Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

A BORNEO ORANGUTAN

Poaching and deforestation in the tropics are imperiling dozens of humans’ primate relations, with nearly a third of the 394 known species of apes, monkeys, lemurs and other groups listed as threatened with extinction in a new report from the World Conservation Union.

The report focuses on the plight of the 25 most endangered species, which live scattered around the tropics, mainly in areas of Asia and Africa. “You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium, that’s how few of them remain on earth today,” said Russell A. Mittermeier, the chairman of the panel of primate experts who wrote the report and the president of Conservation International.

There have been improvements in a few areas. Brazil dropped from the list of places with the most imperiled primates for the first time since the periodic assessments began in 2000. But eight primates have been on all four reports issued since then, including the Sumatran orangutan and the Cross River gorilla of Cameroon and Nigeria.

The worst hot spots are in southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, and Madagascar, the report said.

-- ANDREW C. REVKIN

On our riverboat trip, the land on the northern, non-park side of the river was nearly completely clear-cut, and patches of the supposedly protected park were razed as well. Biruté Galdikas, the Jane Goodall of orangutans, who established the main research camp in Tanjung Puting (in southern Borneo), in 1971, warned earlier this year that the orangutan is being driven to extinction.

This is, or should be, the business of human beings everywhere. We all know the causes—economic growth, population pressure, and, in central Africa, war. Tourism of the kind being encouraged in northern Rwanda and Borneo, and the activism of Western groups, simply won’t counteract these larger forces in developing countries. Deforestation was discussed last week at a meeting of forty environment ministers near Jakarta (Indonesia recently suggested that rich countries should pay poor countries not to cut down their forests), and it should be on the agenda when the United Nations holds its climate-change conference in December, in Bali, just across the Java Sea from the orangutans of Borneo.

The passing from the world of our closest relatives is not a political tragedy, like Burma; it is not a humanitarian nightmare, like Darfur; it is not an ideological disaster, like Iraq. All the same, it makes me unspeakably sad. How lonely to inhabit the planet without that familiar and alien gaze to keep us company. The fact that magnificent, uncomprehending, essentially helpless animals have to pay the ultimate price for our indifference seems at times like a worse crime than anything human beings do to one another. Our belated awakening to the distant prospect of collective suicide known as global warming might be the last chance to prevent the more imminent crime of kin-killing.

-- GEORGE PACKER

Some Neanderthals were probably redheads, a DNA study has shown.

A team reports in the journal Science that it extracted DNA from the remains of two Neanderthals and retrieved part of an important gene called MC1R.

In modern people, a change - or mutation - in this gene causes red hair, but, until now, no one knew what hair colour our extinct relatives had.

By analysing a version of the gene in Neanderthals, the scientists found that they also have sported fiery locks.

-- PAUL RINCON

The ancestors of humanity are often depicted as knuckle-draggers, making humans seem unusual in our family tree as "upright apes."

Controversial research now suggests the ancestors of humans and the other great apes might have actually walked upright too, making knuckle-walking chimpanzees and gorillas the exceptions and not the rule.

In other words, "the other great apes we see now, such as chimps or gorillas or orangutans, might have descended from human-like ancestors," researcher Aaron Filler, a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist and medical director at Cedars-Sinai Institute for Spinal Disorders in Los Angeles, told LiveScience.

Filler analyzed how the spine was assembled in more than 250 living and extinct mammalian species, with some bones dating up to 220 million years old.

He discovered a series of changes that suggest walking upright — and not with our knuckles — might actually have been the norm for the ancestors of today's great apes.

-- CHARLES Q. CHOI