David Riba

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Girona

Social laterality in non-human primates has started to attract attention in recent years. The positioning of individuals during social interactions could possibly suggest the nature of a relationship and the social ranking of the subjects involved. The subjects of the present study were 12 adult Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) housed in a zoolog...

Simple Summary Wild chimpanzees flexibly adapt their behavior based on many social and environmental aspects of their lives. These include seasonality and food availability as well as aspects regarding their communities and parties, such as group size, sex ratio and the presence of sexually receptive females. This results in a stimulating but also...

Primate sanctuaries provide a solution for the increasing number of primates being taken from their home countries to support the demands of the illegal pet trade. To help end the primate trade and raise awareness about the risks this trade poses to delicate ecosystems, sanctuaries are increasingly developing conservation education programs. Educat...

Several primate species use tools for a wide variety of functions, such as probing or obtaining out-of-reach food, both in captivity and in the wild. Given the ubiquitous presence of plants, the study of plant tool use may serve as a proxy to reconstruct archeologically invisible aspects of early human behavior. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are th...

Housing different animal groups in close-by facilities is common in wildlife centers. However, the impact on animal welfare is insufficiently studied in the literature. In this study, we analyzed the behavior of two adjacently housed chimpanzee groups to investigate how intergroup interactions may affect their behavior and, thus, their welfare. We...

Wild chimpanzees live in large and complex social communities, but their complexity is determined by the number of potential social partners as well as the frequent changes in group composition due to fission-fusion dynamics. Alternatively, captive housed chimpanzee groups are usually much smaller and less complex. However, studies have shown that...

Simple Summary Ensuring proper sleep is essential for the health of all animals, including chimpanzees. Many studies have demonstrated that sleep plays a crucial role in physical and behavioral regulation, and sleep disruptions may cause negative consequences for both. This study explores how environmental conditions and nocturnal disturbances affe...

Multidisciplinary work between animal behaviour scientists and anatomists is essential to understand the functional anatomical changes that different species of primates have developed throughout the evolutionary history. According to this, the specific functional anatomy of the upper limb of nonhuman primates cannot be understood holistically with...

Simple Summary In this manuscript, we report the results of our 3D geometric morphometric analyses of the distal radial epiphysis in wild and captive gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. We have identified significant differences in the insertion sites of the palmar radiocarpal ligaments between the wild and captive specimens of each species that...

The environmental conditions of captive hominoid primates can lead to modifications in several aspects of their behavior, including locomotion, which can then alter the morphological charac-teristics of certain anatomical regions, such as the knee or wrist. We have performed tridimen-sional geometric morphometrics (3D GM) analyses of the distal rad...

Simple Summary Presently, it is vital that captive chimpanzee populations are kept physically and mentally healthy, considering the number of individuals remaining in the wild continues to decrease. As such, we carried out this study to further understand how different types of nesting materials impact upon the welfare of captive chimpanzees living...

Brain hemispheres have different functions and control the movements of the contralateral side of the body. One of these functions is processing emotions. The right hemisphere hypothesis suggests that the right hemisphere of the brain is responsible for emotional processing, so the left side of the body is activated in emotive contexts such as soci...

Personality has been linked to individual variation in interest and performance in cog-nitive tasks. Nevertheless, this relationship is still poorly understood and has rarely been considered in animal cognition research. Here, we investigated the association between personality and interest, motivation and task performance in 13 sanctuary chimpanze...

Sexual dimorphism in the insertion sites of the palmar radiocarpal ligaments in hominoid primates

Episodic memory is the ability to recollect specific past events belonging to our personal experience, and it is one of the most crucial human abilities, allowing us to mentally travel through time. In animals, however, evidence of what-where-when memory (hereafter, WWW memory) is limited to very few taxa, mostly reflecting the socioecological chal...

There is currently a controversy about the nature of chimpanzees’ social learning. One of the main issues is focused on chimpanzees’ learning abilities and whether this species is able to learn directly from a model's behaviour (action copy) or otherwise learns indirectly through the consequences of the model’s actions (results copy). The aim of th...

Primates are at times used as performers in circuses, advertisements, films, and as pets. Most of these animals are socially isolated from their peers. They exhibit behavioral problems and lack important skills for living in a group environment. One of the main challenges primate rescue centers face is creating groups to socialize rescued individua...

Social learning, as an information acquisition process, enables intergenerational transmission and the stabilisation of cultural forms, generating and sustaining behavioural traditions within human groups. Archaeologically, such social processes might become observable by identifying repetitions in the record that result from the execution of stand...

NISP with cut-marks, location, morphology and performed activity by skeletal elements, taxa and weight size category from TD10-1. Abbreviations: Cm = Cut-marks; Inc = incisions; Saw = sawing marks; Scr = Scrape marks; Sk = Skinning; Df = Defleshing; Da = Disarticulation; Dm = Dismembering; Vr = viscera removal; Pr = Periosteum removal; Tr = Tendon...

NISP with cut-marks, location, morphology and performed activity by skeletal elements, taxa and weight size category from the archaeological. Abbreviations: Cm = Cut-marks; Inc = incisions; Saw = sawing marks; Scr = Scrape marks; Sk = Skinning; Df = Defleshing; Da = Disarticulation; Dm = Dismembering; Vr = viscera removal; Pr = Periosteum removal;...

