Prehistoric giant Gigantopithecus apes were orangutan relatives

This 2017 video says about itself:

What Happened to the World’s Greatest Ape?

Probably twice the size of a modern gorilla, Gigantopithecus is the greatest great-ape that ever was. And for us fellow primates, there are some lessons to be learned in how it lived, and why it disappeared.

By Bruce Bower, 13 November 2019:

A tooth fossil shows Gigantopithecus’ close ties to modern orangutans

Proteins help clarify how the giant ancient ape evolved

An ancient ape that was larger than a full-grown male gorilla has now revealed molecular clues to its evolutionary roots.

Proteins extracted from a roughly 1.9-million-year-old tooth of the aptly named Gigantopithecus blacki peg it as a close relative of modern orangutans and their direct ancestors, say bioarchaeologist Frido Welker of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues.

Protein comparisons among living and fossil apes suggest that Gigantopithecus and orangutan forerunners diverged from a common ancestor between around 10 million and 12 million years ago, Welker’s group reports November 13 in Nature.

Since it was first described in 1935, based on a molar purchased from a traditional Chinese drugstore in Hong Kong, G. blacki has stimulated debate over its evolutionary links to other ancient apes. Almost 2,000 isolated teeth and four partial jaws of G. blacki have since been found in southern China and nearby parts of Southeast Asia. G. blacki fossils date from around 2 million to almost 300,000 years ago. The sizes of individual teeth and jaws indicate that G. blacki weighed between 200 and 300 kilograms.

Proteins preserve better in teeth and bones than DNA does, but both molecular forms break down quickly in hot, humid settings. “We were surprised to find any proteins this old at all, especially in a fossil from a subtropical environment,” Welker says. Proteins consisting of chains of amino acids can be used to sort out living and fossil species of various animals, including hominids (SN: 5/1/19).

Researchers generally regard G. blacki as an orangutan relative that evolved to live in forests and eat fruits, leaves, stems and possibly tubers. But that assumption has rested on thin evidence, says biological anthropologist Terry Harrison of New York University.

“This new [protein] analysis provides the first compelling evidence that Gigantopithecus was more closely related to the orangutan than to any other ape,” Harrison says.

Welker’s team retrieved amino acid sequences from six proteins in a G. blacki molar previously found in southern China’s Chuifeng Cave. Five of those proteins are commonly found in living chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and humans, enabling comparisons of accumulated differences in the amino acid arrangements between G. blacki and those five present-day primates. Orangutans displayed the fewest protein disparities with G. blacki, signaling a particularly close evolutionary link between living red apes and the ancient Asian ape. Using those protein comparisons, the age of the G. blacki tooth and previous estimates of when various living apes diverged from common ancestors, Welker’s group calculated the timing of a common ancestor for orangutans and G. blacki.

The sixth protein has been linked to a process by which minerals are produced to harden bones and teeth. That protein may have contributed to the formation of especially thick tooth enamel in G. blacki, the researchers speculate.

No attempt was made to remove DNA from the ancient ape tooth. Even in colder regions than southern China, only much younger fossils have yielded DNA (SN: 3/14/16).

Ancient proteins from other Asian fossil apes dating to between around 12 million and 6 million years ago are needed to further clarify the evolutionary position of G. blacki, says paleoanthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Ciochon suspects that Indopithecus giganteus, a fossil ape that inhabited what’s now northern India and Pakistan during that period, was a potential ancestor of G. blacki.

Protein analyses of fossil orangutans that lived in Southeast Asia at the same time as G. blacki may also help untangle how and why red apes died out in China after approximately 126,000 years ago, but still live on two Indonesian islands, Ciochon says. Such research could provide insights into how best to save endangered orangutans today (SN: 2/15/18).

Astronomers help counting orangutans

This 9 April 2019 video says about itself:

How to count orangutans | WWF from the field

Borneo is home to the critically endangered Orangutan. With population numbers around 100,000 there are huge conservation efforts being made to combat their two main threats; forest loss and hunting.

