Annotation This book presents a series of review chapters on the various aspects of primate kinship and behavior. The relatively new molecular data allow one to assess directly degrees of genetic relatedness and kinship relations between individuals. A considerable body of data on intergroup variation, based on experimental studies in both free-ranging and captive groups has accumulated. This allows a full and satisfying reconsideration of this broad area of research.

The present volume represents the result of two years of work originally begun as a fifteen-member student project under my supervision at NASA - Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif ornia. As a means of acquainting team members with previous research related to our NASA experiments with long-term isolation and confine ment effects upon nonhuman primate behavior a weekly meeting was arranged for students to orally present abstracts of various articles they had read. As the number of references increased we decided to expand our efforts through several computer searches of the psychological, biological, anthropological, and medical liter ature. Upon completion of our experiments at NASA, three of the team members and myself decided to take this basic foundation, up date, expand and otherwise polish it into the present comprehensive reference tool we feel confident will be of value to investigators and scholars interested in the broad topic of nonhuman primate development as affected by early environmental influences. While ours is the only bibliography of this literature which includes both abstracts and indexing, several previous publications are worth noting as we found them particularly helpful in our own work. Those bibliographies, compiled by Agar and Mitchell (1973), Stoffer and Stoffer (1976), and Roy (1976, 1977), are excellent. In addition to the articles cited in these sources we have added approximately 400 more articles with abstracts and indexing.

The present volume represents the result of two years of work originally begun as a fifteen-member student project under my supervision at NASA - Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif ornia. As a means of acquainting team members with previous research related to our NASA experiments with long-term isolation and confine ment effects upon nonhuman primate behavior a weekly meeting was arranged for students to orally present abstracts of various articles they had read. As the number of references increased we decided to expand our efforts through several computer searches of the psychological, biological, anthropological, and medical liter ature. Upon completion of our experiments at NASA, three of the team members and myself decided to take this basic foundation, up date, expand and otherwise polish it into the present comprehensive reference tool we feel confident will be of value to investigators and scholars interested in the broad topic of nonhuman primate development as affected by early environmental influences. While ours is the only bibliography of this literature which includes both abstracts and indexing, several previous publications are worth noting as we found them particularly helpful in our own work. Those bibliographies, compiled by Agar and Mitchell (1973), Stoffer and Stoffer (1976), and Roy (1976, 1977), are excellent. In addition to the articles cited in these sources we have added approximately 400 more articles with abstracts and indexing.

Kinship, Friendship, Sex and Aggression in Free-ranging Rhesus Monkeys is an "ethnography" of social behavior. Descended from individuals brought from India in 1938 by the comparative primate psychologist C.R. Carpenter, who anticipating WWII, foresaw the supply of monkeys for medical research being cut off. The colony is located on Cayo Santiago, a forty-acre island, 5/8 of a mile off the coast of Puerto Rico and is by now the best-studied population of nonhuman primates in the world. Following Carpenter's initial studies (1942), a detailed field study of the Cayo Santiago colony was made by Stuart Altmann (1954), a student of E.O. Wilson. Many investigators followed. Noteworthy among them is Donald Sade, an anthropologist, whose many graduate students followed his pioneering work. My own study was initiated under Sade's guidance in July 1964 when I went with Sade for a summer's introductory field work in Puerto Rico from graduate school at Berkeley.

At some point in the course of evolutionâe"from a primeval social organization of early hominidsâe"all human societies, past and present, would emerge. In this account of the dawn of human society, Bernard Chapais shows that our knowledge about kinship and society in nonhuman primates supports, and informs, ideas first put forward by the distinguished social anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss. Chapais contends that only a few evolutionary steps were required to bridge the gap between the kinship structures of our closest relativesâe"chimpanzees and bonobosâe"and the human kinship configuration. The pivotal event, the author proposes, was the evolution of sexual alliances. Pair-bonding transformed a social organization loosely based on kinship into one exhibiting the strong hold of kinship and affinity. The implication is that the gap between chimpanzee societies and pre-linguistic hominid societies is narrower than we might think. Many books on kinship have been written by social anthropologists, but Primeval Kinship is the first book dedicated to the evolutionary origins of human kinship. And perhaps equally important, it is the first book to suggest that the study of kinship and social organization can provide a link between social and biological anthropology.