S3E01 - Primates (Primate Evolution)

#Primates #Evolution #GreenButteryflyGames #Conservation #BoardGames #Science
Summary
Happy 2026, everyone! To celebrate Darwin Day (February 12th), we have a special 90-minute episode with Will and David from the Common Descent Podcast to talk all about Primates! We'll cover the new game by Green Butterfly Games, all six clades of primates it showcases, and tons of other fun facts about us an our arboreal cousins, like how monkeys rafted from Africa to South America and why Aye-ayes are the best nose-pickers. So grab a banana, build a nest, and settle in for a lively discussion of Primates.
Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intros
00:02:07 - Dung Beetles and Human Endurance
00:11:42 - Game Overview
00:21:23 - Primate History
00:33:00 - Different Primate Groups
00:51:17 - Humans in the Game
00:57:17 - Representation through Game Mechanics
01:07:36 - Picking Nits
01:13:09 - Final Grades
01:21:55 - Wrap-up

Links

Primates (Green Butterfly Games)
The Common Descent Podcast
Dung beetles evolving to eat meat (Science.org)
Limits of human endurance (Nature.com)
An aye-aye picking its nose (YouTube) 
When the Earth was Green, by Riley Black (Macmillan Publishers)
Pitchstorm and Fate of the Nostromo (Board Game Geek)   

Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net 
This episode of Gaming with Science was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Full Transcript
(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )
Jason Wallace  0:00  
Brian, hello and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games.
Brian  0:12  
Today, we're going to discuss primates by green butterfly games. Hey, welcome back to gaming with science. This is Brian. This is Jason. And wait, we've got some other people here.
Brian  0:26  
Will and David, you're back! 
Will  0:27  
We're back. 
David  0:28  
Can't get rid of us, 
Brian  0:30  
no. Well, not that we would want to actually, this whole reason that this entire episode happened is actually your fault, so please explain yourself. 
David  0:38  
Oh, that's true. We this game was sent to us. We were sent it as a gift from one of our listeners, yeah, oh, we should have, we should have looked up who it was that sent it to us. That would have been really good to get the name.
Jason Wallace  0:48  
Thank you, anonymous. Listener of another podcast,
Brian  0:54  
common descent. Listener, whoever you are, thank you and make yourself known. You guys got a game, and you said, Well, we know some people who want to play, who like to play science games, and you approached us, which is totally different, because that's not how this works around here. We usually have to chase people down.
David  1:08  
We got the gift. I think it, I think we received it shortly after the last time we recorded with you guys. 
Brian  1:15  
Oh, wow. 
David  1:16  
And it was a really cool because it's the it's a perfect game for your podcast?
Brian  1:22  
 Absolutely. 
David  1:24  
We thought it would be super fun, and so, yeah, it was one of the first things we did is we said, hey, do you guys want to play this you want to come back and play this game with us? 
Brian  1:31  
Yep, and we did, and it was fun. And we even did it the weekend of the museum meetup at Fernbank, which, again, is going to date this episode, but whatever, that's fine. We're releasing this episode that will also be our episode that's closest to Darwin Day. So it's also a good game for Darwin Day. So I'm excited to talk about this game. It has a huge amount of science content, and I'm excited about the conversation we're going to get to have about primates and how they're weird. But before we get into that, why don't we do a little bit of science banter? Anything you guys would like to talk about?
Will  1:58  
One that's on my mind because I literally just finished taking notes on it for one of our news sections, which will come out before this. So it won't be, I won't be spoiling our news. There was a study on dung beetles that have evolved to be necrophageous. So eating dead bodies,
Brian  2:16  
Did they roll them up into little balls? 
Will  2:18  
Yeah. And this is a thing that I was aware of. We talked about this in the decomposing episode, there are beetles that basically roll up a bit of a meatball and roll it away, bury it and let their young feet off of it, 
Brian  2:30  
okay,
Will  2:30  
 instead of dung, yeah, meatballs.
Brian  2:33  
That's a different meaning of meatball. Yep.
Will  2:37  
And there was, there's a group of dung beetles that have evolved to do this, and they studied it by finding those underground 
Brian  2:48  
meat?
Will  2:48  
 open like like like burrows that they used to there are Ichnofossils, trace fossils of these burrows that have preserved. And you can tell which kind of beetle does it, because they build the burrow differently. And so they were able to figure out the timing of the evolution. Because originally the idea was that, well, when the big herbivores that the dung beetles were eating the dung of died, they had to switch to something else. And so during the megafaunal extinction not too long ago in our earth's history. That must have been when the beetles switched over. But when they looked at the dating, it found out no they were eating meat well before the big herbivores started dying out. So what it seemed is more likely, is there were so many herbivores and so much dung and so many dung beetles that competition for some dung beetles to have to start doing something differently, because there was too much competition and too much to go around. So the herbivores now were just feeding dung beetles while alive and then flesh eating dung beetles while dead.
Brian  3:59  
What an unusual form of niche partitioning, and also meatball trace fossils!
David  4:04  
Yes, yeah. Cool.
Jason Wallace  4:06  
So which, which megafauna mass extinction. Was this? Is this like dinosaur mass extinction, or is this like 10,000 years ago mass extinction?
Will  4:14  
Yeah, yeah. The 10,000 the 10,000 years ago with the mammal, megafauna, mass extinction. This was a study focused on South America. So this would have been a lot of the American big animals that would have been these dung beetles, would have been living alongside of, of, like big marsupials and things like that.
Brian  4:35  
Were there coprophagous organisms that are known from, like the Jurassic I know we like to talk about how sauropods must have been crazy ecosystem engineers, but they must have been producing huge amounts of waste.
David  4:49  
There are dung beetle fossils in coprolites in the fossil record. I think they go back to the Mesozoic, although I'm off the top of my head, I'm not sure. But there are specific there are dung ball fossils, like coprolites that are specifically rolled up into balls and have often dung beetle larval burrows inside 
Brian  5:14  
interesting. So I would be it would be absolutely insane if basically, the origin of dung beetles corresponds with sauropods. Because, of course,
Will  5:25  
when it's like someone was definitely doing the job, I just don't know which group of insects it was, because how could you not take advantage of that?
Brian  5:33  
All right, what about you, Jason, you said you found the thing too. 