Traditionally, orangutan numbers are estimated by counting their nests from the ground, but this can be costly, and very time consuming. Our collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University tested how effective new thermal imaging drone technology would be to count the critically endangered orangutan.

Read more here.

From the British Ecological Society:

Astro-ecology: Counting orangutans using star-spotting technology

A collaboration between astrophysicists, conservationists and ecologists aims to save rare and endangered animals

April 9, 2019

A ground-breaking scientific collaboration is harnessing technology used to study the luminosity of stars, to carry out detailed monitoring of orangutan populations in Borneo. Liverpool John Moores University, WWF and HUTAN came together to examine better ways of detecting the great apes in the Bornean forest canopy, by using drones fitted with thermal-imaging cameras.

Orangutans, like all great apes, build a sleeping nest in trees. Traditionally orangutan numbers are estimated by counting these nests from the ground. However, this method is costly and time consuming due to the large areas that need to be surveyed.

Drones can cover large areas of difficult ground quickly and monitor endangered wildlife from above. The addition of thermal-imaging cameras has even more benefits, as a new study shows: They can detect difficult to find animals at any time of day or night because of their heat signatures. The field team conducted 28 flights at two sites over six days and successfully spotted 41 orangutans from the air, all of which were confirmed by ground observers.

“All orangutan species are critically endangered and monitoring their numbers is crucial for their conservation,” said Professor Serge Wich, Liverpool John Moores University’s expert in primate behavioural ecology.

By combining drone technology with thermal-imaging cameras, which are usually used by astronomers, researchers were able to spot and classify the animals’ heat signatures. To distinguish the primates from their surroundings, they performed flights before 9 a.m. or after 7 p.m. local time.

Dr Claire Burke, an astro-ecologist at the university, who will present the findings at the ‘Unifying Tropical Ecology’ conference in Edinburgh today said:

“We tested the technology on orangutans in the dense tropical rainforest of Sabah in Malaysia. In thermal images, animals shine in a similar way to stars and galaxies, so we used techniques from astronomy to detect and distinguish them. We were not sure at all whether this would work, but with the thermal-infrared camera we could see the orangutans quite clearly because of their body heat, even during fog or at night.”

Dr Burke added:

“The biggest difficulties occur when the temperature of the ground is very similar to that of the animal we are trying to detect, so the images from morning or evening flights are more reliable. Absolute surface temperatures cannot be used to differentiate species as animal body temperatures change with that of their environment.”

This innovative technology could potentially be used to understand and monitor population numbers of orangutans or other endangered primate species.

Nicola Loweth, Asian Programme Manager at WWF, who was on the Bornean study said:

“As ever more species are decimated, due to human activity such as deforestation, we must embrace and scale up innovative approaches to monitoring wildlife populations, to better protect them for generations to come.

Our collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University to test the feasibility of thermal-imaging and drone technology to monitor orangutan populations in Sabah has proven promising and could have a wide range of applications, benefiting wildlife conservation as a whole.”

The team also spotted a troop of proboscis monkeys during the field trial, which they were able to distinguish from orangutans based on their smaller size. Besides that, proboscis monkeys are generally found in groups, whereas orangutans tend to be solitary or in pairs. Pygmy elephants were also captured on a night-time forage through an oil palm plantation.

The astro-ecologists are now developing a machine learning algorithm to tell animal species apart, based on their unique thermal fingerprint.

“In the future, we hope to be able to track, distinguish and monitor large numbers of different species of animals in real time, all around the globe, so that this technology can be used to make a real impact on conservation and stop poaching before it happens,” Dr Burke concluded.

The group previously tested the technology with spider monkeys in Mexico and riverine rabbits in South Africa and will soon be embarking on a field study with the Lac Alaotra bamboo lemurs in Madagascar.

The ‘Unifying Tropical Ecology’ conference in Edinburgh is organised by the British Ecological Society and Society for Tropical Ecology (gtö). There will be an entire session on the use of drones for animal and plant monitoring, including a presentation of the ‘Orangutan Nest Watch’ project where citizen scientists can help researchers look through images to spot orangutans and fig trees.

