"The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys" is an intriguing compilation of naturalistic and experimental research conducted over the course of 20 years on gestural communication in primates, as well as a comparison to what is known about the vocal communication of nonhuman primates. The editors also make systematic comparisons to the gestural communication of prelinguistic and just-linguistic human children. An enlightening exploration unfolds into what may represent the starting point for the evolution of human communication and language.
This especially significant read is...

The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys is an intriguing compilation of naturalistic and experimental research conducted over the course of 20 years on gestural communication in primates, as well as a comparison to what is known about the vocal communication of nonhuman primates. The editors also make systematic comparisons to the gestural communication of prelinguistic and just-linguistic human children. An enlightening exploration unfolds into what may represent the starting point for the evolution of human communication and language.

This especially significant read is...

The last decade has witnessed remarkable discoveries and advances in our understanding of the tool using behaviour of animals. Wild populations of capuchin monkeys have been observed to crack open nuts with stone tools, similar to the skills of chimpanzees and humans. Corvids have been observed to use and make tools that rival in complexity the behaviours exhibited by the great apes. Excavations of the nut cracking sites of chimpanzees have been dated to around 4-5 thousand years ago. Tool Use in Animals collates these and many more contributions by leading scholars in psychology, biology and...

This two-volume handbook presents the different aspects of comparative psychology--behavior, cognition, learning, and neurophysiology--in a balanced and exhaustive manner. Comparative psychology is the scientific study of animal cognition and behavior from an evolutionary perspective. There are 80 chapters across the set, divided into nine parts. History and Methods constitute the first two parts of the handbook. Key events and basic questions (and controversies) that have shaped the field as well as the methods used to make those questions empirically tractable are presented here. The next...