Primates in History, Myth, Art, and Science

Non-human primates (hereafter just primates) play a special role in human societies, especially in regions where modern humans and primates co-exist. Primates feature in myths and legends and in traditional indigenous knowledge. Explorers observed them in the wild and brought them, at great cost, to Europe. There they were valued as pets and for display, their images featured in art and architecture, and where they were literally teased apart by scientists. The international team of contributors to this book draws these different perspectives together to show how primates helped humans better understand their own place in nature. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students as well scholars in disciplines ranging from anthropology to art history.

Key features:

• Includes contributions from an international team of historians and natural scientists
• Integrates various perspectives and perceptions of non-human primates across time and place
• Summarizes the place of non-human primates in science, art and culture
• Includes rare early illustrations

Introduction

SECTION I - Lore and mythology of non-human primates since antiquity

1. South, Southeast, and East Asia

Philip Lutgendorf

2. Continental Africa

2.1 Ancient Egypt

Cybelle Greenlaw

2.2. North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Cecilia Veracini

3. Madagascar

Alessio Anania & Giuseppe Donati

4. The Americas

Cecilia Veracini & Ana Lucia Camphora

5. A non-monkey land. Non-human primates in the ancient Near East, from protohistory to the first Islamic caliphate

Marco Masseti

6. Europe from the Bronze Age (mid-3rd millennium BCE) to Greco-Roman times

Marco Masseti & Cecilia Veracini

SECTION II. The Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery in Europe and in the Arab world

7. Nonhuman primates in Medieval Europe

Cecilia Veracini

8. Perception and description of non-human primates in the Arab world

Cecilia Veracini & Malak Alghamdi

9. Non-human primates in the Age of Discovery (15th and 16th centuries)

Cecilia Veracini

SECTION III. Modern period (until Darwin)

10. Natural history of nonhuman primates in the 17th century: naturalists, missionaries, scientific expeditions and trade

Cecilia Veracini

11. Natural history of Primates in the 18th-19th centuries, before Darwin

Cecilia Veracini

12. Natural History of Great Apes from Gesner to Huxley

Giulio Barsanti

Section IV. Our Place in Nature

13. The contribution of morphology to Darwin’s understanding of the genealogy of modern humans

Bernard Wood, Ryan McRae, & Rowan M. Sherwood

14. How old and new lines of evidence have contributed to our understanding of the relationships among modern humans and the great apes: 1900-2021

Bernard Wood & Rowan M. Sherwood

Glossary

Cecilia Veracini is associated researcher in CAPP- Public Administration and Public Policies Research Centre and invited assistant professor at the Faculty of Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences/ University of Lisbon (ISCSP/ULisboa), Portugal. She graduated in Biological Science at the University of Pisa (Italy); received a Ph.D. degree in Anthropological Sciences and a Ph.D. degree in History of Science from the Florence and Pisa Universities. She served some years as Assistant Professor at the Florence and Pisa Universities and worked as collaborator at various institutions in different countries including Brazil, US and Spain. Her publications include papers in national and international peer reviewed journals and book chapters. She is co-editor of the books: ‘History of Primatology: yesterday and today. The Mediterranean Tradition’ (2019) and ‘Peoples, nature and environments: learning to live together’ (2020).

Bernard Wood is the University Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University. Previously, he was the Courtuald Professor of Anatomy in the University of London, and the Derby Professor of Anatomy in the University of Liverpool. In 1968 he joined Richard Leakey's first expedition to the Turkana Basin, Kenya, and he subsequently joined the group of researchers working on the hominins recovered from Koobi Fora in Northern Kenya. In addition to his paleoanthropological research, he has a long-standing interest in primate comparative anatomy, with a focus on the ability of hard- and soft-tissue anatomy to recover the recent evolutionary history of the extant apes, and on the history of primate comparative anatomy. He is the co-author of research articles on many aspects of comparative anatomy, and the author, or co-author, of 20 books, including Food Acquisition and Processing in Primates (1984), Major Topics in Primate and Human Evolution (1986), and photographic at