![]() The Jane Goodall Institute UK noted that pet chimpanzees are destructive and too dangerous to be kept as part of the family, and that it is difficult to keep them stimulated and satisfied in a human environment. During attacks, chimps will target a person's face, hands, feet and genitals. Most of the time these are isolated and seemingly reckless attacks by individual chimps, but one chimpanzee in the 1990s killed seven children before he was killed by humans, National Geographic reported.Ĭaptive or pet chimpanzees attack people far more often than their wild kin, because they can lose their fear of people altogether. ![]() Chimps have also snatched and killed human babies. Chimpanzees typically direct their aggressive and sometimes predatory behavior toward children because the animals are more fearful of larger human adults, especially men, according to National Geographic. Chimpanzees may then take to stealing unprotected human food, such as crops, and in the process become more confident around humans.Ĭhimpanzees have attacked more than 20 people in the Western Region of Uganda over the past 20 years and killed at least three human infants since 2014, National Geographic reported in 2019. This usually happens when humans move into and destroy chimpanzee habitats, reducing their access to food. However, there have been recorded incidents of chimpanzees attacking and killing people. Wild chimpanzees are usually fearful of humans and will keep their distance. Even in high-mortality modern hunter-forager populations, human life expectancy at birth is still twice that of wild chimpanzees.(Image credit: Anup Shah via Getty Images) In spite of their genetic similarity to humans, chimpanzees and great apes have maximum lifespans that rarely exceed 50 years. "Drugs being developed to alter activities of apoE4 may also enhance lifespan of apoE4 carriers." "ApoeE may be a prototype for other genes that enabled the huge changes in human lifespan, as well as brain size, despite our very unape-like meat-rich diets," Finch said. Chimpanzees in captivity have unusually low levels of heart disease and Alzheimer-like changes during aging when compared to humans.įinch hypothesizes that the expression of ApoE4 in humans could be the result of the "antagonistic pleiotropy theory" of aging, in which genes selected to fight diseases in early life have adverse affects in later life. "The chimpanzee apoE functions more like the "good" apoE3, which contributes to low levels of heart disease and Alzheimer's," Finch said. ApoE4 carriers have higher totals of blood cholesterol, more oxidized blood lipids and higher rates of early onset coronary heart disease and Alzheimer's disease. However, another expression of apolipoprotein E in humans - the minor allele, apoE4 - can increase the risk of heart disease and Alzheimer's disease by several-fold, Finch explained. "Over time, ingestion of red meat, particularly raw meat infected with parasites in the era before cooking, stimulates chronic inflammation that leads to some of the common diseases of aging," Finch said. ApoE3 is unique to humans and is a variant of the cholesterol transporting gene, apolipoprotein E, which regulates inflammation and many aspects of aging in the brain and arteries. Specifically, humans have evolved what Finch calls "a meat-adaptive gene" that has increased the human lifespan by regulating the effects of meat-rich diets. Kieschnick Professor in the Neurobiology of Aging in the USC Davis School of Gerontology, explains that slight differences in DNA sequencing in humans have enabled us to better respond to infection and inflammation, the leading cause of mortality in wild chimpanzees and in early human populations with limited access to modern medicine. ![]() Comparing the life spans of humans with other primates, Caleb Finch, ARCO & William F. ![]()
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