Jason Wallace  5:37  
Yes. So I was looking at things about primates, and I found one about humans recently, which were primates. So that counts. This was a recent one on our peak energy expenditure. So basically, there's the question of, what is the capacity for human like endurance, like, how much, many calories can you actually burn sustainably? And so they took a bunch of like, high endurance performance athletes, like people that are doing all sorts of crazy endurance feats, and they gave them a bunch of labeled heavy labeled isotopes, okay, heavy hydrogen, heavy oxygen. So they could trace it, you
Brian  6:15  
got to have that nice, sweet heavy water. 
Jason Wallace  6:15  
Yes. So and again, I don't know all the details, suffice to say, let them determine how much they were metabolizing, how much they were how many calories they were burning. And they found that for these extreme athletes, the limit was about two and a half times their basal rate. So your basal metabolic rate is how much your body burns when you're just lying there. It's how much it takes to pump your heart and to breathe and to maintain your organs and such, and they've known that. So in short bursts, you can go up to like, 10 times that amount if you're doing like a super, like a super endurance run, like, I know someone who did a 24 hour run. I think he's a little crazy, but he did it.
Brian  6:57  
 I'm sorry. What?
Jason Wallace  6:59  
 you run for 24 hours. That's that's the goal. 
Jason Wallace  7:02  
No You don't
David  7:03  
thank you. I don't want to run. I don't want to run for 24 seconds. Yeah.
Jason Wallace  7:08  
The thing is, when you do that, you're actually burning calories faster than you can metabolize them in you cannot digest food fast enough to replace those calories. So that's not sustainable. So they found that over the course of like six months, as these people were doing their hyper endurance stuff, it averaged out to about two and a half times, and that when they were performing their really high endurance stuff, they subconsciously cut down on other things like fidgeting or walking around or other stuff. So they cut back on their other caloric expenditure in order to keep it to about that amount. And the hypothesis is that that's about as fast as you can actually metabolize calories, because it takes calories to digest your food. And the thought is that about two and a half times your basal rate is probably as much as you can physically ingest and absorb at your peak. And so that's the hypothesis anyway. Obviously, there's other stuff to be proven, but they they seem to have done some good work. So, okay, this is the limit of how far over the long term you can actually burn
David  8:07  
Interesting, interesting. Bad news for speedsters.
Jason Wallace  8:10  
Yeah, then you just tap into the speed force. And that's a force, a source of infinitre energy right?
David  8:15  
This is why the Flash has the Speed Force is to overcome force is actually physiological limitations? Yes,
David  8:28  
I'd be fascinated to know, and I don't know how we would do this, but to see what that kind of study would find in other species, is their version of this? Different? Are they able to maintain a higher activity level.
Brian  8:44  
So I think the best surrogate for this study is probably cats.
David  8:49  
Yeah, well, and dogs are interesting. I was gonna say dogs, because cats, even modern, even wild cats, are not very active animals like lions are famous for they sleep like 18 hours a day or something, right? They really are "rest most of the day and then do some bursts of activity". Dogs, I think, would be an excellent comparison, because dogs actually have a lot of the same physical adaptations as humans, for mobility and for traveling and for covering long distances. They're cursorial animals, as we are. And dogs would also be nice, because you can train a dog to do whatever you need it to do for this.
Brian  9:36  
 Cursorial means running?
David  9:39  
Cursorial means adapted for running. So horses are cursorial dogs and wolves, all canines are cursorial and common adaptations you see across those three groups include large lung capacity certain types of thermoregulatory. Very you know, we sweat, dogs pant, these very particular adaptations for maintaining body temperature and the shape of our legs. Dogs, horses and humans, all have very long legs that tend to also be very thin. One of my favorite things to compare if you if you have a cat and a dog handy, and you look at the shape of the limbs and a cat and a dog, dog legs almost all the muscles up on the top, and then it becomes this stick toward the end. And the fingers on the paws are long and in and narrow. The foot is sort of long and narrow. If you look at a cat, their arms tend to be muscular all the way down. Their arms are much more flexible and their paws are a little bit wider and shorter, because cats are grapplers. Yeah, cats are using their arms to wrestle and grab and pull dog arms are really built to do one thing, and that is to walk. That is to move. And they're really efficient at it.
Jason Wallace  11:08  
And so humans would be the only cursorial primate. Yes, like I've seen other primates try to run, it doesn't work out so well.
David  11:18  
No, we are actually. There's a bunch of hypotheses that we are specifically adapted for running, not just for walking on two feet, but that some of the anatomy of our especially our lower bodies, is specific, not good for walking, but specifically good for running. We are running adapted primates.
Brian  11:42  
Well, I don't think we could ask for a better transition into the discussion to this game, so I think we should take advantage of that and and start talking about primates the board game. I'm going to start by introducing the game. We're going to, you know, deal with that particular challenge and how the game works. And then we're going to jump into a conversation about what is a primate, where did they come from, and how do we relate to the rest of them? As you know, weird, very weird, bipedal primates. Okay, so primates is a game that was designed by Derek Coons. I looked this person up a little bit. So he is a graduate of Miami University in Ohio, another computer scientist person who made his way into board games, but actually was one of the founding members of Mercy for Animals, so very interested in sort of animal rights and that aspect, which actually you can see some of that reflected in the game. So I'm not sure what inspired the creation of primates, but I'm very glad that it did, because this is an incredibly detailed game about primates and primate evolution. So what does the game look like? You have a it's a very space hungry game. Let's start with that, like when we all sat down to play, it took the majority of the table to sort of just lay this out. And there's a reason for that. You have a large, beautifully illustrated, simplified phylogenetic tree of the history of primates. It's split down into six major branches. The reason that the board is so big is you've got six different groupings of primates, and these are regular playing playing, regular size playing cards. So you can kind of imagine, if you're going to stack up six of these side by side, it's just going to take up some space. You have slightly oversized cards as well that are going to represent extinct primates. So the tree is split into six groups. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about all those groups later. In more detail, you've got oversized, chunky, wooden meeples representing, I'm trying to remember what all of them were. There's an orangutan, for sure. I think there's a bush baby. There's definitely a lemur in there at some point. Or maybe it was a tarsier, I don't know. I'm sure they were trying to pull from across the primate family tree.
Jason Wallace  13:50  
I will say the meeples are the best part of this game. They are the most adorable meeples I've ever seen. 
