Primate Evolution and Behavior Syllabus / FALL 2025
ANTH 3313-001 SyllabusDownload
Tag: primates
Envisioning a More Empathetic Treatment of Great Ape Remains
Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. Now anthropologists are advocating to pay similar respects to primates.…
Were Twins the Norm in Our Primate Past?
New research uncovers how the last common primate ancestors typically birthed twins until evolutionary pressures began to favor singletons—likely driven by the advantages of birthing larger, brainier …
Learning From Handy Primates
A researcher who studies animal behavior looks at tool use in nonhuman primates to better illuminate tool use in humans. Many of our primate relatives use tools. How…
Spend a Day Tracking Chimpanzees
A series of short videos captures a rare view into the lives of wild chimps through the eyes of a researcher. ✽ Some see chimpanzees as invariably belligerent…
What Bigfoot Teaches Us About Public Mistrust of Science
In the 1960s, credentialed scientists, including physical anthropologists, hunted for the legendary Sasquatch. How did they fall for the hoax? ✽ In the late 1960s, Bigfoot seemed to…
Monogamy. Grandmas. Milk. The Evolution of Childhood Is Very Strange.
In a new book, Growing Up Human, a bioarchaeologist chronicles some of the most surprising evolutionary adaptations of babies, parents, and grandparents. This article is excerpted and adapted…
Extracting Hominin Evolution From Fossilized Teeth
Two anthropologists explain how analyses of oxygen isotopes from 17-million-year-old ape teeth could lead to new insights on early human evolution amid environmental changes. This article was origina…
Does “Monkeypox” Give Monkeys a Bad Name?
The debate over naming the virus known as monkeypox says a lot about the close—but fraught—relationships between humans and our fellow primates. ✽ The name of the latest…
What Chimpanzees Know About Giving Medicine
Chimps exhibit unique behaviors in different communities, such as these who clasp hands while grooming one another. P. Gagneux/GMERC This article was originally published at The Conversat…
Did Dads Evolve?
[no-caption] Vincent van Gogh/Wikimedia Commons This article was originally published at Knowable Magazine and has been republished under Creative Commons. Lee Gettler is hard to get on t…
The Evolution of Throwing
United States Olympic athlete Kara Winger competes in the women’s javelin throw in 2019. Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images With the Tokyo Olympics on the horizon, Kara Winger is trainin…
How Apes Reveal Human History
Except for humans, every great ape is endangered—many at great risk of going extinct. There are fewer than 300,000 chimpanzees living in the wild. USAID Africa Bureau/Wikimedia Commons…
All Things Ape
One illustrator’s approach to conveying the multidimensional lives of apes with particular focus on their anatomy. *This essay includes scientific illustrations as well as descriptions of the observin…
Why Are There So Many Humans?
Savanna Pumé (hunter-gatherers in Venezuela) children, shown here building a house, learn to cooperate from a young age. Russell D. Greaves Something curious happened in human population …
Can an “Invasive Species” Earn the Right to Stay?
Macaques sit near Florida’s Silver River. Rachel Simmons/Flickr Steve Johnson never thought he’d have to worry about death threats, not in his line of work. Johnson is a…
What Orangutans Taught Me About Motherhood
[no-caption] Sascha Wenninger/Flickr The first time I saw wild orangutans, in Borneo back in 2017, it was a mother-infant pair that caught my eye. The mother, Bibi, had…
Animal Grief Shows We Aren’t Meant to Die Alone
A mother gorilla cradles her dead baby at a zoo in Germany in 2008. Rolf Wilms/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images As the SARS-CoV-2 virus rocks the world, a haunting aspect of…
Why Social Distancing Feels So Strange
People stand 6 feet apart while waiting in line for a store in Denver, Colorado. Michael Ciaglo/Stringer/Getty Images Around the world, millions of people are now practicing social…
Decolonizing Extinction: An Interview with Juno Salazar Parreñas
Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation By Juno Salazar Parreñas, The Ohio State University 288pp. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. § Colin Hoag spoke with…
Does Your Microbiome Shape Your Friendships?
[no-caption] Sara López Gilabert/SAPIENS It is early morning on a wide plain in Amboseli National Park in southern Kenya. With a small Dixie cup and a wooden tongue…
Decolonizing Primatology: Part I
We all have texts that are formative in our academic, professional, spiritual, personal, mental, and philosophical lives. There are a few books that I can point to as…
The Myth of Badass Sperm
This scanning electron micrograph (SEM) shows healthy spermatozoa emerging from a cavity within the testis. Innerspace Imaging/Getty Images This article was originally published at Aeon. …
Why Can’t Apes Talk?
[no-caption] Science Photo Library/Getty Images This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons. We all know that parrots can tal…