New monkey species with orange lips discovered after years of searching - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds. I'm June, a primatologist who has spent most of my adult life watching, studying, and honestly just marveling at our closest relatives — and then coming here to tell you their stories. True stories. Stories that I think will change how you see yourself, and the world just outside your window. June: Today's episode is brought to you by Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; by Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting from A I to SoC; and by Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. I'm genuinely grateful for their support, because it means I get to keep making this show. June: So. What are we getting into today? We have a brand new monkey species — discovered in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo — with the most remarkable orange lips you've ever seen. We have a genomics story that I find almost impossibly exciting, where scientists have now read the complete genomes of six of our ape relatives in a way that has never been done before. And we have a story about teasing. Yes — teasing. Poking, pestering, and provoking. Turns out that very human impulse to mess with someone you love? It is ancient. Millions of years old ancient. June: The thread running through all of it, as always, is this: we are not as separate from our primate relatives as we like to think. The same recipe that makes you — makes them. Let's get into it. June: Alright, let's start with something that genuinely made me laugh out loud when I read it, and I mean that in the best possible way. A study published in the journal Biology Letters — and this research was led by Isabelle Laumer and colleagues — looked at whether great apes engage in deliberate teasing. And I want to be precise about what I mean by teasing here, because this isn't just play. Teasing, as the researchers defined it, involves intentionally provoking another individual — doing something you know will get a reaction — and then watching for that reaction. It requires a kind of social awareness. You have to understand that the other person has expectations, and you have to find it funny, or at least interesting, to violate those expectations. June: What the researchers did was observe four species of great apes at two different facilities — bonobos, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. And what they found was that all four species — all four — engaged in behaviors that look a lot like teasing. They'd wave objects in front of another individual's face and yank them away. They'd poke, hit, or grab and then look back to check the reaction. One of my favorites: they'd just stare directly into another individual's face from uncomfortably close range, essentially daring them to respond. And the key thing the researchers noted was that the teasers kept doing it. They weren't just acting randomly — they were watching for the response and then doing it again. June: Now, here's what makes this more than just a cute observation. For teasing to work — for it to even make sense as a behavior — you need a theory of mind. You need to understand, on some level, that the other individual has a perspective. That they want something, or expect something, or feel something. And you need to anticipate their reaction before it happens. That is a cognitively sophisticated thing to do. And the fact that we see it across all four great ape species suggests this isn't something that evolved separately in each of them. It almost certainly has a shared evolutionary root. Which means the urge to poke and pester someone you're comfortable with — that thing your sibling does, that thing you do — is not a quirk of human culture. It is a primate thing. It is millions of years old. June: I love this because it's one of those findings that sneaks up on you. You start by thinking, oh that's funny, apes tease each other. And then you sit with it for a moment and you realize — playful provocation requires social intelligence. It requires you to model another mind. And these animals are doing that naturally, spontaneously, in their everyday social lives. The line between us and them keeps getting shorter, doesn't it. June: Okay. Now I want to talk about something that, for me as a primatologist, is one of the most exciting developments in the field in years. And it comes from the world of genomics. Scientists have now sequenced the complete genomes — and I mean truly complete, end to end — of six ape species: the siamang, which is a Southeast Asian gibbon; the Sumatran orangutan; the Bornean orangutan; the gorilla; the bonobo; and the chimpanzee. June: Now, you might be thinking — haven't we had ape genome sequences for a while? And the answer is yes, we have had drafts. But drafts have gaps. There are regions of the genome that are so structurally complex — so full of repeating sequences and tangled architecture — that the older sequencing technology just couldn't read them cleanly. It was like trying to read a sentence where the middle section is just a blur. You can guess at the meaning, but you can't be certain. This new work — sequencing what researchers call telomere-to-telomere, meaning literally from one tip of the chromosome to the other — resolves most of those gaps. For the first time, we have something close to the full instruction manual for these six species. June: And what are those instruction manuals telling us? Well, researchers are already using these genomes for comparative studies — laying them side by side with the human genome and looking at what's the same, what's different, and crucially, what those differences mean functionally. We've known for decades that humans and chimpanzees share somewhere around 98 to 99 percent of their D N A. Bonobos are similarly close. Gorillas are a little further — around 98 percent. Orangutans, around 97 percent. These numbers have always been striking. But they were always a bit approximate, because the genomes weren't fully resolved. Now we're getting a much sharper picture. June: What I find most moving about this — and I realize that's a strange word to use about genome sequencing — is what it reveals about the shared recipe of life. Think about what D N A actually is. It is a set of instructions. It tells your cells what proteins to make, when to make them, how to organize themselves into tissues and organs and, eventually, into a whole living being with a personality and a history and feelings. And the instructions that built you and the instructions that built a chimpanzee or a gorilla — they are overwhelmingly the same instructions. The same chapters, the same paragraphs, with relatively small edits here and there. June: Those edits matter, obviously. They account for real differences in anatomy, cognition, language, and lifespan. But the framework — the deep biological framework — is shared. And now that we can read these genomes with near-perfect clarity, we can start asking questions we couldn't ask before. Why do chimpanzees not get certain diseases that humans do? What genetic changes underlie the differences in brain development between us and gorillas? Where, exactly, in this four-billion-year-old story did our lineages diverge, and what did we each keep from the common ancestor we shared? June: Those are old questions. But now, finally, we have the data to start answering them with real precision. And every answer, I suspect, is going to make us feel a little less alone at the top of the family tree — and a little more aware of how much company we've always had. June: And now — the story I've been most looking forward to telling you today. Because this one is fresh. It happened in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and it begins, as the best natural history stories often do, with years of patient searching. June: Scientists have identified a brand new species of monkey. It's called the Likweli monkey — and its scientific name is Cercopithecus likweliensis. And the first thing you need to know about it is that it has these extraordinary orange lips. Vivid, bright orange, like someone painted them on. Against the rest of its dark fur, it's striking. It's actually beautiful. June: The second thing you need to know is its nickname. Local communities in the region of the DRC where this monkey lives — between the Momboyo and Likweli rivers — they call it the branch shaker. Because when this monkey is alarmed or agitated, it grabs onto branches and shakes them. Hard. It's a behavioral signature distinctive enough that people who live alongside these forests have recognized this animal as its own kind for a long time — long before scientists formally described it. June: And that matters. Because the formal scientific identification of this species — which involved genetic analysis, morphological measurements, and careful documentation — didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened because researchers worked with and listened to local knowledge. The people who have lived near these forests for generations already knew this monkey was different. They had a name for it. They had observations about it. Science caught up. June: This discovery is significant for a few reasons. The Cercopithecus genus — which includes a large group of African monkeys known as guenons — is actually one of the most species-rich primate genera on the planet. But even within a well-studied group, in a region that has been the subject of biological research for over a century, a new species can still be hiding. The forests of the Congo Basin are among the most biodiverse places on Earth, and they are also among the most threatened. When a new primate species is found, it is almost always also a species in need of protection — because its range is usually small, its habitat is under pressure, and the world has only just learned it exists. June: The Likweli monkey's range sits in a part of the DRC where forest loss and hunting are ongoing pressures. So the discovery and the conservation concern arrive at the same moment. We learn this animal exists, and in the same breath we have to ask — how do we make sure it keeps existing? June: But I want to sit with the wonder of it for just a second before we get to the urgency. Somewhere in the forest between two rivers in central Africa, there is a small monkey with orange lips who shakes branches when it's scared and has been living there, doing its thing, for who knows how long — entirely on its own terms, entirely unaware of our taxonomic categories. And now we know its name. We know its face. And we know it belongs to the same order of mammals — Primates — that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, and us. One more branch on the family tree that we didn't know was there. June: That, to me, is one of the most hopeful things science does. It finds something we almost missed, and it says — look. Pay attention. This matters. This life, right here, has been here all along. June: So. Orange-lipped monkeys who shake branches. Apes who tease each other with the casual social sophistication of someone who absolutely knows what they're doing. And six complete ape genomes, laid out for the first time in their full complexity, whispering the same story they always whisper — that we are made of the same stuff, shaped by the same forces, and related in ways that go far deeper than we usually stop to think about. June: Intelligence, curiosity, playfulness, social bonds, the impulse to provoke someone you trust — these are not inventions of the human mind. They are inheritances. They belong to a whole family of beings, spread across forests and mountains and riverbanks, living their own full lives on this planet we share. June: I find that genuinely comforting. Not because it diminishes what's remarkable about being human, but because it means we are not as alone as we sometimes feel. We have relatives. Good ones. Ones worth knowing, and worth protecting. June: This has been Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode made you curious, made you smile, or made you think differently about who your neighbors on this planet really are — please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who might love it too. Show notes with links to the science we talked about today are available the link in show notes. Stay curious out there. I'll see you next time.