![]() ![]() ![]() Iceland was the first major UK supermarket to pledge not to use palm oil in its own-brand products. The future of the remaining primate population in the wild is at threat from widespread deforestation as a result of palm oil farming.Įarlier this year, a Christmas TV advert for superstore chain Iceland that depicted a baby orangutan’s forest home being destroyed was banned for being too political. Orangutans were once found across Southeast Asia but today are confined to rainforests on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Pony was finally rescued in 2003 and now lives with seven other orangutans at Borneo’s Nyaru Menteng Rehabilitation Centre. They wanted people coming in - in this case, men from the fields - and spending their money,” she explained. The whole village was not willing to let her go. “Pony was a cash cow and she earned that village a lot of money. The apes are sold for up to £10,000 on the black market and even on social media sites.Ĭharity boss Desilets told the Daily Mirror that rescuing Pony had been difficult, because of resistance from local people in the village where she was held. "If it was somehow beneficial for humans in our ancestral environment to have white sclera, natural selection could have acted on developmental patterns already in place in our ape ancestors.Pony is one of many orangutans illegally traded throughout Asia. Which are those species? What do they have in common? Our finding provides a potential mechanism for how white sclera could have evolved in humans," Sandel said. ![]() These are their stories, offering heartbreaking, moving, and. As chimpanzees are rescued from laboratories, their stories can finally be told by the voices of former laboratory attendants or current sanctuary caregivers who are part of their rehabilitation. "More species than previously thought have white sclera. Meet some of the fantastic chimpanzees that inspire many. The study, which included researchers from Arizona State University, Tufts University, University of Michigan and Yale University, could eventually help explain how the human eye developed into its present-day form. The team also looked at sclera color in 70 species of zoo animals and found that 19 of these had at least one individual with white sclera. Just like in humans, there is a lot of variation between individuals and perhaps populations of chimpanzees, which may get overlooked if we only consider a small sample." "This is the first study to look at such a large sample of wild, individually identified chimpanzees, made possible by the sheer numbers at Ngogo, along with Kevin Lee's skilled and prolific photography. "The fact that chimpanzees supposedly have uniformly dark sclera has been used as evidence to support the narrative that they are more competitive than cooperative," said Isabelle Clark, a UT Austin doctoral candidate and co-first author of the paper. This new study used a larger sample size than previous research, to which the authors attribute their ability to observe so much variation in sclera color. Recent studies reported white sclera in other primates but failed to find significant prevalence in chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives. "This idea became so ingrained that some scientists overlooked obvious exceptions to this rule." They began theorizing how unique aspects of our cognition, like our ability to cooperate and communicate, were made possible by our contrasting eyes," said Aaron Sandel, assistant professor of anthropology at UT Austin and one of the authors of the study. "Psychologists interested in human evolution took that finding and ran with it. Scientists have long hypothesized that humans' white sclera facilitated the evolution of our complex social communication and tended to view instances of lighter sclera in other species as anomalous. In most nonhuman animals, sclera are dark, making it difficult to discern where individuals are looking. In chimps with dark sclera, 75% exhibited pale irises, which also created contrast that made it easier to observe the direction of the animals' gaze. Light and white sclera were most common in infants under 1½ years old and often darkened as the animals aged. The researchers assessed sclera color in animals as young as 1 month to as old as 68 years and found that 15% of chimpanzees in the sample had white sclera, and an additional 41% had some other form of lighter sclera, such as tan or brown sclera, or sclera with patches of lighter color. The study, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, analyzed more than 1,000 photographs of 230 individual wild chimpanzees living at Ngogo, a habitat in Kibale National Park in Uganda. ![]()
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