Post Description

BBC Cousins

Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek sets off on a global adventure to meet our closest living relatives - monkeys, apes and other primates. 

1 of 3 The First Primates

In Rwanda, Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek finds herself grunting to a group of mountain gorillas for the first time. Accepted by these gentle giants, Charlotte finds herself the target for some laddish behaviour by two young black-back male gorillas. In the dry forests of Madagascar, Charlotte meets the smallest primate in the world, a pygmy mouse lemur that would fit in the palm of her hand. Apes and monkeys never got across to the island of Madagascar, and in their place some weird and wonderful primitive primates flourish here. 
Bamboo lemurs live off shoots of giant bamboo, which is heavily laced with cyanide. Golden bamboo lemurs consume what should be 12 times their lethal dose of cyanide every day and survive. 
In northern Madagascar, Charlotte tackles one of the hardest landscapes in the world, the limestone tsingy. Her reward is to meet some crowned lemurs that scale the vertical rock faces with apparent ease. Deep in the caves beneath she unravels the mystery of the giant extinct lemurs that were as large as humans. 
Madagascar's most famous residents are ring-tailed lemurs. The females are clearly in charge and with babies on their backs they lead the attack when there is conflict with other groups. Very few animals apart from humans gang up like this and go to war. It leaves no doubt that these are our long lost cousins.

2 of 3 The Monkeys
At 3,000 metres up in the Simien mountains of Ethiopia, Charlotte encounters gelada baboons that live in groups of up to 800 individuals. The large lion-like males are busy attending to theirharems and a lot of male posturing is going on. It looks fierce, but these are the teddy bears of the monkey world. 
In Central America, Charlotte catches the attention of some laid-back howler monkeys by howling at them. Charlotte can't climb like the monkeys, so to get up into the canopy she dons a hard hat and harness and hauls herself up to get a monkey's eye view of the world. Humans have the longest childhood of all animals, but young monkeys do stay with their parents for several years. In the remote mountains of central China, a baby golden monkey is the apple of everyone's eye. Like humans, older brothers and sisters want to hold the baby and play pass the parcel with it, until mum calls a halt to their game. 
Also in China, Tibetan macaques are serious muggers that line up along the precarious path to the temples and operate a stop and search policy on pilgrimsand tourists, grabbing food in exchange for a photo-opportunity. One 20-kilo macaque can cause a lot of damage, and when they gang up it's enough to start a riot. Every year, many people are bitten and some even fall off the cliff in a
blind panic. In a snowy valley in Japan, Charlotte is joined in a hot spring by a cheeky Japanese macaque. For a long time the Japanese have enjoyed bathing in the hot mountain springs, and back in the 1960s some young macaques joined them in the
water. Eventually they had their own monkey health spa built for them higher up the mountain. Here they happily dive-bomb and wallow in the steaming water for hours. The youngsters even make snow-balls around the pool.

3 of 3 The Apes

Bericht 2