Brian  13:57  
They are very good. So the board is a phylogenetic tree of primates and how they relate to one another, but it's also representing a real, physical tree at the same time. So the goal of the game is to take your little meeples, and you're moving them up the branches to the top of each of these six different extant primate families. When you get to the top, you get to take one of the cards that is there, and that card will represent a member of that family, and usually will tie it to a specific ability. So for instance, orangutans, if you get the orangutan card under the great apes, it has an ability called tree swaying, which lets you jump from branch to branch on the phylogenetic tree, which we think is a wonderful representation of that ability. There may be things that are affecting their ability to collect food, or stuff like that. Positioned on the tree, you'll have little primate skull icons that are representing extinct primates along those different lineages. And you're also going to populate with different sort of food tokens. And there are, I think it's animal protein,  there's plants, fruits, and then there's like a wild card that's supposed to be, like, saps or exudates or something like that. I think it's a wild card because sometimes you're licking honeydew, which is just what comes out of the back of an insect. So it's kind of vegetable, it's kind of animal, it's both. It's a wild card, 
Jason Wallace  15:18  
post processed vegetable.
Brian  15:20  
Yeah so let's see the movement of your primates up the tree is actually something where you it is a roll to move, kind of it's still very strategically choice. It's not Candy Land. So you're going to roll three dice. They have either one, two or three on them. You can either move all three of your little primate meeples on different branches, or you can move, use two dice and move one of your your meeples, an extra far distance. When you get to the top of the tree, you get to collect a card. The only other mechanic is, if you rest, you can get these bonus cards. And a lot of those have this sort of if you think about Mercy for Animals, a lot of those are about legislation to protect animals or to protect primates. Or that's where you'll also get your set mechanics where you're trying to collect. You'll get extra points for collecting all of the primates from China, or something like that, or other sort of interesting groupings. When you collect those, there's this secondary track called the heart track. You can also get points from that. Most of your points are going to come from collecting your primates at the top, collecting your little bonus primate sets and your heart track that runs across the bottom. And I think that's all the ways you get points in this game. Jason, what am I forgetting?
Jason Wallace  16:32  
No, I think that mostly covers it. You've got your your primary points you get from picking up the various extant or extinct primates. You've got your bonuses, you've got the heart track, and I think you may have some bonuses for food at the end. You haven't eaten, but you use the food to buy various other things. So it's a resource, but it's also worth points at the end.
Brian  16:51  
Yeah, usually that's true. Whenever there's some resource, they usually throw a couple extra points. If you got a bunch of those sitting around, usually it's only going to be there to help break ties. You're never gonna win a game from hoarding a bunch of like, food cubes.
Will  17:03  
I don't can attest that's where most of my points came from. When we played, that was where most of my points were from. Was my leftover food. Oh, okay.
Brian  17:11  
But actually, this is the different from when we played holotype. Because I think you spanked everybody in holotype. Yes, that one, I did well. But I think in this version, I think David spanked everybody if I'm, if I'm remembering correctly,
David  17:22  
I think me, Jason and I, I feel if I remember correctly, we were sort of neck and neck,
Jason Wallace  17:27  
yeah, and I honestly don't remember which one of us was ahead. I also don't. I think the difference was like, Yeah, David and I were up ahead, and then the rest, you other two were way behind.
Brian  17:36  
Sorry, I was just enjoying the game. That's my That's the excuse I always get for why I lose pretty much every time we play.
David  17:47  
We sat down before we played. Brian was like, I haven't played in a while. So the classic video gaming excuse,
Brian  17:59  
yeah, this controller is clearly broken.
Will  18:03  
I'm not used to this kind of controller.
Brian  18:05  
So we were playing where if you were putting your meeple along the traffic, you were running up a thing, you'd pick up all the food along that track. That's how we were playing the game. That is wrong, by the way. It's the only reason I know it's wrong. And unfortunately, this is just rule books are hard to write. There's a card that I found, and it's actually for the cheek pouch, which is in an Old World monkey trait, which gives you the ability to pick up all of the food as you go by, which is the only way that I found out that we were doing that wrong.
Jason Wallace  18:35  
Yeah, we looked at the rule book for like, two minutes trying to figure that out and compare wording at one place and another. So I'm going to put that down to poor wording in the wording in the rule book.
Brian  18:44  
I mean, like I said, rule books are hard to write. They just are. It was very clear that you had to stop on the location of where an extinct creature was located to pick it up. It was a little less clear about if you had to do that for food. But evidently, you were have to, you have to actually choose to stop to collect the food. You don't just get it for walking by it.
David  19:02  
That's interesting, because that would have changed it quite all. You would have ended up with a lot less food. Another thing that I maybe you mentioned this, the game has a set number of turns. 
Brian  19:13  
It's only 10 rounds in a 4-player game.
David  19:15  
 It's only  10 rounds. And that was one of that was part of the logic. Why we figured, oh, it must be you pick up the food as you go, because otherwise you're really food is a really limited resource.
Brian  19:27  
You'd have to be much more strategic and purposeful about your movement. But even then, it seems like you would really struggle to get some of those more expensive cards. Like you'd have to actively go for them. Like, I think the Gigantopithecus card, I think you're using your food to buy these extincts that are out there. 
David  19:43  
right, I wouldn't have been able to steal it from will. 
Will  19:46  
No, no, that's right. A better game.
Brian  19:51  
I do say that honestly, with the board game, as long as everybody's playing by the same rules, it's fine, right? And we were definitely all playing by the same rules, it just would have been a little different.
Will  20:00  
Yeah, yeah. Just been a lower point point total at the end, but the gameplay would have been the same,
Jason Wallace  20:06  
yeah, for sure. And I will say, like, the gameplay on this is pretty straightforward. It's like, once you set up everything, like you, you roll your dice, you move your primates, you kind of, you can aim for some things and try to get them certain ways and such. But it's, there's it's not a super complex game. It's like, we've had some games on the podcast that are very complicated. I'm thinking like Earth or genotype is fairly complex, even in terms of just how the game plays out. This is a fairly simple game, roll the dice, move your primates, pick up cards. Doesn't take long to kind of figure it out.
