This is amazing. It takes my mind off whether or not Mitt Romney paid his taxes, shipped a bunch of jobs overseas or tied a dog to the roof of his car and chopped off all its hair. It even eclipses, in my mind, the Mars Rover, and the Mars Rover is a pretty cool thing indeed.
The Day Will Come
Partly, I guess, it’s just because I like baboons. and chimps. and orangutans. When I stumble across Animal Planet while surfing the channels and mixing my metaphors, I may keep going if it’s just another thing about sharks, or penguins, or wildebeests getting eaten by lions, but 5 seconds of great apes and I’m glued to the screen.
I know why. It’s their human like quality. Their family relationships, their jealousies, their rivalries, their ambitions and desires are so much like ours that you almost forget they are animals.
Sure, cats are cute but all of the anthropomorphized pictures of them on the internet are forced. They don’t really ride bicycles or play the piano. I love dogs, but I don’t kid myself that they have human like intelligence.
With the apes, I’m not so sure. They make tools. They make plans. They can’t speak but we’re almost to the point where we can communicate with them. And now, as we see in this video, they have domesticated the dog. Maybe not exactly in the way that humans do, I didn’t see any of the baboons in the video throwing a frisbee or walking the dog on a leash, but very much in the way our stone age ancestors probably kept dogs.
I think we need to keep a sharp eye on the great apes. It will not be long before they discover fire, and agriculture, and more sophisticated tools than a sharp stick to poke into an anthill. From there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to living in cities and holding elections.
I’m not sure. It could be we are just understanding them better and better. But I suspect they are evolving.
www.gurukalehuru.com 