The Great Apes: A Short History

A unique, beautifully illustrated exploration of our fascination with our closest primate relatives, and the development of primatology as a discipline

This insightful work is a compact but wide-ranging survey of humankind’s relationship to the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans), from antiquity to the present. Replete with fascinating historical details and anecdotes, it traces twists and turns in our construction of primate knowledge over five hundred years. Chris Herzfeld outlines the development of primatology and its key players and events, including well-known long-term field studies, notably the pioneering work by women such as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas.
 
Herzfeld seeks to heighten our understanding of great apes and the many ways they are like us. The reader will encounter apes living in human families, painting apes, apes who use American Sign Language, and chimpanzees who travelled in space.
 
A philosopher and historian specializing in primatology, Herzfeld offers thought-provoking insights about our perceptions of apes, as well as the boundary between “human” and “ape” and what it means to be either.

• Orangutans: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (The MIT Press)
• Mountain Gorillas: Biology, Conservation, and Coexistence
• Wattana: An Orangutan in Paris
• The New Chimpanzee: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait of Our Closest Kin
• Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
• The Quotable Darwin
• I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals
• A Different Kind of Animal: How Culture Transformed Our Species (The University Center for Human Values Series)
• Zooland: The Institution of Captivity (The Cultural Lives of Law)
• Chimpanzees and Human Evolution