Word: schaik
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...buzz of chain saws and those decomposing corpses were warnings that Van Schaik, and the orangutans he was studying, were running out of time. If these noble great apes were driven to extinction, as now seemed likely, that would mean more than the tragic passing of another of God's creatures, it would also mean losing some potential understanding of ourselves. For 25 years, the Duke University primatologist had been chasing orangutans through the swamps of Sumatra. Now he was starting to achieve startling new insights into some of our most fundamental questions: What made us men and not monkeys...
...conclusive proof, Van Schaik needed a control group of directly comparable orangutans living in the same ecological circumstances that still broke open the fruit and plucked out a few accessible seeds, wasting most of the nutrition. His own group, he knew, had a much higher degree of cooperation in daily tasks such as food sharing and grooming. If his theory was right, the higher sociability that allowed orangutans to teach one another how to more efficiently access the fat-rich fruit seeds provided them with a huge evolutionary advantage over their less friendly cousins. That same evolutionary encouragement of cooperation...
...Schaik, seeking to find that control group of orangutans to answer those great questions about men and monkeys that could only be answered here in the wild, crossed the Simpang-kiri river, persuading the illegal loggers to give him rides through unending kilometers of rotting stumps and splintered branches. He was just a tourist, he told them, but had they by any chance seen any neesia trees still upright? He finally hit pay dirt in August of 1999. "On our last trip in," the lanky Van Schaik recounts, "the loggers said, yes, there are a few crooked trees left that...
...cousins of their wild predecessors. "Orangutans are naturally the most intelligent of the great apes," says Willie Smits, a Dutch forester turned orangutan advocate. "They're so close to us, we can learn a huge amount about our own physiology, psychology and early origins." Smits talks enthusiastically of Van Schaik's research. The "spark" that enabled Van Schaik's particular group to use tools was a much higher level of sociability?sharing food, helping one another in tasks such as food collection?than is usual for orangutans. That in turn speaks volumes about how human cooperation was nurtured by natural...
...flash of triumph soon turned to ash. Soon after the momentous discovery, Van Schaik's friend of 20 years and chief collaborator, an Acehnese named Idrusman, was returning from Jakarta by bus one evening when anti-Jakarta fighters stopped the vehicle and singled out the non-Acehnese for execution. Idrusman made the mistake of speaking up for three Javanese colleagues with whom he was traveling. All four had their throats cut. Van Schaik abandoned his mission soon afterward. He now spends most of his time teaching at Duke University in North Carolina and has never been able to return...