Chimpanzee Lessons from our Sister Species

The chimpanzee is one of our planet's best-loved and most instantly recognisable animals. Splitting from the human lineage between four and six million years ago, it is (along with its cousin, the bonobo) our closest living relative, sharing around 94% of our DNA. First encountered by Westerners in the seventeenth century, virtually nothing was known about chimpanzees in their natural environment until 1960, when Jane Goodall travelled to Gombe to live and work with them. Accessibly written, yet fully referenced and uncompromising in its accuracy and comprehensiveness, this book encapsulates everything we currently know about chimpanzees: from their discovery and why we study them, to their anatomy, physiology, genetics and culture. The text is beautifully illustrated and infused with examples and anecdotes drawn from the author's thirty years of primate observation, making this a perfect resource for students of biological anthropology and primatology as well as non-specialists interested in chimpanzees.

1. Sister's keeper: humans and chimpanzees; 2. Wild lesson: why study animals in nature?; 3. A most surprising creature: the discovery of the chimpanzee; 4. Kin: the chimpanzee's place in nature; 5. Scratching out a living in an unforgiving world: habitat and diet; 6. Guts, glorious guts, large stomach and colon; 7. Thews, sinews and bone: chimpanzee anatomy and osteology; 8. Arboreal gathering, terrestrial traveling: locomotion and posture; 9. Forged in nature's cauldron: engineering the chimpanzee; 10. Up from the protoape: the evolution of the chimpanzee; 11. Building a natural wonder: growth, development and life history; 12. The source of similarity: chimpanzee genetics; 13. Making your way in the great wild world: chimpanzee senses; 14. The grim reaper in the forest primeval: wild chimpanzee diseases and lessons for healthy living; 15. Powering life: physiology and endocrinology; 16. Shelter from the storm: chimpanzee mothering; 17. Meat seeking missiles: chimpanzees as hunters; 18. The mind of the chimpanzee: reasoning, memory and emotion; 19. The brain of the chimpanzee: the mind's motor; 20. Tired nature's sweet restorer: chimpanzee sleep; 21. Chimpanzee thought transfer: communication and language; 22. Ape implements: making and using tools; 23. Wisdom of the ages: chimpanzee culture; 24. The daily grind: within-group aggression; 25. A nation at war with itself: defending a community of the mind; 26. The sporting chimpanzee: dominance without destruction; 27. The passion of Pan: sex and reproduction; 28. Into the light: Semliki chimpanzees; 29. The other sister, bonobos: the monkey convergence hypothesis; 30. Sister species: lessons from the chimpanzee; Appendix 1. Primate taxonomy; Appendix 2. Professional grade chimpanzee; Index.

Kevin D. Hunt is Professor of Animal Behaviour and Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is also Founder and Director of the Semliki Chimpanzee Project, which was established in 1996 to study and preserve the chimpanzees within the Toro-Semliki Wildlife Reserve. Broadly trained in various anthropological disciplines, much of Professor Hunt's published work has centred on functional morphology and what chimpanzee locomotion, posture and ecology can tell us about what led humans to diverge from apes, and what advantage bipedalism gave our chimpanzee-like ancestors roughly five million years ago.