British transport union TSSA adopts orangutan to highlight palm oil dangers: here.

Orangutan tool use, new study

This 2009 videp is called Attenborough: Amazing DIY Orangutans | BBC Earth.

From the University of Vienna in Austria:

Orangutans make complex economic decisions about tool use

February 14, 2019

Flexible tool use is closely associated to higher mental processes such as the ability to plan actions. Now a group of cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists from the University of Vienna, the University of St Andrews and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna that included Isabelle Laumer and Josep Call, has studied tool related decision-making in a non-human primate species — the orangutan. They found that the apes carefully weighed their options: eat an immediately available food reward or wait and use a tool to obtain a better reward instead? To do so the apes considered the details such as differences in quality between the two food rewards and the functionality of the available tools in order to obtain a high quality food reward, even when multidimensional task components had to be assessed simultaneously.

Tool-use in animals is rare and often quickly rated as intelligent due to its striking nature. For instance, antlions throw small pebbles at potential prey, archer fish down prey by spitting water at them, and sea otters use stones to crack open shells. Nevertheless, most types of tool use are quite inflexible, typically applied to one situation and tightly controlled by processes that are a part of the respective animal’s inborn behavioural repertoire. In contrast, intelligent tool use requires the integration of multiple sources of information to flexibly adapt to quickly changing environmental conditions.

Orangutans share 97 percent of their DNA with us and are among the most intelligent and most endangered primates. They have human-like long-term memory, routinely use a variety of sophisticated tools in the wild and construct elaborate sleeping nests each night from foliage and branches. In their natural habitat, the evergreen rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra, orangutans have to consider several factors simultaneously, such as the predictability to find ripe fruits, the distance and reachability of food as well as the available tools to open extractable food sources. So far it was unknown how orangutans adapt their decisions when the use of a tool is involved and how many factors they can process at the same time in order to make profitable decisions.

Researchers from the University of Vienna, the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna and the University of St Andrews investigated for the first time how orangutans adapt their decisions when the use of a tool is involved and how many factors they can process at the same time in order to make profitable decisions at the Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Center in Leipzig.

The researchers used two different types of food items: Banana-pellets, which are the orangutans’ most favourite food type, and apple pieces which they like but disregard if banana-pellets are available. They could extract these items from two different apparatuses: an apparatus required probing with a stick tool to obtain the food item while the other required dropping a ball inside it. Each apparatus could only be operated with the respective tool. During testing, orang-utans were confronted with either one or two baited apparatus/es and a choice between two items (usually a food item and a tool). Once the apes had picked one item the other was immediately removed.

Orangutans flexibly adapted their decisions to different conditions: “If the apple piece (likeable food) or the banana-pellet (favourite food) was out of immediate reach inside the apparatus and the choice was between an immediate banana-pellet and a tool, they chose the food over the tool, even when the tool was functional for the respective apparatus,” explains Isabelle Laumer who conducted the experiment. “However, when the orangutans could choose between the apple-piece and a tool they chose the tool but only if it worked for the available apparatus: For example when the stick and the likeable food was available but the apes faced the ball-apparatus baited with the favourite banana-pellet, they chose the apple-piece over the non-functional tool. However when the stick-apparatus with the banana-pellet inside was available they chose the stick-tool over the immediate apple-piece,” she further explains. “In a final task, that required the orangutans to simultaneously focus on the two apparatuses, one baited with the banana-pellet and the other with the apple and the orangutans had to choose between the two tools they were still able to make profitable decisions by choosing the tool that enabled them to operate the apparatus with the favorite food.”