Brian  20:41  
And like all the best games, the game is fun, and the learning happens by accident, because when you flip through entire deck of like, Oh, these are all Old World monkeys. These are how they're related to one another, and this is how they're related to Gibbons, and this is how they're related to this. And these are the extinct things that came on their line. And here are the things that they eat. You're just gonna learn that by playing primates. I mean, I'm getting ahead of myself, because I'm gonna come back to I'm already making my argument for why i What kind of grade you might be predicting this game is gonna get when we get to that part of the conversation. But we have two paleontologists on this podcast, and we have a game that is about evolution, Earth history and extinct primates. So Will, David, I would like to if it's okay, we can start talking about the science here. Can you tell me about the history of primates, and in particular, the primate niche and its history?
David  21:35  
Sure, primates, so in the grand sort of picture of evolution, mammals get their start around 200 million years ago, right at the beginning of the age of dinosaurs. And primates get their start after the age of dinosaurs. So primates, from our evidence from the fossil record and also evidence from the genetic comparisons with other species, it looks like primates really sort of came into their own around 60, 65 million years ago, in the aftermath of the mass extinction that ended the Age of Dinosaurs, the earliest primates were closely related and very similar to some early rodents, and this sort of group of mammals that were relatively small, probably some tree climbing ability, right? There are a lot of rodents today. There are a lot of carnivorans, things like raccoons, that are not fully tree dwellers, but they're able very comfortably to go up and down, in and out of trees. Early primates, including groups like the plesiodapiforms, which are considered to be maybe the earliest primates, maybe cousins of the earliest primates were beginning to develop these arboreal adaptations, right, anatomical specializations for spending almost all your time in the trees
Will  23:11  
compared to squirrels a lot? 
Brian  23:13  
Yeah, I was just about to say, like, I've always heard that, like our oldest primate ancestors were more like squirrels than anything else.
David  23:21  
Yeah, and squirrels are a great comparison, because they are extremely arboreal A and B. You know, being a tree dweller full time has the benefits of being able to navigate an environment that not many other animals can navigate, being able to get up off the ground and away from the many dangers that can be present on the ground. Squirrels are a really interesting comparison, because squirrels are uniquely adapted for going up and down trees. Squirrels are famously able to run, just run straight up and down a tree. Their I think their wrists turn outward in a way that most animals don't. Okay, so squirrel, it's you think of like a raccoon will climb sort of up and they're grabbing and they're stepping kind of the way we would. Squirrels can fully just run vertically.
Brian  24:18  
That's true. They kind of sprint up a tree you don't see
Will  24:22  
they can also sprint down the tree. Yeah, they can just move. And their feet also can kind of rotate, so that they have hands and feet going in all four directions, so they just have a four direction grip on the tree, and can just Velcro to it.
David  24:41  
Okay, I won't even run down the stairs. Squirrels are really impressive.
Brian  24:48  
So those early primates, did they have sort of what we would consider like the primate hand setup, or the early version of that, with the fingers and opposable thumb?
David  24:57  
Yes, I believe off the top. Top of my head, I believe in early primates, we see evidence for the at least the beginnings of grasping hands like we have, which, again, not unique to primates, right? Raccoons have that a lot of rodents have, that the beginnings of specialization for plant eating. Early primates were going after plant foods. I want to say long and probably prehensile tails are something that shows up very early on. There is also genetic evidence to suggest that enhanced color vision is something that is evolved deep in the primate family tree. Most mammals have relatively limited color vision, not black and white, but basically, most mammals are effectively color 
Jason Wallace  25:50  
red, green, color blind, 
David  25:52  
color blind, red, green, color blind. Primates are unusual. Primates are not we have three we're trichromatic, right? We can very clearly see reds, greens, blues, etc. That seems to be something most most of us, yes, present company excluded. That's another thing that evolved early on, possibly to help identify fruits and other food stuffs that would be up in the trees.
Brian  26:19  
So our nocturnal mammal ancestors presumably lost one of the three color cones, and actually, mammals had to re evolve like basically, through gene duplication and adaptation, have re evolved the ability to see in three colors, if you look at like birds, for instance, never lost that original trichromy.
David  26:43  
Most vertebrate animals have better color vision than really that we do right. Reptiles tend to be three or four right, trichromat or tetrachromat. A lot of insects have better color vision. A lot of fish have better color mammals really did downgrade in that regard.
Brian  27:03  
We had to get it back. We had to Panda our thumb back.Pandas thumb our way to trichromy. 
Will  27:10  
And some people have hypothesized that that may be why, compared to like reptiles and birds and insects, why mammals are so dull, colored.
Brian  27:18  
Oh, why we're so boring 
Will  27:19  
that you don't get a lot of brightly red and blue and yellow mammals, because it's not as useful for us compared to those other animals that can see the vibrance of those colors much better than the average mammal. So you get a lot of brown mammals.
Brian  27:36  
and that's why mammals are so stinky.
David  27:41  
And also, if you think about what are some of the exceptions mammals that are using Reds and Blues for display, it's primates, right? It's baboons, it's mandrills, it's things like that, yeah,
Jason Wallace  27:55  
okay, so you say that the primates really got their start right after the after the dinosaur extinction, which immediately brings to mind, like, Okay, that sounds like they are occupying a niche that got vacated as part of that extinction. Is that correct?
Brian  28:12  
I mean, what was there before? Like, there were large herbivores and large carnivores and burrowing things and all kinds of things. Like, was there a primate niche before primates, or did they invent the niche alongside with the development of angiosperm trees?
David  28:27  
Well, that is you've hit on. The key point here is that part of what probably allowed them to evolve was the loss of large herbivores and the loss of large carnivores, which meant that there was food to be eaten and safety to be found. But also, there is evidence to suggest that before the dinosaur extinction, forests tended to be more open environments because you had all these big herbivores clearing space and stomping through the forest. Okay, we see evidence for denser, closed canopy forests becoming more common after that extinction, and that was probably a huge boon for animals like primates who live in the trees and are specifically adapted for moving between trees. 
Brian  29:20  
I guess that makes sense when your average herbivore is the size of an elephant or larger
David  29:26  
Yeah, yeah, you don't get a lot of closed canopy those animals stomping around.
Will  29:32  
And you need that. You need that closing of the canopy to be able to just be a canopy dweller. Otherwise, you're going to have to go up and down trees.
David  29:41  
And there are several lineages of gliding, Mesozoic mammals.