Results from the Exact Multinomial Test (EMT) for sublevel TD10-1 of Gran Dolina and level IV of Bolomor Cave. Starting from the ab-initio hypothesis that impacts should be uniformly distributed across bone parts, probabilities in the tested null-model have been adjusted. See Text S1 or http://rgm2.lab.nig.ac.jp/RGM2/func.php?rd_id=EMT:multinomial....

Bone density data estimated by Lyman [22] and Lam et al. [47], NISP with percussion notches and correlation coefficient by means Spearman’s rho and Kendall’s tau from TD10-1 and Level IV. (XLS)

Experimental series and its comparison with the archaeological cases of Gran Dolina TD10-1 and Bolomor Cave. (DOC)

Statistical methods used to approach pattering in the archaeological and experimental samples. (DOC)

Results from the Exact Multinomial Test (EMT) and Fisheŕs exact test (FET) applied to each site and level to approach the cut-mark distribution. (DOC)

Chimpanzees are complex species. Their social structure, social dynamics, development, cognitive capabilities or cultural behaviour reflex a complex animal beings at the wild. Conocer cómo esta especie se comporta en libertad es fundamental para poder realizar un correcto captive management and to improve their well-being and welfare. Objectives me...

Simple Summary Hunting is well documented in wild chimpanzees, but has rarely been documented in captive chimpanzees. At Fundació Mona Primate Rescue we have obtained evidence of five episodes of hunting in rehabilitated chimpanzees who had no previous experience of these types of behaviors. This demonstrated that they were able to perform this spe...

Clear hand laterality patterns in humans are widely accepted. However, humans only elicit a significant hand laterality pattern when performing complementary role differentiation (CRD) tasks. Meanwhile, hand laterality in chimpanzees is weaker and controversial. Here we have reevaluated our results on hand laterality in chimpanzees housed in natura...

A new Pliocene Konservat-Lagerstätte in north-eastern Spain is described here for the first time. It is referred to as Camp dels Ninots. The particular geological conditions of the site, which correspond to lacustrine sedimentation in a maar, made it ideal for the preservation of fossils. At present, five large mammal skeletons in anatomical connec...

Resumen: La primatología, la etología y la prehistoria tienen mucho que ofrecer en el campo de la neuroética. La constitución moral del ser humano no se da de forma aislada en la naturaleza, sino que es el resultado de un proceso evolutivo que permite estudiar su origen en la filogénesis de la especie. Investigar las estructuras neuronales y las co...

Recently, many studies have been conducted on manual laterality in chimpanzees. Nevertheless, whether nonhuman primates exhibit population-level handedness remains a topic of considerable debate. One of the behaviors studied has been bimanual coordinated actions. Although recent studies have highlighted that captive chimpanzees show handedness at p...

As the pressure on primate sanctuaries increases as a consequence of habitat destruction and the illegal pet trade in primates, they are faced with the constant influx of new individuals, and with that, the responsibility of integrating them into stable social groups and providing them with the lifetime care. Our main goal in the integration and re...

Most primates in captivity have not benefited from previous appropriate living conditions, from both a physical and psychological perspective. An appropriate living environment is a prerequisite for the development of primate behavioural strategies to cope with their captive environment. The end result of enduring previous difficult life conditions...

There is currently much debate about the nature of the social learning in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). The main question is whether they possess the ability to copy the actions of others, by imitation, or by reproducing the environmental effects of these actions, by emulation. This study explores the social learning abilities in 12 chimpanzees ho...

Manual functional asymmetries have been extensively studied in nonhuman primates and other animals over the last two decades. It is particularly interesting to see if brain hemispheric specialization, so characteristic of human beings, is present or not and to what extent in the animal kingdom. With chimpanzees, we find few studies that have assess...

Rehabilitation programs are intended to increase the psychological well-being of rescued animals, taking into account their life histories, as well as the peculiar characteristics of each animal and species. In May 2009 Mona Foundation rescued an 11-year old chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) with a previous history of social isolation and a high rate of...

Environmental enrichment activities are currently of great interest in the field of ethology because they encourage animals in captivity to develop species typical behaviours and they improve their welfare. Studies on the activity budget of nonhuman primates have indicated that they spend most of their time foraging. The aim of this study is to eva...

During recent years, handedness of nonhuman primates has been the subject of several studies, especially focused on our closest relatives: the chimpanzees. These studies have dealt with both wild and captive chimpanzees, and they seem to point to divergent conclusions, which have been interpreted as a by-product of the human influence in the captiv...

During recent years, handedness of nonhuman primates has been the subject of several studies, especially focused on our closest relatives: the chimpanzees. These studies have dealt with both wild and captive chimpanzees, and they seem to point to divergent conclusions, which have been interpreted as a by-product of the human influence in the captiv...

Tras la llegada del primer grupo de chimpancés (Pan troglodytes) decomisados al Centro de Recuperación de Primates de la Fundación Mona, se planteó la necesidad de observar cómo individuos que poseían un amplio repertorio de conductas humanizadas, y que anteriormente no habían vivido en grupos sociales, se adaptaban a una nueva dinámica social y de...

The use of primates in the world of entertainment, circus, advertising, film and as pets is still a reality. Most of these animals have lived a situation of social isolation from their peers and not only have behavioural problems but also a lack of life skills in a group environment. Thus one of the main challenges facing Primate Rescue Centres is...