Samuel Beckett - Paul Watson - Roy Chapman - Richard Dawkins - Benjamin Disraeli - Carl Sagan TV - H L Mencken - Soapy Sam Wilberforce - Thomas Huxley - BBC Horizon TV - Alice Roberts TV - Desmond Morris - India: Nature’s Wonderland TV - David Attenborough TV - Natural World TV - The Primates TV -
All people are bloody ignorant apes. Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot starring Stephen Brennan & Barry McGovern & Johnny Murphy & Sam McGovern et al, director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Estragon
I reject the idea that humans are superior to other life-forms ... Man is just an ape with an overly developed sense of superiority. Paul Watson, director of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and founder of Greenpeace
Man is an ape with possibilities. Roy Chapman Andrews
We are apes. We are African apes. Professor Richard Dawkins, lecture Adelaide Festival 2010
Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side of the angels. Benjamin Disraeli, speech Oxford 25th November 1864
There are almost no important differences between apes and humans. Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue, 1979
It is harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. H L Mencken 1880-1956
Is it on your grandmother’s or grandfather’s side that you are descended from an ape? Soapy Sam Wilberforce, to Thomas Huxley debate
cf.
I asserted – and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice. Thomas H Huxley, replying to Soapy Wilberforce
The big mystery of human evolution began ten million years ago ... Back then one kind of creature reigned supreme: the apes. They were everywhere. The Earth really was the planet of the apes. Horizon: The Ape That Took Over the World, BBC 2001
The story starts millions of years ago with an ape who stood upright and walked. Dr Alice Roberts, Origins of Us 1/3: Bones, BBC 2011
Lucy still appears very ape-like. And her brain was very similar in size to a chimpanzee’s. But becoming a walking ape had fundamentally changed the shape of her body. ibid.
I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape. Desmond Morris
The number of gibbons has fallen to 2,600. India: Nature’s Wonderland I, BBC 2015
Orangutans have an extraordinary ability to use tools … Surprisingly, crows also make tools. Attenborough’s Natural Curiosities s3e2: Curious Minds
Orangutans are only found in the rain-forests of Indonesia, one population in Borneo, and another slightly different one in the island of Sumatra. ibid.
Carried over the remote forests of Borneo is a very precious cargo. Meet Leonora. She doesn’t know it but she is a pioneer. With a handful of old friends Leonora is on an adventure into the unknown. She and her baby boy are leaving behind the security of a lifetime in captivity for a chance of freedom, with a chance for a new life as a truly wild orangutan. Natural World s32e6: Orangutans: The Great Ape Escape, BBC 2013
A gibbon: the most acrobatic, the most graceful, of a remarkable animal family. One family, countless faces. Monkeys, apes, lemurs, a family that’s found in almost every habitat on the planet. Each has their own unique strategy for survival. Primates s1e1: Secret of Survival, BBC 2020
Northern-Sumatra, one-thousand metres above sea-level … after weeks of searching they caught of this: a new species of primate, a great ape … the Orangutan … smaller, paler thicker fur than their lowland cousins … There are only 800 individuals; their lost world is no longer a secret … under immediate threat … Within a generation they could be gone. Primates s1e2, Family Matters