Thoughtful Monkey

Baboon actually. This year, The Atlantic compared similarities between these thoughtful animals and how Google’s search system works. 

“Google’s machine learning methods bear a familial resemblance to the baboon processing of language. 

After a mere six weeks of training, the baboons could tell an English word they’d never seen before (e.g. hope) from a non-English word scramble (e.g. tekl) 75 percent of the time, much greater than chance. But, of course, they couldn’t actually read the words and know what they meant… They did not even know what the symbols they were choosing meant, only that some selections led to food while others did not.”  Read more at The Atlantic. 

Baboons and knit-picking is serious business.

Did You Know? 

“During adulthood, dominance rank has different consequences for males and for females. For females, the effects of rank are subtle but pervasive. High ranking females can displace lower ranking females from food and water sources, can push them away and take their place in grooming episodes, and generally enjoy much more freedom to go where they want to go and do what they want to do within the group” (Amboseli Research Project through Princeton).

“Females prefer (other) high-ranking females as grooming partners and compete for the opportunity to groom them” (source). 

Check out the Random African Animals photo album at Explore.org. 

Monkey Monday?!

Have you met Lesula? She’s a cousin of the African Baboons above. Lesula is the “discovered” (or uncovered) newest species of monkey in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Her unusually large, round eyes are reminiscent of the Lesula’s other cousins - us. 

Check out the Guardian’s article on the 10 new mammals discovered in the past decade and see Lesula’s picture here.