Primates in History, Myth, Art, and Science

Humans views of other primates include myths and legends, accounts of early European naturalists, artistic interpretations, and natural histories, anatomical studies and collections. This book synthesizes all these different perspectives and reveals something about our perceived place in the natural world.

Cecilia Veracini is associated researcher in CAPP- Public Administration and Public Policies Research Centre and invited assistant professor at the Faculty of Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences/ University of Lisbon (ISCSP/ULisboa), Portugal. She graduated in Biological Science at the University of Pisa (Italy); received a Ph.D. degree in Anthropological Sciences and a Ph.D. degree in History of Science from the Florence and Pisa Universities. She served some years as Assistant Professor at the Florence and Pisa Universities and worked as collaborator at various institutions in different countries including Brazil, US and Spain. Her publications include papers in national and international peer reviewed journals and book chapters. She is co-editor of the books: 'History of Primatology: yesterday and today. The Mediterranean Tradition' (2019) and 'Peoples, nature and environments: learning to live together' (2020).
Bernard Wood is the University Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University. Previously, he was the Courtuald Professor of Anatomy in the University of London, and the Derby Professor of Anatomy in the University of Liverpool. In 1968 he joined Richard Leakey's first expedition to the Turkana Basin, Kenya, and he subsequently joined the group of researchers working on the hominins recovered from Koobi Fora in Northern Kenya. In addition to his paleoanthropological research, he has a long-standing interest in primate comparative anatomy, with a focus on the ability of hard- and soft-tissue anatomy to recover the recent evolutionary history of the extant apes, and on the history of primate comparative anatomy. He is the co-author of research articles on many aspects of comparative anatomy, and the author, or co-author, of 20 books, including Food Acquisition and Processing in Primates (1984), Major Topics in Primate and Human Evolution (1986), and photographic atlases of the musculoskeletal anatomy of gorillas (2010), gibbons and siamangs (2012), chimpanzees (2013), orangutans (2013), and bonobos (2017).