However well the anatomy of the gastrointestinal tracts of a wide range of mammals are described and quantified, there can be no real explanation of observed patterns without consideration of the mechanical and chemical properties of the food consumed, and digestive stages involved in its processing. This book aims to integrate findings from the many different types of investigations of mammalian digestive systems into a coherent whole. Using the themes of food, form and function, researchers discuss models of digestive processes, linking this with evolutionary aspects of food utilization....

However well the anatomy of the gastrointestinal tracts of a wide range of mammals are described and quantified, there can be no real explanation of observed patterns without consideration of the mechanical and chemical properties of the food consumed, and digestive stages involved in its processing. This book aims to integrate findings from the many different types of investigations of mammalian digestive systems into a coherent whole. Using the themes of food, form and function, researchers discuss models of digestive processes, linking this with evolutionary aspects of food utilization....

The hand commonly is considered to have exerted great influence on the evolution of typically human characteristics, like upright posture, stereoscopic vision, -manipulative- handling of parts of the environment. The German term -Begreifen-, which is commonly used for the understanding of complex relationships in a generalised, abstract sense, always implies the original meaning of seizing objects with the aid of the hands. The hands are also of greatest importance for the survival of the other, non-human primates. Hands are absolutely essential for locomotion in an arboreal habitat, and the...

This book results from a two-day symposium and three-day workshop held in Cambridge between March 22nd and March 26th 1982 and sponsored by the Primate Society of Great Britain and the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland. More than 100 primatologists attended the symposium and some 35 were invited to participate in the workshop. Speakers from Prance, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa and the U. S. A., as weIl as the U. K., were invited to contribute. In recent years feeling had strengthened that primatologists in Europe did not gather together sufficiently often. Distinctive...