Kategoria BISAC: Nature >> Animals - Primates

Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, are familiar enough--bright and ornery and promiscuous. But they also kill and eat their kin, in this case the red colobus monkey, which may say something about primate--even hominid--evolution. This book, the first long-term field study of a predator-prey relationship involving two wild primates, documents a six-year investigation into how the risk of predation molds primate society. Taking us to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, a place made famous by Jane Goodall's studies, the book offers a close look at how predation by wild...

How did we become the linguistic, cultured, and hugely successful apes that we are? Our closest relatives--the other mentally complex and socially skilled primates--offer tantalizing clues. In Tree of Origin nine of the world's top primate experts read these clues and compose the most extensive picture to date of what the behavior of monkeys and apes can tell us about our own evolution as a species.

It has been nearly fifteen years since a single volume addressed the issue of human evolution from a primate perspective, and in that time we have witnessed explosive growth in...

"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla," writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist's coming-of-age in remote Africa.

An exhilarating account of Sapolsky's twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A...

Kohler's classic analysis of the intelligence of apes marks a turning point in the psychology of thinking. Through meticulously described experiments, his two-fold aim is to ascertain the degree of relationship between the intellectual capacity of anthropoid apes and of man and to gain insight into the nature of intelligent acts."

Three astounding women scientists have in recent years penetrated the jungles of Africa and Borneo to observe, nurture, and defend humanity's closest cousins. Jane Goodall has worked with the chimpanzees of Gombe for nearly 50 years; Diane Fossey died in 1985 defending the mountain gorillas of Rwanda; and Birute Galdikas lives in intimate proximity to the orangutans of Borneo. All three began their work as protegees of the great Anglo-African archeologist Louis Leakey, and each spent years in the field, allowing the apes to become their familiars--and ultimately waging battles to save them...

With their tonsured heads, white faces, and striking cowls, the monkeys might vaguely resemble the Capuchin monks for whom they were named. How they act is something else entirely. They climb onto each other's shoulders four deep to frighten enemies. They test friendship by sticking their fingers up one another's noses. They often nurse--but sometimes kill--each other's offspring. They use sex as a means of communicating. And they negotiate a remarkably intricate network of alliances, simian politics, and social intrigue. Not monkish, perhaps, but as we see in this downright ethnographic...

Wild Man from Borneo offers the first comprehensive history of the human-orangutan encounter. Arguably the most humanlike of all the great apes, particularly in intelligence and behavior, the orangutan has been cherished, used, and abused ever since it was first brought to the attention of Europeans in the seventeenth century. The red ape has engaged the interest of scientists, philosophers, artists, and the public at large in a bewildering array of guises that have by no means been exclusively zoological or ecological. One reason for such a long-term engagement with a being found only on...