The orangutan is the most highly endangered species of great ape. Orangutans are threatened by deforestation, poaching, the illegal pet trade, and the isolation and fragmen tation of dwindling wild populations. Their conservation is impeded by certain aspects of their ecology (e. g. , a rain forest habitat) and certain features of their life history (e. g. , an eight-to twelve-year interbirth interval). Added to the U. S. Endangered Species List in 1970, the orangutan is now clearly on the road to extinction. The number of wild orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra is currently estimated to have decreased to between 12,300 and 20,571 individuals. Only 2% of original orangutan habitat is protected and some of these areas are now being destroyed. Clearly, attention to ecology, demography, censusing, rehabilitation, and conservation is essential if the orangutan is to survive in the wild beyond the next century. The protection of orangutans is a complex, multifaceted problem, involving such pressing issues as human poverty, overpopulation, and the economic development of Southeast Asia. Although the orangutan has been placed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), more orangutans were sold illegally in Taiwan between 1990 and 1993 than are housed in all the world's zoos. In the past, scientific and public attention has centered on the African apes. For this reason, the sole Asian great ape, the orangutan, has been called the "neglected ape.

A REDISCOVERED WORK BY ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING NOVELISTS OF THE 1930S 'One of the most important novelists of our day' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (1938) Virginia Hutton embarks upon an experiment. She will take an ape and raise it as a human child. She purchases an infant orangutan and names him Appius. She clothes him, feeds him, and puts him to bed in a cot every night. As Appius grows older, she teaches him to dress himself, to speak, to read, to stand and walk up straight, to eat his meals at the dining table with a knife and fork. She teaches him how to be human. The young orangutan is not always a willing student. His relationship with Virginia becomes fraught and flits between that of mother and child, teacher and student, scientist and experiment. But as Appius gains knowledge he moves ever closer to the one discovery Virginia does not want him to make: that of his true origins. Appius and Virginia explores the ongoing conflict between nature and nurture. It is also a chilling and unforgettable portrait of loneliness. G.E. Trevelyan wrote eight groundbreaking novels between 1932 and 1941 but her writing career was tragically cut short when her flat was hit by a German bomb during the Blitz. She died shortly afterwards and her books have subsequently been largely forgotten. This publication, the first reissue of any of her books since her death, seeks to restore the author to her rightful place in British literature.

The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our altruistic tendencies, and our culture? The book tackles these issues by drawing on two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment. Featuring a new foreword by Michael Shermer.

Why do humans differ from other primates? What do those differences tell us about human evolution? Elaine Morgan gives a revolutionary hypothesis that explains our anatomic anomalies: why we walk on two legs, why we are covered in fat, why we can control our rate of breathing? The answers point to one conclusion: millions of years ago our ancestors were trapped in a semi-aquatic environment. In presenting her case Elaine Morgan forces scientists to question accepted theories of human evolution.

Foreword / by Jane Goodall -- The uncanniness of similitude : wild men, simians, and hybrid beings -- Skeletons, skins, and skulls : apes in the age of colonial expansion and natural history collections -- Apes as guinea pigs : primates and experimental research -- Great apes in the eyes of scientists : what does it mean to be an ape? -- Apes that think they are human : astronaut apes, painting apes, talking apes -- Conquering the field : pioneers, the quest for origins, and primates -- Socialities, culture, and traditions among primates : when the boundary between humans and apes blurs -- Women and apes : sex, gender, and primatology -- Becoming-human, being-ape

Sexual Selection in Primates provides an account of all aspects of sexual selection in primates, combining theoretical insights, comprehensive reviews of the primate literature and comparative perspectives from relevant work on other mammals, birds and humans. Topics include sex roles, sexual dimorphism in weapons, ornaments and armaments, sex ratios, sex differences in behaviour and development, mate choice, sexual conflict, sex-specific life history strategies, sperm competition and infanticide. The outcome of the evolutionary struggle between the sexes, the flexibility of roles and the leverage of females are discussed and emphasised throughout. Sexual Selection in Primates is aimed at graduates and researchers in primatology, animal behaviour, evolutionary biology and comparative psychology.

