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Humans views of other primates include myths and legends, accounts of early European naturalists, artistic interpretations, and natural histories, anatomical studies and collections. This book synthesizes all these different perspectives and reveals something about our perceived place in the natural world.
List of contents
Introduction
SECTION I - Lore and mythology of non-human primates since antiquity1. South, Southeast, and East Asia
Philip Lutgendorf2. Continental Africa
2.1 Ancient Egypt
Cybelle Greenlaw2.2. North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Cecilia Veracini 3. Madagascar
Alessio Anania & Giuseppe Donati 4. The Americas
Cecilia Veracini & 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 VeraciniSECTION II. The Middle Ages and the Age of Discovery in Europe and in the Arab world7. Nonhuman primates in Medieval Europe
Cecilia Veracini8. Perception and description of non-human primates in the Arab world
Cecilia Veracini & Malak Alghamdi9. 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 Veracini11. Natural history of Primates in the 18th-19th centuries, before Darwin
Cecilia Veracini 12. Natural History of Great Apes from Gesner to Huxley
Giulio BarsantiSection 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. SherwoodGlossary
About the author
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 atlases of the musculoskeletal anatomy of gorillas (2010), gibbons and siamangs (2012), chimpanzees (2013), orangutans (2013), and bonobos (2017).
Summary
Humans views of other primates include myths and legends, accounts of early European naturalists, artistic interpretations, and natural histories, anatomical studies and collections. This book synthesizes all these different perspectives and reveals something about our perceived place in the natural world.
