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.


About the Author
Hunt, Kevin D.: - 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.