Word: chimp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What can be done with Cheetah? Replace that nattering chimp with gorillas who are all too human. This is a film about parenting, about the pain and triumph of racial or social assimilation. Kala is a loving adoptive mother, her concern for the boy complicated by the loss of her own child and the knowledge that his difference, when he finally does understand it, may force him from her. To Kerchak, Tarzan is a threat: a wiser form of machismo. And to the brash young Terk (Rosie O'Donnell), Tarzan is just another playmate--weird...
...fact, there may have been an evolutionary advantage to sluttiness. The females of our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees and the bonobos, are not exactly paragons of sexual probity. A recent DNA study of chimp behavior in the Tai forest of Africa's Ivory Coast showed that despite the bullying of local males, the wily females were sneaking off so often that half their offspring turn out to be fathered by outsiders. Of bonobos, perhaps the less said the better, at least in a family magazine. These "pygmy chimps," as they are also known, share 98% of our genes...
...other chimpanzees kept at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico during the 1960s and '70s to study the effects of space travel--like Ham, the first primate in orbit--she never made it off the ground. Instead she did her duty as a breeder, a friendly, easily handled chimp mom who gave birth at least a dozen times before her untimely death...
...remained elusive to virus hunters like Alabama's Dr. Beatrice Hahn. Long on the trail of links between HIV and kindred simian viruses, she jumped at the chance to examine old tissue samples (stored, as it turns out, in a freezer at the National Cancer Institute) from the only chimp in the Air Force colony to have tested positive...
...researchers, this suggested that the chimp virus had mutated and crossed over to humans on at least three separate occasions, each time finding man a more congenial host than ape. The momentous leaps, Hahn speculates, could have occurred when hunters came in contact with infected blood while butchering chimps for food, a common practice in Africa. As it happens, the first documented case of AIDS goes back to 1959, when a man living in Kinshasa, just across the Congo River from Gabon, home of Marilyn's kin, died of the disease...