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Apes: Humans
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Planet of the Apes - Highly evolved society of talking apes on the sci-fi adventure PLANET OF THE APES/CBS/1974. When a time-warping spaceship carrying astronauts Alan Virdon (Ron Harper) and Pete Burke (James Naughton) from the year 1988 landed on this futuristic landscape of A.D. 3085, a chimpanzee named Galen befriended and protected the astronauts from enslavement by his fellow creatures who saw "man" as an evil threat to their current world. He later fled with the earthmen after accidentally killing an ape leader who was trying to kill the astronauts. At this point the program became a futuristic version of THE FUGITIVE with a group of angry apes in hot pursuit espousing the sentiments "The only good human is a dead human." Galen (played by Roddy McDowall) spoke the English language and walked upright as did the rest of his simian kind (an atomic holocaust destroyed most of mankind but evolved the apes on planet Earth to a higher form of life). Other monkey character included Urko the ape (Mark Lenard), a military leader and Zaius (Booth Colman), an orangutan politician. The TV series is based on the novel Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle which spawned the motion picture Planet of the Apes (1968) starring Charlton Heston (on which the TV series is based), the sequels Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1969), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) as well as the animated Saturday morning cartoon RETURN TO THE PLANET OF THE APES/NBC/1975-76 and the remake motion picture Planet of the Apes (2001) starring Mark Wahlberg.
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Today’s apes are few in number and in kind. But between 22 million and 5.5 million years ago, a time known as the Miocene epoch, apes ruled the primate world. Up to 100 ape species ranged throughout the Old World, from France to China in Eurasia and from Kenya to Namibia in Africa. Out of this dazzling diversity, the comparatively limited number of apes and humans arose. Yet fossils of great apes - the large-bodied group represented today by chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans (gibbons and siamangs make up the so-called lesser apes) - have turned up only in western and central Europe, Greece, Turkey, South Asia and China. It is ... becoming clear that, by Darwin’s logic, Eurasia is more likely than Africa to have been the birthplace of the family that encompasses great apes and humans, the hominids.
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Because their vocal chords are different from those of humans, apes are unable to speak. Since the 1940s... numerous scientists have tried to determine whether meaningful communication between humans and apes might be possible through the use of a symbolic language. Their results have often seemed promising on the surface. One very famous gorilla named Koko, for example, seems to have learned how to “speak” with American Sign Language, but some scientists have hotly disputed the results of those studying Koko. Ask your students to use journal articles, magazines, news reports, textbooks, and the Internet to research Koko’s sign language communications—not only what the scientists involved with the project claim to have discovered, but also the criticisms of their methods and results. (One good place to start is www.gorilla.org.) When their research is complete, ask them to write a series of questions that would be able to determine whether Koko can actually understand sign language.
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BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES picks up where the first left off and revolves around a mystery surrounding the disapperance of taylor. At the same time astronaughts from earth crash land in the future and one survives to take up the quest for taylor. While the search goes on for taylor the apes in ape city are planning a military foray into the forbidden zone; a foray that will bring them face to face and into conflict with mentally superior humans who live in a dead city. BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES promises alot and delivers and is adventure on a grand scale. The only thing holding it back are awkward subplots where the humans worship a atom bomb and sing to it. The film handles the lack of charlton hestons involvement well and structured the story around that impedement. Out of ten stars this film gets eight.
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The apes, which include gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and gibbons, are much more like human beings than monkeys or lower primates are. They have the same basic body structure, possess a high level of intelligence and may exhibit similar behavior. Chimpanzees, humans' closest living relatives, use simple tools extensively and even have culture to some degree. Different chimpanzee social groups develop their own unique tendencies and behaviors, which may be in stark contrast to the behaviors of another group. Gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans exhibit extensive language capability as well, though they do not have the necessary physiological adaptations to produce speech. Scientists have taught apes of all three species to use sign language, as well as special computer keyboards.
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Both great apes and lesser apes fall within Catarrhini, which ... includes the Old World monkeys of Africa and Eurasia. Within this group, both families of apes can be distinguished from these monkeys by the number of cusps on their molars (apes have five—the "Y-5" molar pattern, Old World monkeys have only four in a bilophodont pattern). Apes have more mobile shoulder joints and arms due to the dorsal position of the scapula, broad ribcages that are flatter front-to-back, and a shorter, less mobile spine compared to Old World monkeys (with caudal vertebrae greatly reduced, resulting in tail loss in most species). These are all anatomical adaptations to vertical hanging and swinging locomotion (brachiation) in the apes, as well as better balance in a bipedal pose. All living members of the Hylobatidae and Hominidae are tailless, and humans can therefore accurately be referred to as bipedal apes. However, there are also primates in other families that lack tails, and at least one (the Pig-Tailed Langur) that has been known to walk significant distances bipedally.
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