Why humans may have more in common with chimps than we thought

What can humans learn about ourselves from studying chimpanzees? Primatologist Frans de Waal has spent almost three decades studying the behavior and intelligence of chimpanzees. Now, he’s focused on their emotional lives–and he’s found primates and people aren’t so different in how they react to circumstances and each other. Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour talks…

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Watch the world’s smallest bear copy its friends’ facial expressions

Humans are master impersonators—even infants can mimic the facial expressions of their friends and parents. Other socially sophisticated primates can copy others’ faces during play, with toothy grins bouncing from one gorilla or orangutan to the next. Now, scientists have captured video of the world’s smallest bear doing the same thing, the first time that…

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Jan van Hooff visits chimpanzee “Mama”, 59 yrs old and very sick. Emotional meeting

Can we recognize emotions amongst other species? Can they recognize ours? If our emotional recognition skills expand to other species besides humans, that tells us a great deal about the universality and evolutionary basis of our expressions, including our basic emotions. In this amazing video, Dr. Jan van Hooff visits an elderly chimpanzee, Mama, whom…

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