These results are similar to findings in Gofffin cockatoos that have been previously tested in the same task. “Similar to the apes, the cockatoos could overcome immediate impulses in favor of future gains even if this implied tool use. “The birds were confronted with the choice between a tool to retrieve an out-of-reach food item and an immediate reward. We found that they, similar to the apes, were highly sensible to the quality of the immediate relative to the out-of-reach reward at the same time as to whether the available tool would actually work with the task at hand,” explains Alice Auersperg, the head of the Goffin Lab in Austria. She continues: “Again, this suggests that similar cognitive abilities can evolve independently in distantly related species.”Nevertheless, the cockatoos did reach their limit at the very last task in which both apparatuses baited with both possible food qualities and both tools were available at the same time.”

“Optimality models suggest that orangutans should flexibly adapt their foraging decisions depending on the availability of high nutritional food sources, such as fruits,” says Josep Call from the University of St Andrews. “Our study shows that orangutans can simultaneously consider multi-dimensional task components in order to maximize their gains and it is very likely that we haven´t even reached the full extent of their information processing capabilities.”

“According to a 2007 survey by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) orangutans will be extinct in the wild within two decades if current deforestation trends continue,” says Isabelle Laumer. “Habitat loss due to extensive palm-oil production is the major threat. Unfortunately palm oil is still the most widely used vegetable oil in the world. As long as there is a demand for palm oil and we keep buying products that contain palm oil, more and more of the rainforest will be destroyed. Each of us can positively impact the survival of these extraordinary animals by making purchase decisions that may appear small, but that can collectively make a huge impact on our planet.”

Freed blonde orangutan girl Alba doing well

This 21 December 2018 video from Borneo in Indonesia says about itself:

Update on Alba’s Reintroduction

[Albino blonde orangutan girl] Alba [freed recently after reconvalescence] is doing very well, and has adapted quickly to her new home with friend Kika! Our PRM team has followed Alba since her return, waking at 3 a.m. before she rises to track her progress. Don’t worry, we will keep an eye on Alba and her pal.

Read more here.

Blonde orangutan Alba freed in Borneo

This 17 December 2018 video from Indonesia says about itself:

The World’s Only Albino Orangutan – Alba

Do you remember when Alba first came to our rescue centre? Post this emoji «🙌» in the comment section if you participated in suggesting a name for her!

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Albino orangutan Alba will be freed today in a national park in the Indonesian part of Borneo island. The animal was found by villagers in May last year and kept in a cage.

Conservationists found the very malnourished and dehydrated female and took her along. From all over the world there were suggestions for a name for the orangutan. Eventually it became Alba, which means white in Latin and dawn in Spanish.

Recently, the animal has strengthened. The female has also shown that she can climb trees effortlessly. According to experts, she is therefore ready for a return to the wild.

Today Alba is released together with a normally coloured congener. They will be monitored in the national park.

Orangutan language, new research

This 14 November 2018 video says about itself:

Orangutans are the only great apes—besides humans—to ‘talk’ about the past

New finding may shed light on the evolution of language

Read more here.

British fat cats’ anti-orangutan censorship

This 2018 Greenpeace video from Britain about a human girl and an orangutan girl says about itself:

Rang-tan: the story of dirty palm oil

Sign the petition and tell big brands to stop using palm oil from forest destroyers: here.

Rang-tan’s forest home is being destroyed to clear the way for palm oil – an ingredient used to make products for brands like Unilever, Mondelez and Nestlé.

If we don’t act, more precious habitats will be ruined; Indigenous Peoples could lose their homes, and Rang-tan and her species could be lost forever.

There’s a Rang-tan in my bedroom and I don’t know what to do.
She plays with all my teddies and keeps borrowing my shoe.
She destroys all of my house plants and she keeps on shouting ‘oo’.
She throws away my chocolate and she howls at my shampoo.

There’s a Rang-tan in my bedroom and I don’t want her to stay,
So I told the naughty Rang-tan that she had to go away.
Oh, Rang-tan in my bedroom, just before you go,
Why were you in my bedroom? I really want to know.

There’s a human in my forest and I don’t know what to do.
He destroyed all of our trees for your food and your shampoo.
There’s a human in my forest and I don’t know what to do.
He took away my mother and I’m scared he’ll take me, too.