Brian  29:46  
Interesting, interesting. So another thing, I was looking through the book, and I didn't realize this, every one of the little spaces on the phylogenetic tree has a letter and a number, and we were trying to figure it out. And so, like we decoded what the letters mean. They're. Coded to the name of that lineage, of that particular branch, including, you know, before the splits that occurred, there's also, they're numbered one through seven. And I found out in the book that has a meaning too, in fact, the it's tied to the to the era in which that extinct creature would have been found, like, if it has the number six or seven. It's from the Quaternary within the last which is the most recent 5 million years. The most recent anything in five was the Neogene, and anything prior to that would have been the Paleogene, 66 million to 23 million. So it's actually also synchronized to time, which is, I suppose, great when you're getting your extinct it shows you exactly on what branch and exactly what time period it has to be in right as you're going up through it. We've got a bunch of different families of primates to talk about, and I really don't know how we want to, how we want to narrow it down. I did think one thing I wanted to point out is one of the families is tarsiers. And I looked through the tarsier cards, because the cards have different abilities based on what the different creatures, the different primates in that group are. There was only one ability for tarsiers. It was leaping. There was the only thing that they mentioned was leaping. Our tars So, so what is a tarsier?
Will  31:14  
Tarsiers are really like they're one of my favorite groups of primates.
Jason Wallace  31:18  
Are they? The oldest branch I'm looking here at the board, but I don't have a good image of it.
Brian  31:24  
I think the oldest was actually and they did the wet nosed primates, which is combining lemurs as well as lorises and Bush babies, into a larger group,
Will  31:34  
yes, and I don't know which member of them like has, but it does look like tarsiers, probably is, is one of the oldest, if not the oldest
David  31:48  
lemurs in in true primates. So the closest cousins, living cousins of primates, are colugos, which are just outside the group, which are gliders. Then lemurs are the out group. So they are the earliest branch of living primates, lemurs, lorises and so on. Then it's tarsiers, sort of the next branch in. And then everything with everything beyond tarsiers is monkeys. Then you're your New World monkeys, your Old World monkeys. So tarsiers are the closest primates to monkeys without being monkeys, and then lemurs are one more step out from there,
Brian  32:27  
and all the lemurs are in Madagascar. There are no are all the lemurs in Madagascar? 
David  32:33  
Yes, I believe that's true.
Brian  32:36  
Okay, so unlike marsupials, where we do have the occasional possum who's running around there somewhere, like all of the lemurs are found in one place, and their closest relative, the lorises and the bush babies, are a little bit more distributed than that, right?
David  32:50  
Yes, yeah. They're in broader Africa, I believe, yeah.
Will  32:54  
And there are, there are some in Asia that I don't know, which specifically.
Brian  33:00  
The Loris is the only, okay, it's the only venomous primate is the slow Lori. So that's just, it's weird claim to fame, and lemurs do all kinds of insane things. And I mean, I wish we probably can't really spend, like, a ton of time on it, but the front of the box is the aye aye, which is one of my favorite primates, which is absolutely freaky little lemur that is basal even to the rest of the lemurs, and is is a primate that is doing the same ecological job as a woodpecker.
Jason Wallace  33:34  
Tell me about this. You guys kept talking about its freaky fingers and stuff, and I have no idea what you're talking about. So explain this, please. 
Will  33:41  
I will happily take this one, because this is one of my I love primates. They're so cool. The Aye Aye is a lemur, but it is extremely specialized. They hunt for grubs underneath the bark of trees, and they do this using very sensitive ears and a very sensitive finger that they tap on the bark. Their middle finger has elongated into this very thin, very still dexterous, and it's actually almost like ball jointed at the base. It is extremely dexterous. And they tap on the bark and listen for hollow spaces. And when they find one, they have these rodent like front teeth that they then gnaw a hole into the burrow or cavity where the grub is. And then they use that long finger, which has a hooked nail on the end, to reach in and fish out the grub, and then in eat it and move on to the next one. And that's very much what woodpeckers do. Woodpeckers find spots where grubs are going to be in the wood. Bore into it with their beak, you know, Peck into it. They're woodpecking, and then they have their tongue is long and barbed. To fish out the prey. So it's very similar system.
Brian  35:05  
So they're both highly derived, and they hit on very different solutions to the same problem based on their starting materials.
David  35:12  
Yeah, the third finger. So it is the third it's the middle finger that they're using to do it. And my favorite thing to it's, it's very, very long. It is this unusually creepy looking finger. There was a paper that came out recently that got a video footage of Aye Ayes picking their nose, putting that finger all the way to the base, the full finger, all the way up in there, to get as much reach as they can, yep, into the into the throat.
Brian  35:54  
I'm gonna shout out another podcast here weird and dead, because they did a whole, the whole episode on the freaky fingers and the nose picking. 
David  36:01  
Oh, just, Oh, that's great. 
Brian  36:03  
Oh, absolutely, of course they did. That's their whole jam, right? Gross, the gross things in biology and evolution that nobody wants to talk about. There was even some discussion of, why do they do this? It's like, I don't know, humans do it too. Why do humans do it?
Will  36:18  
one of those of, like, super weird for us to think about doing it. I bet it feels amazing,
David  36:24  
like a Q tip in the ear. Yeah, just
Will  36:28  
No, itch, you can't get to Yeah.
Brian  36:35  
All right, so we said New World and Old World monkeys. Okay, so we got to talk about this. We got monkeys in South America and we got monkeys in Eurasia. Those are different groups of monkeys, right?
David  36:49  
Yes. Generally speaking, New World monkeys are in the new world the Americas Old World monkeys are on the other half of the world,
Brian  36:57  
okay, but they're not okay. They but you said, because of that, phylogenetically, that means that everything between them is also, if we're going to call monkeys a group, that means everything in between them is also a monkey, right? So they share a common answer with each other. But like, where did they come from? And where did the new to the new world? Are we? Are we doing some insane rafting to get monkeys to the new world? 
Will  37:20  
Yeah, that does seem like what happened
Jason Wallace  37:22  
That's exactly what we're doing. Oh, so this is, this is not like breakup of Gondwana land or whatever. 
Brian  37:26  
No, it wouldn't, because the continents were already split before primates existed.
