In a viral ad campaign, producers of the upcoming film "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" have released a series of videos showing weapon-wielding apes.
Stylized to look like documentary footage out of Africa, one video features a chimp shooting an AK-47 at a group of off-duty soldiers who had been taunting it. Another clip shows a chimp hacking a carcass to bits with a machete.
The footage is most likely intended to make the premise of the new film (intelligence-enhanced apes rising up and taking control of Earth, enslaving humans in the process) frighteningly plausible. But can chimps really wield weapons?
According to experts: yes. Though the footage in the videos is staged, the chimps involved are merely "actors," and the underlying message -- that apes could rebel and use the advanced weapons we've developed against us -- is extremely unlikely, chimps are indeed capable of being trained to use a diverse armory of weapons.
But would the apes know what to do with an AK-47, or use one to cause intentional harm? Probably not.
"I wouldn't doubt that you could train a chimp to wield a gun in the manner shown," said John Mitani, a primatologist at the University of Michigan who specializes in chimp aggression.
Likewise, Steve Ross, a chimpanzee primatologist at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, agreed that chimps are cognitively and physically capable of operating weapons, and said they even use them in the wild.
"Chimpanzees have been seen to use rudimentary weapons (such as projectiles, clubs and spears), so they have the capability of understanding that a tool can be used to cause harm or do damage," Ross told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. "Whether or not they would understand a gun is more difficult to say."
Any chimp gunplay would most likely be restricted to mimicry. Mitani believes actor chimps would likely learn to operate machine guns to please their trainers and receive rewards, but he doesn't think the apes are capable of using them to purposely do harm.
"When shooting the gun, I'd be hard-pressed to think that the chimp can really understand [the consequences of] what he's doing."
