The Natural History of the Primates

As our closest living relatives, monkeys and apes hold a special appeal for humans. Their lively inquiring minds, superb agility, and manipulative skills, that so remind us of ourselves, have evolved over tens of millions of years and have their origins deep in the fossil record. This natural history, clearly written by two distinguished primatologists, provides a basic and fully-illustrated introduction to the order of primates. It answers such questions as how and why this remarkable process of adaptive change took place, what features of primate primitive anatomy lent themselves to such striking changes, what were the origins of their sophisticated social activities, and what are our relationships, as humans, to these animals and their ancestors. The Natural History of the Primates introduces the order and describes its general characteristics and distribution, reviews the fossil record on primate origins, and describes anatomical details, and social behavior. The heart of the book offers specific profiles of the individual primate species—among them the lemurs of Madagascar, the bushbabies of Africa, and the marmosets of South America, the impudent capuchin monkeys, the highly social baboons, the striking black-and-white colobus, and, familiar to us all, the gibbons, orangutans, chimpanzees, and gorillas. A final chapter focuses on Homo sapiens and its precursors. The book concludes with a helpful glossary, a list of further readings, and references.