Myth of the typical primate

Abstract

Anthropological interest in nonhuman primates as models for human behavioral evolution has tended to focus on a relatively small number of species. This emphasis, coupled with a search for unifying principles that explain behavior, has led to a widespread perception of the semiterrestrial cercopithecines as "typical," and therefore characteristic of most other primates. The prevalence of male-biased dispersal and female philopatry, the use of aggression to establish and maintain hierarchical relationships, and the occurrence of sex for exclusively reproductive purposes have been challenged repeatedly, but the cercopithecine model of primate behavior has nonetheless persisted in much of the anthropological literature. This review incorporates accumulating data on a diversity of primates to examine the myth of the typical primate. The roles of kinship, aggression, and sex in mediating primate social relationships are far less uniform across primates than the myth has implied, raising questions about the generality of models of primate social systems derived from "typical" primates. Acknowledging existing diversity and encompassing it in more accurate portrayals of primate behavioral ecology requires consideration of the interacting effects of phylogenetic, demographic, ontogenetic, and physiological variables. o 1994 Wiley-Liss, Inc.In the last two decades, a growing number of anthropologists have begun to follow nonhuman primates out of the Old World savannas and woodlands into what remains of the world's tropical forests. Data on species that were once considered peripheral to questions about human behavioral evolution are now challenging many long-standing perceptions of comparative primate behavioral ecology. Yet, mainstream anthropology has been slow to incorporate behavioral findings from these newly studied species into its models. The anthropocentric currents of primatology run deep, and appear to have been resistant to change.Part of this resistance may be rooted in biases dating back to the first primate field studies in the 1930s, when psychologist Robert Yerkes sent his students to investigate the naturalistic behavior of nonhuman primates (Carpenter, 1934). By the mid 1950s, Japanese primatologists, influenced in part by Carpenter's work, and in part by Kinji Imanishi's belief that monkeys "resemble human beings more than they resemble other animals" (Asquith, 1991:91), initiated field studies on macaques (see Fedigan and Asquith, 1991). Soon afterward, American anthropologists began to focus on other Old World semi-terrestrial monkeys in an effort to understand the social correlates of adaptations to life on the ground (Washburn and DeVore, 1961; Dolhinow, 19721, and paleontologist Louis Leakey promoted field studies on the great apes because of their phylogenetic relatedness to humans.Unlike many anthropologists, primatologists from disciplines such as psychol- ogy and zoology have never limited their research to particular species or geographic areas that were obvious candidates for inferen...

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