ARCH 131 Lecture Notes - Cayo Santiago, Louis Leakey, Primatology
27 May 2014
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Document Summary
As discussed at the start of the primate unit, the living non-human primates can serve as illustrations or examples of evolutionary principles like natural selection, sexual selection, adaptive radiation, and convergent evolution. This can provide us with some idea of how early humans behaved and why we evolved the way we did. The importance of this approach is reflected in the existence of, primatology, as a closely related discipline to physical anthropology. We have seen that sociality is one of the most fundamental characteristics of the primate adaptation as a whole. Modern primatology resulted from a major change in the approach to studying non-human primates in the 1960s. Prior to this, most primate studies were carried out with captive monkeys and apes in zoos and any observation done in the wild was very short term a few days or perhaps a couple of weeks.
