7 million years ago. Moreover, the human-chimp lineage split from that of the rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta) around 25 million years ago.