Monkeying around

One of my pet peeves is how most people think "ape" and "monkey" are synonymous. They both belong to the order of primates, suborder anthropoids. But an ape is not a monkey. And a monkey is not an ape.

Monkeys = tamarins, baboons, mandrills, macaques (above) etc
Apes = gorillas, chimapanzees (below right), gibbons, orangutans etc

The simplest way to distiguish one from the other is the presence of a tail. Most monkeys have tails, but no apes have tails. In addition, the skeletal structure of the shoulder in apes enable them to swing from branch to branch, which most monkeys cannot do. Instead, monkeys run along the tops of branches.

And yet these people who have so much difficultly in telling the difference between a monkey and an ape have no problems differentiating a human from a monkey. But the human genome is 98% the same as our closest cousins, the chimpanzees. We are more closely related to a chimp than a chimp is to a gorilla. A chimpanzee is no more a monkey than we are.

The arrogance of man.