Barbara King: If we look carefully at modern apes, we can look at a model for our past.
Barbara King is an anthropologist and ape expert at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. King studies apes both in the wild and in captivity, filming them to find subtle expressions of what she says are their emotions.
Barbara King: We look at, for example, difference in muscle tension, whether there’s a lot of tenseness in the body or a relaxed, loose-limb sort of gate, whether there are pursed lips, and we try to correlate that with states of aggression or relaxation.
King is examining how apes, particularly mother and infants, express their emotions most fully in social relationship.
Barbara King: I think that’s why I’m so drawn to studying mothers and infants and families, because their bonds are so clearly expressed in emotion. People who talk about humans as very unique in terms of our emotional meaning-making should take a look at the apes, because I think that they have quite a lot to tell us about our evolution – not so much about how we live life today – but how we became Homo sapiens as we are today.
King asserts that because humans share a common ancestor with apes, studying their emotions reveals how human emotions might have evolved.
Barbara King: The fact that we see this emotional expression, grief and empathy and joy and depression in apes in the wild and in captivity is so robust, gives us a suggestion that this happened as well in the past, and it was a platform for us. This was in place before we humans began to evolve.
Dr. King talked more about the scientific evidence for her findings that emotions in apes arise from social interactions.
Barbara King: The evidence is just really just spending a lot of time with apes, watching them and filming them. So in other words, what might seem fairly subtle to a person who hasn’t spent a lot of time hanging around with apes is really very striking to primatologists.
King says scientists need to observe ape emotions in the wild as well as in captiviity.
Barbara King: I have done a lot of reading and talking with people who study apes in the wild, from Jane Goodall to Christophe Boesch, and others, and we do see these very same types of emotional expressions. Because it’s so robust and because of Darwin’s insight about our common descent, we know that this must have been a platform. This was in place before we humans began to evolve. As a result, I think that it tells us a place to start looking and asking questions about our human evolution over the last six million years when we evolved away from the apes.
EarthSky asked Dr. King to describe what an ape emotion is.
Barbara King: For example, there was a female killed by a leopard, the entire group surrounded this dead body. And the alpha male of the group allowed certain infants and individuals to come close, most particularly the dead ones brother. He sat at the body. He expressed what can only be called grief by pulling on her hand, trying to find out what had happened to the sister that he apparently had deep love for. We look at that and find similar examples in captivity. Here in Chicago, at the Brookfield Zoo, an adult female gorilla died, and the group allowed the group to come and grieve at the body. And so what you see is that depressed posture, that sorrowful pulling on the body that, they don’t cry, they don’t do exactly what we do, but the entire sort of gestalt is really of some sort of sorrow coming out. And that’s a dramatic example.
I dare anyone to say that mankind came from apes. We were created in God’s image not monkeys. The Holy Bible is the only truth that I need or want. You can say that you came from an ape, but that offends me. I did not evolve from monkeys. When something supposedly evolves, by definition it should be changed into something else. Therefore, if man came from apes, then my question is this. Why are there still apes if man came from them? The statement that mankind evolved from apes doesn\’t make any sense. There would not be any apes if mankind evolved from them. Stop denying what God has created. He created EVERYTHING in existence, including monkeys and apes, but HE created MANkind in HIS IMAGE. Scientists should stop putting CRAP into books and papers and read the Book of truth (Holy Bible). In the beginning God created …………. The truth starts in Genesis and ends in Revelations. Use the intelligence God gave you instead of the ignorance satan has given you.
We did not evolve from chimps, We evolved from a COMMON ancestor with them.
Robert,
If you have an education beyond high school, I am concerned about which university you obtained your degree from. The bible is great literature, I suppose, however, it is a sad state of affairs if ALL the world lived according to it. It would be as if we lived according to any other book of tales.
We are all free to believe what we want, and you say “The Holy Bible is the only truth that I need or want”, well that is great, for YOU, but others with some critical thinking skills will disagree with you…sorry about that.
Satan is correct, we evolved from a COMMON ancestor!
Robert,
Your saying that the bible is the only truth you want and need. Okay that’s fine, so why are you writing on here as if everyone is suppose to believe what you believe. And to answer your question my friend:
Why are there still monkeys if we came from them?
Evolution is a gradual process that takes million and millions of years to manefest a being such as ourselves.
Monkeys aren’t just going to run out of a jungle and look exactly like us. Through generations of successful individual is how monkeys have evovled into humans.
Also, an individual will only need to evolve depending on factors such as weather, predotors,prey, and environment. Meaning that monkeys of whatever other of our common ancestor you wish to say we have not evolved from, are at an evolutionary stable state and have evolved to survive in there current environment.
Sorry to say but we do not need to exist. All life cares about is that we successfully reproduce, leaving individuals that will do the same and continue that until who knows when.
And who knows maybe one day (millions and millions of years) the human could fly.
Now the only way that that is possible is if our enviroments demands that we have wings to survive and (once again) reproduce.
But it will happen only and I emphasis only! If our environment demands it.
Each generation that has a exseccive amount of skin in the underpit area will glide or be wind risistent and he will survive and reproduce. His lineage will keep spreading genes that manefest individuals with flabby arms. Through mutational means, that flab will become bigger and bigger through the process of natural selection.
Natural Selection:
The process inwhich individual and the genes that create a specific trait, will be favored by evolution as long as it is helping the individual survive.
You see we can believe what we want but because the process of evolution has bulid our minds to not imagin time spans beyond our own (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years etc.) Some of us can not consider evolution as a plausible explanation of life because that process has occured million and million and millions of years ago (and still happening).
We want to say god created us because the elucidation of evolution in hard and we tend to go with what’s clear cut and answer question (like why do we exist?) with answers that require no justification and just be done with it.
Believe what you want.