Almost Family – Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal, Botanical Garden, Montréal, Québec

Almost family is a Mosaiculture artwork presented by the Republic of Guinea in West Africa.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closest cousins in the larger Hominidae family. In fact, we share 98.7% of our gene pool with each of them. You have to go back six million years, to the end of the Miocene era, to find the common ancestor of these three species. Since the end of the 1960s, many studies have enabled us to discover the intellectual abilities of chimpanzees. A female chimp named Lana, for example, was the first to learn a symbol-based language invented for primates known as Yerkish.

Chimpanzee populations are declining everywhere in Africa. Whereas two million individuals existed at the dawn of the 20th century, today the number is somewhere between 150,000 and 250,000. And the trend gives little cause for optimism: their numbers have fallen by half over the last 20 years alone, resulting in the disappearance of the genus from four African countries. Poaching is a problem, as well as deforestation, which breaks up the chimpanzees’ habitat into small islands.

Thankfully, efforts have been made to reverse this decline. Since 2001, the survival of chimpanzees has been the focus of the great ape protection program called GRASP, established by the United Nations Environment Program.

For a description of the art of Mosaiculture and of the Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal competition, please turn to the first photo in this series at:

www.ipernity.com/doc/jonathan.cohen/33872015