Great apes share salutations, like humans | Hacker News Reader

Great apes share salutations, like humans

edition.cnn.com

14 pointsTrueJane5 comments

> Just like people, some great apes don't leave each other hanging

Um actually: Humans are great apes.

> The current, 21st-century meaning of "hominid" includes all the great apes including humans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae

Why is this "article" upvoted here? It's just a collection of random factoids about totally unrelated topics all under a single heading that's the equivalent of "some dogs bark like other dogs".

>factoids about totally unrelated topics all under a single heading that's the equivalent of "some dogs bark like other dogs".

that's a bit disingenious. if it were "dogs great other dogs with a hand gestures similar to humans", we'd have an interesting conversation.

>Why is this "article" upvoted here?

the fact that other animals give handshakes/fitbumps/whatever in an acknowledgement/recognizition of each other is interesting to other people than you. people find things interesting and submit it to this site. other people see it as interesting too and upvote it. now that you know how HN works...

I didn't say none of the topics weren't potentially interesting, although I suppose I don't find it that interesting that the other apes are indeed similar to us along some vector. And yes, the title, as written, is similar to what I wrote because humans are great apes. So it's not really surprising in the least. Also, there's no link to any further resources, the study itself, the researchers involved, or any further detail. So like I said, it's just random factoids. They state it and then move on to the next thing.

Although now I see there's a link to a more dedicated article. I didn't click on it at first because it's an inane sentence that I thought was a sort of ad clickbait: "But can you guess which ape greeting is more popular: hello or goodbye?" That should be linked instead.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/20/world/apes-social-interaction...

That article is moderately more well written, but it's still full of biases and assumptions, even from the scientists, that humans are the only animals with complex "coming and going" communication. Primates are not the only complex societies on Earth. Elephants and whales, for example, have very deep social bonds and complex relationships that we barely understand.

>Although now I see there's a link to a more dedicated article.

Lots of media sites do this where they have the TL;DR versions of their stories for those that have never actually read a newspaper and get their news from "feeds" as they scroll by. It seems like they are trying to reach people with short attention spans, so it's a bullet list of points extracted from a more indepth article. I imagine greybeard editors submitting full articles, and then 20something YOLOs creating the bullet lists.

>Primates are not the only complex societies on Earth. Elephants and whales, for example, have very deep social bonds and complex relationships that we barely understand.

I've read things in the past about the social behaviors of elephants, and we know whales and porpoise have pods for community/social activities.

Post some links to things you think are interesting in this area, and what as fellow HN readers upvote showing common interest as well. Sharing is caring

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