There’s a lot we don’t know about gorillas. This is due to the lack of legal dead gorillas to dissect. And that means many details of our shared family tree remain unclear. For instance, we used to believe that if you look at all the primates, you’d see a gradual increase in the complexity of the lower facial muscles — important in human speech and facial expressions — as you moved from primates that are closer to our common ancestors, like the loris, say, to the Great Apes and humans.
But scientists haven’t had much of a chance to see for themselves where gorillas actually fit in this supposed spectrum. Now science — and a gorilla named Lia — may be shedding light on a question that’s more complex than it sounds.
