Anthropology

Survival of the fittest is a simple reality in the game of life. Successful play necessarily requires a degree of selfishness, but across the animal kingdom species have evolved social behaviors. Why? Do they enhance survival?

“Many of us are really fascinated with the wide spectrum of social behavior we see across the diversity of animal taxa,” said Janis Dickinson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

A mysterious group of apes found in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa has scientists and conservationist scratching their heads. The apes nest on the ground like gorillas but have a diet and features characteristic of chimpanzees.

The apes are most likely a group of giant chimpanzees that display gorilla-like behavior. A far more remote possibility is that they represent a new subspecies of great ape. Researchers plan to return to the region later this month to collect more clues to help resolve the mystery.

Genetic markers commonly found in modern humans all over the world could be evidence that our earliest ancestors were cannibals, according to new research. Scientists suggest that even today many of us carry a gene that evolved as protection against brain diseases that can be spread by eating human flesh.

East of the Andes Mountains, deep in the Amazon River Basin in the southeastern region of Peru known as Madre de Dios, loggers congregate in the village of Monte Salvado. The loggers come from throughout the region to Madre de Dios to extract mahogany from the forests.

Close to the village of Monte Salvado, across the Las Piedras River, lies a newly-created reserve for indigenous people. Anthropologists believe these indigenous people are living in voluntary isolation from the rest of the world. Though they may know the outside world exists, they want nothing to do with it.

Every few years a dinosaur leaps from the signature yellow border of National Geographic Magazine and captures the fascination of readers. This month a skull of Tyrannosaurus rex shatters a bone of its prey—another dinosaur.

Cool, but is it realistic? Is that picture with T. rex’s teeth glistening with the blood of the dinosaur it just devoured a scientifically accurate interpretation of dinnertime 75 million years ago?

In April 2002, the government of Peru set aside more than 2 million acres (809,400 hectares) of remote jungle in the Amazon River Basin for the protection of indigenous people who live isolated from the outside world.

In theory, the reserve allows the Yora, Yine, and Amahuaca peoples to live as they have for thousands of years. They are believed to be migratory groups who survive by collecting seasonal resources, such as turtle eggs from exposed riverbanks in the dry season and Brazil nuts from trees in the forest in the rainy season.

No one knows precisely how many people live in isolation from the industrial-technological world. Many of these people, perhaps thousands, are believed to thrive in the remote stretches of the Amazon River Basin of South America. Anthropologists and indigenous rights groups say evidence for the existence of these remote tribes is heard in stories of contact with other indigenous groups, deduced from abandoned dwellings, and seen by developers planning to extract resources from the forests.