David  37:30  
Yep, yeah, yeah. The earliest monkeys in the Americas, I think, are Oligocene, so like 30 something million years ago, I think, is where, where they are, which is way after the Atlantic Ocean was nice and wide by that point, okay, and all the evidence suggests that the ancestors of New World monkeys rafted across the ocean at some point. 
Will  37:55  
Yeah, from Africa.
Brian  37:56  
There's a ridiculous story to be told there about the monkeys that rafted across the Atlantic and didn't die.
David  38:02  
There's a chapter in Riley Black's latest book when the earth was green that depicts a scene of this exact thing happening.
Brian  38:11  
Okay, crazy. 
Jason Wallace  38:12  
You got to figure out if there was some group of monkeys that managed to raft all the way across. There are many, many more that didn't. 
Will  38:20  
Oh, yeah,
David  38:23  
it probably happened multiple times. This is also rodents did the same thing. So there are the group, I think it's caviamorphs. The group that is includes like capybaras and porcupines. New World porcupines, also appear to have rafted across around the same time. So for any listeners who are baffled by what we're talking about, a thing that we see happening pretty regularly in the modern world is you will get, like a storm, will tear a chunk of forest off or something, and then you end up with, like a log and a mat of vegetation, just a big, just a big chunk of floating Trees and leaves and vegetative matter that often has animals in it. And those rafts can go anywhere. And if they make landfall somewhere, those creatures can then crawl off and, you know, go find food and shelter somewhere where they are this there is good evidence to suggest that many times throughout Earth history, this process has been responsible for taking a group of animals to a part of the world that was new to them, 
Brian  39:35  
interesting, So then the the ocean currents must have a huge I wonder if you can infer certain things about ocean currents. So, for instance, placentals in in Australia didn't happen. So nothing rafted and survived. But then do New World monkeys? Did they go through some kind of crazy bottleneck where basically all New World monkeys are descended from, like 50 monkeys who got there at a certain time or. You said there have been multiple instances of rafting?
David  40:02  
Yes, yeah, I think, I think that's from genetic evidence. Now, we're a little bit outside of my familiarity, but it seems like there are multiple origins of New World monkeys, which probably means that at least a couple of different populations rafted over.
Brian  40:24  
Let's see. Okay, so that's our New World monkeys, and this is our spider monkeys, our howler monkeys, our capuchins, like all what there's owl monkeys, which I saw, were the only nocturnal monkeys in the new world. We got lots of nocturnal primates everywhere else, but at least in the New World monkeys, it's just those ones. But then we got our Old World monkeys, and I didn't realize baboons are actually in the Old World monkeys. So of course, it makes sense, because that's where they're from. Do baboons? Okay? Monkeys have tails. This is kind of what we would consider the trait of something being a monkey, is that has a tail, right? And I think we were talking about the color stuff, was it you guys who were telling me about the bright blue and red in a mandrill is not pigments.
David  41:07  
Yes, yes, structural, yeah, animals generally can't do blue pigments. So pigments are molecules in the cells that express different colors. Uh, mammals can't do red, and animals, I'm pretty sure animals in general, can't do blue. And so blue is structural. The actual structure of the skin or scales or feathers refracts light to make it appear blue. And red in mammals is blood. It's just the tissue becomes flushed with blood very close to the surface.
Brian  41:47  
So other examples of structural colors, you'd say animals, and that even extends to insects, a butterfly's blue wings are the shape of the scales, sort of refracting the light to make it blue, the same way that the sky is blue because it's reflect, refracting the light in such a way to bounce it around and create blue.
Will  42:05  
Your blue birds and stuff like that are also like, if you put them in the wrong light, they would stop looking blue, because it's just a trick of the light.
Brian  42:17  
Okay, so at this point, there are two groups that we have not talked about, that are represented in the primate family tree, in the game primates. Obviously, it's more complicated and more diverse than this, and that is the Gibbons and the great apes, or the gibbons I've also heard called as the lesser apes, which seems really mean to make a whole group just to put one thing into as well everybody, but not you. You can be your own side.
David  42:41  
I think historically, they were considered great apes. And then at some point, as more evidence accumulated, we realized that they were an out group. And so that's when they got their own name, the lesser apes, which is a disservice, because Gibbons are awesome.
Will  42:56  
I feel like someone who came up with that name was one who would who was extremely jealous of their ball joint wrists and went, let's call them the lesser apes that'll put them in their place.
David  43:09  
Sounds like they were named by a great ape.
Brian  43:11  
There's a lot of that going around. We really have to do something about that. Gibbons are also they're specialist in their form of movement, right? The brachiation? Like, that's there they are. Like, I guess there are. There are other primates that do it, but nobody does it as well. Or is it really just a Gibbon thing? First of all, what is it? What is brachiation?
Will  43:34  
Brachiation is a primate specialty in many ways. We can brachiate So that is being able to hang from your arms and swing and use your arm as the lever you're swinging by.
David  43:48  
When you do the monkey bars on the playground you go from hand to hand that's brachiation.
Brian  43:53  
gotcha monkey bars or rings, so basically, like half of gymnastics, exactly.
Will  44:01  
Like that's that's all brachiation. Uh, other great apes are also very good at orangutans are brachiators, and they are also primarily tree dwellers. They spend very little time on the ground. Gibbons, though, are not only tree specialists and extremely good brachiators. They're like fast like Gibbons can chase a bird down in the trees, and they are moving with such speed and precision that it just is not comparable to any other group that's doing it, except for, like, you know, spider monkeys, that move but they're not moving in the way Gibbons are moving,
Brian  44:41  
because theyre cheating, they've got an extra limb. 
Will  44:44  
Yeah, exactly Gibbons  are insanely acrobatic, and it's, it's and because they're primates, half the time it looks like it's just for fun, because they are just doing more than they definitely needed to do to get. From A to B, and watching a given with the zoomies is fantastic.
David  45:06  
They have zoomies in three dimensions.
Will  45:08  
Yes, absolutely. They put the Z and zoomies. They use that Z axis.
