Apes are Old World anthropoid mammals, more specifically a clade of tailless catarrhine primates, belonging to the biological superfamily Hominoidea. The apes are native to Africa and South-east Asia. Apes are the largest primates and the orangutan, an ape, is the largest living arboreal animal. Hominoids (except for humans) are traditionally forest dwellers, although chimpanzees may range into savanna, and the extinct australopithecines were likely also savanna inhabitants, inferred from their morphology. Humans inhabit almost every terrestrial habitat.
The heyday of apes with the Miocene Epoch with its abundant rainforests; as the jungles shrank, the number of ape species plummeted.
Facts[]
Apes differ from monkeys in several ways:
- Apes are larger and generally heavier than monkeys;
- Apes are tailless, while monkeys usually have tails, sometimes quite long;
- Apes are bipedal, monkeys - quadrupedal;
- The teeth and jaw structure is different.
In Walking with... series[]
Walking with Beasts[]
Next of Kin[]
This episode follows the adventures of a group of Australopithecus, as they become evicted by a larger, more powerful troup and have to deal with hormone-crazy Deinotherium and the predations of Dinofelis.
Walking with Cavemen[]
First Ancestors[]
This episode also deals with Australopithecus. It depicts them as basic apes, just as Next of Kin from WWB does, but unlike them, Australopithecus is able to work bipedaly all the time, putting them on the first step on the rode to humanity.
Blood Brothers[]
This episode featured Paranthropus boisei, one of the "side branches" of the ape family tree. Unlike the first human species that shared their environment, Paranthropus was too specialized to adapt when the climate changed, and died out during the Pliocene.
Savage Family[]
The last half of this episode featured Gigantopithecus, the "original King Kong". It was confronted by a group of Homo erectus and scared them away through its sheer size.
