Here’s definitive proof that man was descended from monkeys:
Would you pay to see a monkey’s backside? I hope not. Monkeys will, and I guess that’s okay, though it sounds awfully close to the sort of thing that lands guys in jail here in the human realm.
A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey’s bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.
So THAT’S why there were all those copies of Playmonkey near the cages in the San Diego Zoo. More from Live Science’s website:
The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that’s like you or me buying People magazine.
The research, which will be detailed in the March issue of Current Biology, gets more interesting.
The scientists actually had to pay these guys, in the form of extra juice, to get them to look at images of lower-ranking monkeys.
And one monkey was heard saying as he looked at a photo: "I wouldn’t throw HER out of my cage…"
Curiously, the monkeys in the test hadn’t had any direct physical contact with the monkeys in the photos, so they didn’t have personal experience with who was hot and who was not.
"So, somehow, they are getting this information by observation — by seeing other individuals interact," said Michael Platt of the Duke University Medical Center.
Next, Platt and his colleagues want to see how people will perform in a similar experiment.
Well, I DO think I know some people who might get excited by pictures of monkeys… But we digress:
"At the moment, it’s only a tantalizing possibility, but we believe that similar processes are at work in these monkeys and in people," Platt said. "After all, the same kinds of social conditions have been important in primate evolution for both nonhuman primates and humans. So, in further experiments, we also want to try to establish in the same way how people attribute value to acquiring visual information about other individuals."
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.