Monday - March 31, 2008

Monkey Business in the UK

Funny stuff going on in the UK, interesting bits ... I don’t want to pull the rug out from under our UK posters ... but golly. Two monkey stories in one week?

Retired movie star Cheeta turns 76. Cheeta, the lovable chimpanzee side-kick from all those Johnny Weismuller Tarzan movies, is now the oldest living primate in captivity. And you thought the Hollywood lifestyle was bad for you!

It is 76 years since Cheeta the chimp was plucked from the African jungle to become a Hollywood star in the Tarzan movies. Yet incredibly, he is still going strong.

The oldest known living chimpanzee enjoys a leisurely retirement in California, where he enjoys painting, piano and strolling in the sunshine.

Not to mention writing his autobiography - or so we are told.

Me Cheeta, an account of his life in the limelight, is to be published in the autumn and extracts from it appear in next month’s Esquire magazine.
...
Although he was fond of smoking and drinking, both have been forbidden since he arrived more than a decade ago at the Cheeta Primate Foundation in the desert enclave of Palm Springs. He helps pay for his keep with his “Ape-stract” paintings which sell for £75 a time.

Esquire also jokes that he has made a small fortune working as a body double for actor Robin Williams.

Evidence has emerged that humans learned the medicinal properties of soil and plants from fellow primates.  When we look back at the history of medicine, we think of the clever people who have, over thousands of years, devised ingenious ways of allaying human suffering.  But to find the real fathers of the healing arts, we should look millions of years further back - to our hairy relatives.

Prof Michael Huffman, of Kyoto University, believes humans have long looked to other animals for medicinal wisdom.

In 1987, he happened to be watching a constipated chimpanzee called Chausiku in the dense rainforest of the Mahale mountains in western Tanzania.

Reaching for the shoot of a noxious tree that chimps would normally avoid, Chausiku peeled it and sucked its bitter pith. Within a day, her constipation was gone. It was the first time a scientist had seen a sick chimp select an unsavoury plant known by humans to have medicinal properties, and then recover.
...
Prof Huffman has found that nearly all of the ape remedies he has studied are also used by local people as medicine - echoing, he believes, the evolutionary origins of human medicine.

So, who is aping who?

self-medication is found in apes across Africa. This, says Prof Whiten, probably means “it is very ancient, culturally important and spread widely”.

Given that the common ancestor of chimpanzee and man lived six million years ago, the roots of medicine are indeed prehistoric.

Ok, I really should be making wisecracks here, but this is interesting. But don’t let me stop you from any monkey business you might come up with

Posted by Drew458     on 03/31/2008 at 08:13 PM   
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