Gregory F. Tague’s An Ape Ethic and the Question of Personhood argues that great apes are moral individuals because they engage in a land ethic as ecosystem engineers to generate ecologically sustainable biomes for themselves and other species. Tague shows that we need to recognize apes as eco-engineers in order to save them and their habitats, and that in so doing, we will ultimately save earth’s biosphere. The book draws on extensive empirical research from the ecology and behavior of great apes and synthesizes past and current understanding of the similarities in cognition, social behavior, and culture found in apes. Importantly, this book proposes that differences between humans and apes provide the foundation for the call to recognize forest personhood in the great apes. While all ape species are alike in terms of cognition, intelligence, and behaviors, there is a vital contrast: unlike humans, great apes are efficient ecological engineers. Therefore, simian forest sovereignty is critical to conservation efforts in controlling global warming, and apes should be granted dominion over their tropical forests. Weaving together philosophy, biology, socioecology, and elements from eco-psychology, this book provides a glimmer of hope for future acknowledgment of the inherent ethic that ape species embody in their eco-centered existence on this planet.

It is a great honor to be asked to introduce this exciting new volume, having been heavily involved in the first comprehensive synthesis in the early 1980s. Gibbons are the most enthralling of primates. On the one hand, they are the most appealing animals, with their upright posture and body shape, facial markings, dramatic arm-swinging locomotion and suspensory postures, and devastating duets; on the other hand, the small apes are the most diverse, hence biologically valuable and informative, of our closest relatives. It is hard for me to believe that it is 40 years to the month since I first set foot on the Malay Peninsula to start my doctoral study of the siamang. I am very proud to have followed in the footsteps of the great pioneer of primate field study, Clarence Ray Carpenter (CR or Ray, who I was fortunate to meet twice, in Pennsylvania and in Zurich), first in Central America (in 1967) and then in Southeast Asia. It is 75 years since he studied howler monkeys on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal Zone. It is 70 years since he studied the white-handed gibbon in Thailand.

From the website: The IUCN/SSC Primate Specialist Group is publishing new guidelines for surveys and monitoring of great ape populations. These guidelines address a need which has existed since great ape studies began -- the challenge of collecting consistently high-quality data for comparison between a wide variety of sites, and often across many years. This need is driven less by academic interest than by the urgent demands of field-based conservation. The maelstrom of threats which now endanger all the great apes must be addressed by immediate action on every scale: initiatives at individual sites, strategies on the regional and national level, and species-wide action plans and international accords. All of these efforts must be founded on accurate field data -- and to fully understand the impact of specific threats, and to measure if conservation programs are succeeding, it is essential to have baseline density estimates and sustained monitoring of great ape populations. The newest publication in the Best Practice series outlines current approaches to these issues, offering guidance and perspective on choices that must be made by wildlife biologists, site managers, government agencies and the conservation community at large. This report provides an overview of the variety of survey methodologies that have been developed, as well as a decision tree to help select the approach that is best for a particular site or situation, depending on available resources. As a continuation of this report, a series of modules will be made available online, which will present detailed information on survey design, field techniques, analytical approaches, and practical issues such as logistics, finance and standardized reporting. These new IUCN guidelines will help researchers to standardize their data collection and, just as importantly, will allow for improved comparisons between datasets. This will complement the A.P.E.S. database (http://apes.eva.mpg.de), which is intended to serve as a repository for survey data on great apes, and to analyze trends in their populations. These survey and monitoring guidelines, combined with resources available via A.P.E.S., are important steps towards a comprehensive understanding of the conservation status of great apes, at both the population and species level. .

Several books chronicle attempts, most of them during the last 40 years, to teach animals to communicate with people in a human-designed language. These books have typically treated only one or two species, or even one or a few research projects. We have provided a more encompassing view of this field. We also want to reinforce what other authors, for example Jane Goodall, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Penny Patterson, Birute Galdikas, and Roger and Deborah Fouts, so passionately convey about our responsibility for our closest animal kin. This book surveys what was known, or believed about animal language throughout history and prehistory, and summarizes current knowledge and the controversy around it. The authors identify and attempt to settle most of the problems in interpreting the animal behaviours that have been observed in studies of animal language ability.