There are humans in my forest and I don’t know what to do.
They’re burning it for palm oil so I thought I’d stay with you.
Oh Rang-tan in my bedroom now I do know what to do.
I’ll fight to save your home and I’ll stop you feeling blue.

I’ll share your story far and wide so others can fight too.
Oh Rang-tan in my bedroom I swear it on the stars:
the future’s not yet written but I’ll make sure it’s ours.

Usually, censorship is against leftist and/or pro-peace organisations or blogs; not against big business.

However, here we have one of not so frequent cases where a big business advocates something positive … and then it gets censored! Not even capitalists are allowed to criticize capitalism.

By Lamiat Sabin in Britain:

Friday, November 9, 2018

Iceland’s Greenpeace Christmas advert ‘too political’ for TV

SUPERMARKET chain Iceland has had its Christmas advert banned from TV for being “too political” in highlighting the devastation of rainforests and orangutans as a result of palm oil production.

The animated ad originally produced by Greenpeace features a friendship between a girl and a baby orangutan called Rang-tan.

Rang-tan tells the girl about her home in the rainforest while the advert shows a digger ripping up trees.

“There’s a human in my forest and I don’t know what to do”, Rang-tan says. “He took away my mother and I’m scared he’ll take me too.”

The advert ends with the caption: “Dedicated to the 25 orangutans we lose every day.”

It comes as Iceland goes about removing palm oil from all of its own-label food by the end of the year.

The company said that more than 50 per cent of products in supermarkets use palm oil, and demand for it has led to millions of acres of rainforests in south-east Asia being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations.

Clearcast, the watchdog for adverts on Britain’s main commercial channels,

Clearcast is owned by six UK commercial broadcasters: ITV, ITV Breakfast, Channel 4, Channel Five, British Sky Broadcasting [partially owned by Rupert Murdoch] and Turner.

said it was concerned that Iceland’s commercial “doesn’t comply with the political rules.”

It added that Greenpeace had “not yet been able to demonstrate compliance in this area.”

The regulations do not apply online, where the video has been shared at least 60,000 times.

Meanwhile: 184,710.

Iceland managing director Richard Walker said: “Whilst our advert sadly never made it to TV screens, we are hopeful that consumers will take to social media to view the film, which raises awareness of an important global issue.”

Greenpeace said the commercial was not originally intended for TV, but neither they or Clearcast were able to immediately confirm whether it had been previously submitted for broadcast clearance.

If the Iceland ad would have promoted their palm oil containing, orangutan habitat destroying products as usually, then they would not have been censored by Rupert Murdoch and his pals.

Orangutans making tools, new study

This 2013 video says about itself:

A female orangutan is eating ants using a stick as a tool to dislodge the insects from a tree hole. The orangutan population of Suak Belimbing in South East Aceh is known to use tools to extract the nuts from the nesia fruit. This behavior is a sign of evolution in great apes like orangutans and chimpanzees.

The orangutans of Sumatra are threatened by lose of habitat and poaching.

From the University of Vienna in Austria:

Orangutans spontaneously bend straight wires into hooks to fish for food

November 8, 2018

Summary: Cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists have just studied hook tool making in a non-human primate species — the orangutan. To the researchers’ surprise the apes spontaneously manufactured hook tools out of straight wire within the very first trial and in a second task unbent curved wire to make a straight tool.

The bending of a hook into wire to fish for the handle of a basket is surprisingly challenging for young children under eight years of age. Now cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists from the University of Vienna, the University of St Andrews and the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna working with Isabelle Laumer and Alice Auersperg studied hook tool making for the first time in a non-human primate species — the orangutan.

More precisely: Sumatran orangutan.

To the researchers’ surprise the apes spontaneously manufactured hook tools out of straight wire within the very first trial and in a second task unbent curved wire to make a straight tool.

