Can chimpanzees and humans really "fall in love"? This question may be answered by the "bizarre" experience of Belgian woman Adi Timmermans!
According to a message quoted by the Global Times on the "Russia Today" website, it roughly means this: a Belgian woman named Adi Timmermans claimed that she had "fallen in love" with a chimpanzee in the zoo, and the zoo said that this "cross-border romance" led to chimpanzees not getting out of place, and if it went on, it would cause damage to its physical and mental health, so Timmermans was forbidden to "continue to visit" it.
The zoo director said that the chimpanzee timmans said was "in love" with her, named Chita, who came to the zoo around 1991 and was grumpy, noisy, and very difficult to control.
In the past 4 years, Timmermans has come to the zoo every week on time to visit Chita, they will "fly kiss" each other through the glass when they meet, and when they leave, they will also "wave" goodbye, so Chita and humans are getting closer and closer, which also means "drifting away" with their own group.
Breeders believe that due to long-term contact with humans, especially basically only "alone" contact with Timmermans, Chita has become more and more unsociable, so that it has gradually lost its position in the chimpanzee group, and other chimpanzees do not pay much attention to it, so except for the visit to the wind time, Chita almost always sits alone, and does not rub each other's backs and fight like other chimpanzees, which is "two people" with the always noisy Chita.
In order to help Chita return to the group, the zoo had to "beat the Mandarin Duck" to prohibit Timmermans from continuing to visit Chita, although this was questioned and dissatisfied by Timmermans. But after Chita was barred from meeting Timmermans, the zoo didn't know some of its unusual reactions.
Chimpanzees are mammalian primates that inhabit the tropical rainforests of the equatorial regions of western and eastern Africa, and are semi-arboreal, allowing them to build some relatively simple nests in trees for rest.
In terms of body size, chimpanzees are between 70-95 cm long and can reach 100-170 cm tall when standing, and males are slightly larger than females, with males weighing 56-80 kg and females weighing 45-68 kg. Its food intake is very large, spending 5-6 hours a day to forage, mainly eating fruits, young leaves, rhizomes, bark, etc., some individuals also have "carnivorous", often preying on insects, small antelopes, small baboons or monkeys, digging bird nests is also a common thing.
Chimpanzees are creatures whose behavior and social behavior are more similar to those of humans, which can not only make expressions such as joy and sorrow, but also distinguish different colors and make 32 different meanings of the call, and can also simply use some tools, such as poking a branch into a honeycomb to eat honey, and catching termites with a "fishing rod".
And chimpanzees like to live in groups, that is, they have a strong gregariousness, and there is a certain hierarchical relationship within the group, and its leader is a healthy adult male, and there is a certain connection between different groups, and conflicts will break out. However, the group size is large and small, with small groups of 3-5 individuals and large groups of as many as 30-50 individuals.
Although chimpanzees are very intelligent, due to man-made destruction and habitat fragmentation, its habitat has seriously deteriorated, which not only leads to a reduction in the distribution range year by year, but also a decrease in the number of populations, with a total of less than 300,000, which has been included in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and is a Class I protected animal in the appendix of cites of the Washington Convention on Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
Chimpanzees are the most similar higher animals to us humans, belonging to the most intelligent animals known besides humans, and it is also the closest organism related to humans, the dna sequence similarity is 95%, the DNA code similarity is only 1% different from humans, that is, its similarity is as high as 99%, and the amino acid order on cytochrome c is the same as that of humans, so there is a view that in a sense humans should be classified as the third category of "chimpanzees".
Scientists trace the origin of excavated fossils to show that about 6 million years ago chimpanzees and humans have a common "ancestor", and after this "separation" appeared evolutionary differentiation, evolved in different directions, and due to millions of years of evolution, chimpanzees and humans also formed reproductive isolation, popularly speaking, can not mate with each other to produce offspring.
However, Ilya Ivanovich Ivanovov, a well-known expert in animal hybridization and artificial insemination in the former Soviet Union, was "unbelieving", and he always felt that there might be a "transitional human race" between humans and chimpanzees, so he conducted a notorious ape hybridization experiment, the purpose of which was to produce a "new species" with stupid brains and great strength and only know how to work, and placed them in Siberia for heavy manual labor such as mining and logging.
However, due to successive chimpanzee deaths or insufficient funds forced to change the experimental site, Ivanov's ape hybridization experiment did not go very well, and he himself was later involved in the "vortex" and was arrested and exiled to Almaty, until his death in 1931 due to arteriosclerosis, so there has been no news of ape hybridization since then.
Oliver, the chimpanzee that appeared in the sixties of the last century, has attracted the attention of many scientists due to some special "signs" and "performances", including his own body hair is relatively small, the mouth protrudes forward, he can walk upright and learn to watch TV, drink coffee, etc., and even like to stay with human women, so some people even interpret it as the product of orangutan or ape hybridization. But later tested, its chromosome is 48, which means that Oliver is just an ordinary chimpanzee, but some of its "performance" is more special, so it cannot be a "new species" of "orangutan" or ape hybridization.
Scientific studies have shown that chimpanzees are closest to humans in terms of physiology, higher neural activity, or kinship, so that chimpanzees can master some basic operations after "professional" training, including sign language, some basic techniques, etc., so it may be easier to establish "friendship" with people for a long time.
The Belgian woman Timmermans mentioned in this report has visited Chita at the zoo every week for the past 4 years, interacting through the tempered glass, kissing and waving, and it can be said that they have formed a deep "friendship" between each other, which is what Timmermans said "love".
However, cross-border "love" between cross-species is not so easy, and some of the "bizarre" phenomena that appear on individuals are not specific, after all, "the world is big, there is no strangeness", this open question has no standard answer, it is reasonable to say.