David  45:16  
Well, it's an interesting point to make, because we've been talking about how primates are these tree dwelling specialists, but there are several different methods among primates about how they do this, right? Great apes do not have tails, right? Gibbons have an actual ball and socket, wrist joint. They have these incredibly flexible arms, so they're great at swinging and brachiating. Orangutans are good brachiators, but they also do, like, what I think is called, like scramble climbing where they are going. They're reaching across branches. They're sort of crawling through the trees with all four limbs at once? Yes, a lot of monkeys have prehensile tails, so they're effectively climbing with five limbs. Lemurs are unusual in that they tend to be they're often vertical climbers, so their body is sort of upright while they're climbing. And they're also leapers. They jump from tree to tree and branch to branch. Okay, so even among primates, you have different styles of climbing and getting across and through trees.
Brian  46:34  
Gotcha, which was that tarsier thing, that sort of like state that leaps, that leap, that way of leaping through trees?
David  46:40  
Yes, which is part of why, when lemurs are on the ground, they hop,
Brian  46:46  
which is very fun. If you've ever seen zaboomafoo, it's the Yes. It's a fun like sideways crab bouncing, yes, with their hands held up in the air. 
Will  46:58  
Yeah. They're no longer good at walking around on flat ground. They are made for trunks. 
Brian  47:04  
Okay? Gibbons also lack a tail, right? Like, if we were to say, like, the thing that we sort of ties all the apes together is that the tail has been, I guess, do we just say it's lost, or just extremely reduced,
David  47:15  
it's effectively lost? Yes, I don't think any apes have a functional tail at all, even when, like humans, occasionally, a person will be born with a tail. But tail is in quotes because it's really just like an act, like a little nub, okay, at the base of the spine.
Brian  47:37  
So tail loss is that actually, okay? Wait, is it tail just an extension of the is a tail made up of vertebra, or is it a different set of bones?
David  47:45  
It is, it is vertebrae. It's often differently shaped vertebrae. So you can tell in a lot of animals, if you're looking at a tail vertebra versus, you know, trunk or neck.
Brian  47:55  
Is that a snake? Is that a snake thing, too? David, yes, snake.
David  47:59  
You can see, you can identify a tail vertebra by itself. Yeah, a tail is actually defined by being an extension of the trunk, okay, past the butt that is made of bones and muscle, but there's no organs with it. Okay, interesting. So all of our organs are in the body wall, like within the core of the body. A tail is an extension of the body, muscles, vertebrae, but no more organs, and it is beyond the butt.
Will  48:30  
This is why a lot of your arthropods that have tails aren't actually like a scorpions tail is just its abdomen. A scorpion poops out of the tip of its tail right before the stinger? Oh, no, yep, the stinger tail is full of organs that. So that is not actually a tail. That is just a long body that has been made into a tail like structure.
Brian  48:53  
I am. There's that horrible pun that I'm building in my head, and I haven't finished it. So anybody feel free to pick this up. But it's like bed butt and beyond
Brian  49:06  
but anyway, so, so it's
David  49:07  
Bod butt and beyond, yes. 
Brian  49:09  
There we go, body butt and beyond.
Brian  49:13  
So we actually then prime we, because we are also apes and graded specifically, have literally lost vertebra, like it's just, it's just gone, like we don't make them anymore.
David  49:26  
we've also lost teeth,
Brian  49:28  
yeah, I guess that's true. 
Will  49:29  
Yeah, shortened our snouts down.
David  49:31  
Okay? Dental count,
Brian  49:33  
so we have fewer teeth than other other great apes, or just other primates,
David  49:37  
other mammals, okay, other mammals.
Brian  49:41  
So great apes that you know, I bonobos and chimps are considered separate now, right? I know that they weren't when I was young, but now we consider them two different species, correct?
David  49:51  
Yes, yes, they're both in the same genus. They're Pan Okay, so chimps and bonobos are our closest cousins. So the great ape tree. Is orangutans on the outside, right the early branch, then gorillas, then chimps and bonobos, and then side by side with chimps and bonobos is humans, the hominins.
Will  50:13  
And we can see there that the great apes arrive from best to worst.
David  50:22  
Yeah, no, that's you pretty much got it. Primates prime, like a, like a pop, a successful film franchise. They really nailed it on the first one, and then they just been trying and failing ever since
Will  50:36  
I like the sequel. Gorillas, real cool. The sequel is good. I lost interest after that.
Brian  50:43  
Hey, man, I love orangutans, right? I think we might have a little bit of redhead bias over here,
Will  50:51  
but long arms and red hair makes me biased. I don't know,
Brian  50:56  
but the one thing I like, Okay, so let's actually look at how it's represented in the game. So remember, every one of these creatures that's in the game has a card that's associated with it. They have basically a portraiture of a representative of that species. So there is several different subspecies of chimpanzee, gorillas, orangutans, and each of those have a different abilities. Now, in great apes, there is a card for human. It is not one portrait. It's actually a collection of portraits. There is no ability that's specifically associated with humans. There is no benefit to collecting the human card.
David  51:32  
You can be human and you're you just get an extra feet and that's it. You don't have any special abilities.
Jason Wallace  51:37  
I mean, given how many specialized adaptations we have. I think that's an oversight.
Brian  51:42  
I think it was clearly not it was it. It was an active, conscious choice. It's like we are not going to pick a person to represent all of humanity, and we are not going to pick an ability that represents all of humanity. We're just, we're basically kicking it down the curb. We're not dealing with it. Here's your human you're in the great apes. You can collect it if you want. I don't think there's any bonus points that lets you get you get for collecting humans. It's like, we can't leave them out, because that's wrong, but we're also not gonna let them be the same as everything else. 
Jason Wallace  52:12  
You make it sound like they were so grudgingly included. 
Brian  52:15  
It's like, I think they were, I kind of, I'm not kidding, yeah, I think we're like, well, we can't leave them out, but we're not going to put them in the game in the same way.
David  52:25  
I think the choice to have a collage instead of a single portrait image is an excellent choice. Yeah, I think that's that's always that's such a difficult because once you start talking about humans, you're in culture territory, and you're in modern culture, and how do you pick a single living culture to represent the entire species that you make it a collage, you skip that issue like doing an ancient human might have been the only way to get around that of like and even then, if you're depicting them as they once lived, yes, are you in? Are they based on particular demographics, living human? How are you but
Brian  53:07  
you're forgetting. The obvious solution is, you make them yellow. You just go Simpsons, 
David  53:14  
that's true. Or Lego, yes, you just make it a lego person.
Jason Wallace  53:16  
I think we could have had some special abilities, tool use, endurance running. That's true.
