Monkeys: Last News

Robbie Williams — the British pop star gets in touch with his inner primate.Indeed, the 50-year-old singer — who rose from the boy band Take That to become one of the biggest UK music icons of the 1990s and early ’00s — is transformed into a singing, dancing chimpanzee thanks to the wonders of CGI in the film that opens wide on Friday.“I’ve been a cheeky monkey all my life,” Williams, who narrates the movie, told the Associated Press. “There’s no more cheekier monkey than the coke-snorting, sex-addict monkey that we find in the movie.”And Williams believes that this ape take on his story — which traces his life from childhood to his struggles with addiction and depression at the height of his fame — benefits from seeing it through a furry-faced chimp.“We care for animals more than we care for humans, most of us,” he told AP.

New research has found that orangutans (which are indeed apes, not monkeys) possess beatboxing skills as good, if not more impressive than their primate cousins — us — and it may be a huge clue to the evolution of human speech.“Humans rarely produce voiced and voiceless noises simultaneously. The exception is beatboxing, a skilled vocal performance which mimics the complex beats of hip-hop music,” co-author Madeleine Hardus said.“But the very fact that humans are anatomically able to beatbox, raises questions about where that ability came from.

At the movies, a monkey in a laboratory is never a good sign.