Kyoto University’s Center for the Evolutionary Origins of Human Behavior has launched a memorial website for Ai, a chimpanzee known as a “genius” for her cognitive abilities, after she died at the age ...

Marilyn Monroe sang that “diamonds are a girl’s best friend”, but a new study suggests that a love of crystals is a universal ...

Observing how chimps interact with crystals may help us understand why our ancestors started collecting them thousands of ...

The study suggests that both humans and chimpanzees possess a “shared cognitive predisposition” for crystals. Whenever such a trait emerges as common between two related species, it’s likely that this ...

The crystal chimp study, published on Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, was an attempt to understand what about the shimmering minerals is so attractive to the apes’ closest cousins, ...

More than a century ago, the Chinese paleontologist and archaeologist Pei Wenzhong found an unusual trove in the same cave near Beijing where he found the skulls of the early hominin Peking Man. Along ...

Scientists in Spain investigated which characteristics of crystals may have made them so fascinating to our ancestors.

It’s at this point in our history that the first collection of crystals appears in the archaeological record. Discovered at ...

Primates of all stripes really love their crystals. Archeologists have found the shiny rocks at dig sites dating back as long ...

In experiment 1, the crystal was placed on a pedestal which had been installed months prior to the experiments, so it did not constitute a novelty for the chimpanzees.

Crystals have repeatedly been found at archaeological sites alongside Homo remains. Evidence shows that hominins have been collecting these stones for as long as 780,000 years. Yet, we know that our ...

Back from the brink. Under a microscope at Chester Zoo, UK, a greater Bermuda snail (Poecilozonites bermudensis) awaits its ...