Brian  53:22  
Actually, you're right. Bipedalism actually would have been a very easy thing to go with, which is worth talking about, because I know we've all done this. Look at your feet. They are hands, I'm sorry, and it's weird, like primates have four hands, and we tried to turn those hands into feet, and we walk weird. So weird compared to everything. I don't, yes, what else can you say this? Humans walk weird. We just do,
Will  53:49  
yeah, no, I absolutely think that should have been the ability, and it could, it could have had some mobility thing of like, you get to you get to re roll a low dice when you want to move, and you get to move farther, because you're a long distance traveler, like that's what humans are good at.
David  54:05  
If I didn't know you mentioned the cheek pouch thing, you could also have done the same thing with that, because your hands are free,
Brian  54:15  
yeah, for sure, yeah. 
Will  54:18  
I definitely think that's a little bit of an oversight. I can, I'd like the DND mentality. I get potentially where they were coming from, but that definitely feels like it's missing.
Brian  54:29  
Yeah, I think, you know, bipedal and tool using specialists. I mean, that's just, I mean, that's, that's what we are. You gotta explain well. And there's a couple other things, like highly vocal humans are incredibly vocal. But you know, not everybody I understand why they didn't do it. So I guess, okay, I'm already into my nitpick territory. You could have given humans something, right? Yes, okay, that is pretty much in terms of the science we have now crossed the family tree of primates more or less. We have talked about each of the different groups and a little bit of a weirdness on each of them. Is there something that you guys saw in the game that you'd like to talk about, that we haven't talked about?
Will  55:10  
I like that the cards focused in on the diverse array of things that primates eat and would give like, here's a food, here's some of the primates that eat this food and focus in on that because we, I think very often it's primates are often very good generalists in that they're not, you know, they're not known as picky eaters, but they do have a wide range of specialties. And you get things like gorillas, which are herbivores, like, mostly, they are specialized for, you know, grazing effectively, like, not like a cow does, but they are eating bamboo and tough foliage, which is a very specialized herbivore of a primate. So we just, I like that they emphasize the diet more to be like they're they're not all just eating the typical stuff that you think of a monkey eating or us eating. They're eating a wide variety of stuff.
Brian  56:09  
They're not eating bananas. I don't think bananas in the game, actually. Yeah, they didn't.
David  56:13  
I think on the Kickstarter page they say there are no bananas in this game.
Brian  56:19  
There were plenty of insects though,
David  56:22  
yes, and and I it was really cool because it meant that you'd pick a food card, and the food card would be like a real plant with a scientific name and a portrait. And it means that this game about primates isn't just about primates. No, there's also some plants in there, there's some insects, and I think that that is both fun because right you're learning even more stuff. You're learning things beyond primates, but it also really drives home a really important part about studying ecology and evolution, which is that you can't just study primates, because primates live alongside other species, and they eat other species, and they in order to fully understand any group of animals, you also have to know about other species, because that's their predators or their prey or whatnot.
Jason Wallace  57:17  
For me, I want to talk a bit about the bonus cards, because we didn't actually get to see that many due to the nature of the game. I don't think you see that many of the bonus cards in any given game. It's a thick stack of cards, but this is where you have a lot of the the other side about primates. So I'm looking on the Kickstarter here. It has things like fission fusion, which is a certain thing that groups of chimps, I think, will do in terms of restructuring their social networks and such, but it's also where you get a lot of how we interact with primates. You mentioned there's like protective legislation, there's a wildlife veterinarian card. There's other things there that are showing how humans are interacting with primates. And since they're all bonus cards. They're probably the good ways we are interacting with primates. I doubt that there is a habitat destruction card or a bushmeat card.
Brian  58:07  
Probably not on the probably not on the heart track. No, I think that that would be a weird, weird way to get points for
David  58:15  
well, and Brian mentioned the sort of passive learning. And there are cards that are like China, right? Primates that live in China. And it's just a list of primates that live in China. And I had a moment, I don't remember, I might have been the China it was one of those cards. I had a moment sitting there, and I looked at one of those cards and I went, Oh, I didn't know that species lived in in that part of the world. Oh, that's cool. And that's, you know, that was a thing that I learned along the way,
Jason Wallace  58:42  
I think the other thing to throw out is that this is probably the best, the best cited game that we have. Not the others are citing it. But if you look at the back of the rule book, we talk about showing your work and showing your sources. You said, every single card has a citation link to it.? 
Brian  58:59  
As near as I could tell. This game, this board game, has an extensive references cited section that is longer than many review papers, every card, every dietary card, every behavior, every everything seems to be linked to a an appropriate citation. I actually, I'm curious what citation format they used. I didn't check that the Chicago style,
Jason Wallace  59:24  
but it does mean that they did a lot of work to make sure it's accurate. We talk about hard science versus soft science games. This is definitely a hard science game. They wanted to be true to the actual science out there, to the actual reality, while also making a game that was fun to play.
David  59:41  
I was reflecting on this while we were talking, you know, going over the rules and such. The last time we were on your podcast, we had played holotype. And holotype is really a game where the mechanics of the game are capturing the scientific process. Yes, right. It's gamified. But it is very much you know you're doing the things that actual scientists do.
Brian  1:00:05  
Holotype is about being a paleontologist.
David  1:00:08  
Yeah, this game is an interesting approach, because the mechanics aren't trying to be one to one with primate ecology or evolution. So instead, the primate evolutionary tree is the setting for a game that is built to take place in that setting we talked during playing that the tree that is the game board is both a evolutionary tree of primates and a physical, actual tree, right? Like you can climb between the branches and stuff, and in terms of scientific representation, that doesn't make any sense, right? That is not an accurate way to depict either of those things, but it makes a game out of this real scientific depiction of primate evolution. And I thought, I think they did a really excellent job balancing. You made a game where all of the pieces are scientific things, yeah, as opposed to a game where you're like, true, the game is you're traveling through primate evolution. That's not really what they've done here. They just made a game out of the pieces of primate evolution.
Brian  1:01:26  
The goal of the game is to learn about primates. The goal is to learn about primates.
Jason Wallace  1:01:31  
Yeah, it reminds me a lot about periodic which we did a few episodes back where It's a game where your board is the periodic table. The game is not about the periodic table. That's just the the tableau on...