While most apes build nests in trees, the study, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, focused on a group of wild, West African chimpanzees, that often show ground-nesting behaviour. It suggests that sleeping on the ground, once thought to have been a key part of the evolutionary shift among the early ancestors of modern humans, was actually a more gradual process.
An international team of primatologists from the University of Cambridge and Kyoto University, led by Dr Kathelijne Koops, studied the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes verus) population in the Nimba Mountains in Guinea, West Africa.
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Image: Tree-nesting. Credit: Kathelijne Koops
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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