Human children are already proficient tool-users and tool-makers from an early age on. Nevertheless, when confronted with a task which required them to innovate a hooked tool out of a straight piece of wire in order to retrieve a basket from the bottom of a vertical tube, the job proved more challenging for children than one might think: Three to five-year-old children rarely succeed and even at the age of seven less than half of them were able to solve the task. Only at the age of eight the majority of children was able to innovate a hook-tool. Interestingly children of all tested age classes succeeded when given demonstrations on how to bend a hook and use it. Thus, although young children apparently understand what kind of tool is required and are skilled enough to make a functional tool, there seems to be a cognitive obstacle in innovating one.

Cognitive biologists and comparative psychologists have now tested for the first time a primate species in the hook-bending task. “We confronted the orangutans with a vertical tube containing a reward basket with a handle and a straight piece of wire. In a second task with a horizontal tube containing a reward at its centre and a piece of wire that was bent at 90°”, explains Isabelle Laumer who conducted the study at the Zoo Leipzig in Germany. “Retrieving the reward from the vertical tube thus required the orangutans to bent a hook into the wire to fish the basket out of the tube. The horizontal tube in turn required the apes to unbent the bent piece of wire in order to make it long enough to push the food out of the tube.”

Several orangutans mastered the hook bending task and the unbending task. Two orangutans even solved both tasks within the first minutes of the very first trial. “The orangutans mostly bent the hooks directly with their teeth and mouth while keeping the rest of the tool straight. Thereafter they immediately inserted it in correct orientation, hooked the handle and pulled the basket up”, she further explains.

Orangutans share 97% of their DNA with us and are among the most intelligent primates. They have human-like long-term memory, routinely use a variety of sophisticated tools in the wild and construct elaborate sleeping nests each night from foliage and branches. Today orangutans can only be found in the rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo. Like all four great ape species, orangutans are listed as critically endangered (IUCN, Red List). “Habitat loss due to extensive palm-oil production, illegal wildlife trade and poaching are the major threats. Palm oil is the most widely used vegetable oil in the world. As long as there is a demand for palm oil and consumers keep buying products that contain palm oil, the palm industry thrives. According to a 2007 survey by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) orangutans will be extinct in the wild within two decades if current deforestation trends continue”, says Isabelle Laumer.

“The hook-bending task has become a benchmark paradim to test tool innovation abilities in comparative psychology,” says Alice Auersperg from the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna. “Considering the speed of their hook innovation, it seems that they actively invented a solution to this problem rather than applying routined behaviours.”

“Finding this capacity in one of our closest relatives is astonishing. In human evolution hook tools appear relatively late. Fish hooks and harpoon-like, curved objects date back only approximately 16,000- 60,000 years. Although New Caledonian crows use hooks with regularity, there are a few observations of wild apes, such as chimpanzees and orangutans, that use previously detached branches to catch and retrieve out-of-reach branches for locomotion in the canopy. This branch-hauling tools might represents one of the earliest and simplest raking tools used and made by great apes and our ancestors”, says Josep Call of the University of St Andrews.

So why do younger children struggle with this task? “Follow-up studies showed that children’s difficulty with independently finding the solution cannot be explained by fixedness on unmodified tools, impulsivity nor by not being able to change the strategy. The hook bending task represents a complex problem, for which several unrewarded steps must be performed while keeping the final goal in mind”, explains Isabelle Laumer. “Interestingly, complex problem solving has been associated to certain areas of the medial prefrontal cortex, which mature later in the child development. This explanation, besides children´s strong reliance on social learning might explain their success at a later age.”

Orangutan evolution and humans

This November 2018 video is called Orangutans are the only great apes—besides humans—to ‘talk’ about the past.

A 2017 video used to say about itself:

Orangutans can explain the evolution of languages.

Anthropologists in England claimed that the orangutans‘ voices to kiss could be a window into how modern languages ​​are formed.

According to the theory of evolution, orangutans, the closest ape species to humans, can answer the question of how modern languages ​​are formed. Anthropologists working on the subject recorded and analyzed 5,000 orangutans‘ “kissing squeak”.

