Chimpanzee Cultures [Paperback]

Do chimpanzees have something akin to culture? Bringing together studies of behavioral variation within and among chimpanzees and bonobos --the sibling species of the genusPan--this book provides the basis for answering this question. InChimpanzee Cultures, the world's leading authorities on chimpanzees and bonobos chronicle the animals' behaviors from one study site to the next, in both captive and wild groups, in laboratory and field settings.Chimpanzee Culturesbeautifully conveys the experience of working with chimpanzees, our closest living relative...[It] gives us a better appreciation of the place of our own species in Nature.This volume presents the best up-to-date collection of the current state of knowledge of most aspects of chimpanzee behaviour, and it spells out the dangers now facing the apes and their environments. The study of chimpanzee cultures is crying out for more information from the increasingly isolated and diminishing communities of these apes. This book shows what has to be done, and where.Chimpanzee Culturesis a title to catch the eye...The aims are made explicit at the outset: to create a discipline of `cultural primatology' by using the tools to the cultural sciences and encouraging the use of ethnography in comparing chimpanzee populations...The quality of material on the subject animals is high. All the papers are original, many containing previously unpublished data, and they do an excellent job of highlighting behavioural diversity...This is a book chiefly aimed at the scholarly community, yet it carries an important message for all of us. Wild chimpanzee populations continue to decline through habitat destruction and hunting for bush-meat: the bare bones of this are made clear in the book's final chapter by Jane Goodall. The dwindling of any species through human short-sightedness is depressing, but chimpanzees present a special case.Chimpanzee Culturesprovides ample evidence that chimpanzees are nolƒ-