Branches of primates near extinction

MANKIND’S closest relatives are teetering on the brink of their first extinctions in more than a century, hunted by humans for food and medicine and squeezed from forest homes, a report on endangered primates said yesterday.

There are just a few dozen of the most threatened gibbons and langurs left, and one colobus may already have gone the way of the dodo, warned the report on the 25 most vulnerable primates.

“You could fit all the surviving members of these 25 species in a single football stadium — that’s how few of them remain on earth today,” said Russell Mittermeier, president of US-based environmental group Conservation International.