Adriano Reis e Lameira found that the orangutans shriveled their lips to make sounds similar to the silent letters at the end of their analysis. Lameira stated that each lip movement is equivalent to a different message, and that this behavior can give an explanation of how the first words are formed. Following the article published in Nature Human Behavior, “The human language has a complex and sophisticated structure, and people can transfer virtually any information they want through voices”, said Reis e Lameire. … “Simply put, we use the orangutans‘ voice behaviors as a time machine, and we try to understand what kind of voices are used by our ancestors in the process leading to the formation of vowels and consonants.”

From Cardiff University in Wales:

Orangutan: How 70,000 years of human interaction have shaped an icon of wild nature

June 27, 2018

The evolution of the orangutan has been more heavily influenced by humans than was previously thought, new research reveals.

Professor Mike Bruford, of Cardiff University, was part of the team of scientists shedding light on the development of the critically endangered species. Their findings offer new possibilities for orangutan conservation.

One of humans’ close[s]t living relatives, the orangutan has become a symbol of nature’s vulnerability in the face of human actions and an icon of rainforest conservation.

But in the research paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team argues this view overlooks how humans, over thousands of years, have shaped the orangutan known today.

Professor Bruford, of the Sustainable Places Research Institute and the School of Biosciences who is a co-author of the paper, said: “This research offers new hope for how we can save the orangutan from extinction.

“Our studies show that orangutans actually have a long history of adapting their behaviour to survive in different areas, even those that have been heavily impacted by humans. This means they can live in much more varied habitats than previously thought.

“There needs to be a multifaceted approach to conservation efforts that incorporates human-dominated landscapes, reduces hunting and increases habitat quality.”

It was often assumed that environmental factors like fruit availability were primarily responsible for most features of modern-day orangutans, such as the fact that they usually live at low densities and have a restricted geographic distribution.

But the study indicates the orangutan that existed before modern humans arrived in Southeast Asia 70,000 years ago may have been quite different.

Lead author Stephanie Spehar, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, said: “Our synthesis of fossil, archeological, genetic and behavioral evidence indicates that long-term interactions with humans shaped orangutans in some pretty profound ways.”

These creatures were once far more widespread and abundant, with orangutan teeth among the most common animal remains in deposits in China, Thailand and Vietnam. They weathered many environmental changes and may even have lived in a wider range of environments than their modern counterparts.

Today, the orangutan is only found on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra.

Studies of the species living in heavily human-impacted habitats, such as oil palm and forestry plantations, highlight that the apes can adapt to survive in such areas, at least in the short term.

It had always been assumed that orangutans were mostly arboreal, but camera traps in the forest showed they also walk extensively on the ground in some areas. The team is calling for these findings to be applied to conservation efforts immediately.

Professor Bruford added: “Although much effort has already been made to understand the endangered orangutan, this latest study shows that much work still needs to be done to ensure conservation strategies are as robust and wide-ranging as possible. Only then will we stand a fighting chance of preventing this incredibly important animal from being wiped out.”

World’s oldest Sumatran orangutan, RIP

This video from Perth Zoo in Australia says about itself:

Farewell to the Oldest Sumatran Orangutan in the World!

18 June 2018

Yesterday the Zoo family farewelled Puan, the oldest orangutan in the world, due to age related complications.

Puan was one of a kind, an individual to the end. She was a grand old lady who demanded respect and earned respect.

As the founder of our world-renowned breeding program her legacy is phenomenal with descendants living all over the world.

Rest in peace Puan, may you climb happily in the jungles of the sky.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

Her offspring have been placed in other zoos all over the world, some of them have been placed back in the wild.

Puan received an entry in the Guinness Book of Records in 2016 because of her old age. Adult animals of the endangered species are rarely older than 50 years in the wild.

Breeding program

According to the World Wildlife Fund, some 14,600 Sumatran orangutans live in the wild. The species is threatened by poaching and deforestation.

Perth Zoo has an extensive breeding program with the aim to place as many young animals as possible back in their original habitat.