An epidemiological cross-sectional study was undertaken to determine the prevalence of clinical malaria among the Orang Asli population of Raub, Pahang, Malaysia. The study was conducted on a representative sample of 520 Orang Asli. Malariometric and clinical measurements were taken. The overall parasitemic rate was 24.2% (95% CI 20.7-28.1). Twenty-three point four percent (95% CI 19.5-26.9) of...

Behavioural observations suggest that orang-utans are semi-solitary animals with females being philopatric and males roaming more widely in search of receptive partners, leading to the prediction that females are more closely related than males at any given site. In contrast, our study presents evidence for male and female philopatry in the orang-utan. We examined patterns of relatedness and pa...

All great ape species are endangered, and infectious diseases are thought to pose a particular threat to their survival. As great ape species vary substantially in social organisation and gregariousness, there are likely to be differences in susceptibility to disease types and spread. Understanding the relation between social variables and disease is therefore crucial for implementing effective...

BACKGROUND Several studies suggested great ape cultures, arguing that human cumulative culture presumably evolved from such a foundation. These focused on conspicuous behaviours, and showed rich geographic variation, which could not be attributed to known ecological or genetic differences. Although geographic variation within call types (accents) has previously been reported for orang-utans and...

Culture has long been assumed to be uniquely human but recent studies, in particular on great apes, have suggested that cultures also occur in non-human primates. The most apparent cultural behaviours in great apes involve tools in the subsistence context where they are clearly functional to obtain valued food. On the other hand, tool-use to modify acoustic communication has been reported only ...

Pigmentation is a readily scorable and quantitative human phenotype, making it an excellent model for studying multifactorial traits and diseases. Convergent human evolution from the ancestral state, darker skin, towards lighter skin colors involved divergent genetic mechanisms in people of European vs. East Asian ancestry. It is striking that the European mechanisms result in a 10-20-fold incr...

background and purpose: dye is widely used in industries such as cosmetic, leather, paper and textile and release to the environment via their effluents. the purpose of this study was to compare the efficiency of low-cost adsorbents in acid orang 7 dyes removal from water. materials and methods: the rice stem biomass was sun dried, crushed and sieved to particle sizes in range of 1-2 mm. then t...

Vocal fold control was critical to the evolution of spoken language, much as it today allows us to learn vowel systems. It has, however, never been demonstrated directly in a non-human primate, leading to the suggestion that it evolved in the human lineage after divergence from great apes. Here, we provide the first evidence for real-time, dynamic and interactive vocal fold control in a great a...

So far as the study of human and comparative anatomy is concerned the seventeenth century exhibited to a high degree what Cole has so felicitously called the development of craftsmanship. During this century anatomists in many parts of Europe searched for the smallest details of the anatomy of man and of animals. In this century, too, was developed the comparative approach to anatomy. The solid...