The Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Video: Ape delves into the world of our closest living relatives and gives us a detailed portrait of how their lives compare and contrast with our own. With two hundred plus species, primates are divided into two categories: primitive primates and higher primates including apes, gorillas and even ourselves. They can grip objects in their hands, have forward facing eyes and their brain sizes are relative to body size. We've all heard ferocious gorilla stories and seen movies like King Kong, a monkey was the first living creature in space, and legend defines a chimpanzee as half man and half monkey. But that's who apes are in our world. By tracking the life cycle of a chimpanzee, in thirty minutes we are shown who they are in relation to their world. With breathtaking footage of these creatures in the wild combined with in studio footage and computer animation, the video covers subjects as varied as anatomy, birth and child rearing, diet and communication. Most primates are tree-dwellers and live on the continents of Africa, Asia and South America. The largest however, the mountain gorilla with over 400 pounds of muscle, must live closer to the ground. Their communication skills are sometimes as detailed as our own, as some species have up to six different calls alerting danger and we have been able to teach sign language to chimps. Although baby primates are born with the instincts to suckle and hold on (to trees, parents) higher primates require a long childhood to learn, much like ourselves, and development is discussed in detail. Almost all but the orangutan travel in troops for protection. Well-known mysteries surrounding primates are not ignored, and the names Bigfoot and the Yetti pop up for discussion. In fact, a similar myth involving the pygmy chimp was proven true with the discovery of the species in 1923, so perhaps we've yet to find our other mysterious friends. This colorful and informative video allows us to learn more about our primate cousins than we ever could by simply observing them in captivity, and we may recognize a trait or two in ourselves as well. Even though apes are not designed to walk upright all the time, it is easy to see our relation. And anyone who doesn't believe we evolved from these creatures should take note: our genetic material is 98.4 percent the same, making us closer to apes than zebras are to horses.