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5: Meet the Living Primates

  • Page ID
    158742
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    Learning Objectives

    • Learn how primates are different from other mammals.
    • Understand how studying non-human primates is important in anthropology.
    • Identify different types of traits that we use to evaluate primate taxa.
    • Describe the major primate taxa using their key characteristics.
    • Understand your place in nature by learning your taxonomic classification.

    Image: Stump-tailed macaques. “Macaca arctoides” by Frans de Waal is licensed under CC BY 2.5.

    • 5.1: What is a Primate?
      Primates are one of at least twenty Orders belonging to the Class Mammalia. All members of this class share certain characteristics, including, among other things, having fur or hair, producing milk from mammary glands, and being warm-blooded. There are three types of mammals: monotremes, marsupials, and placental mammals. Primates, including ourselves, belong to this last group.
    • 5.2: Key Traits Used to Distinguish Between Primate Taxa
      When trying to place primate species into specific taxonomic groups, we use a variety of dental characteristics, locomotor adaptations, and behavioral adaptations. Differences in these characteristics across groups reflect constraints of evolutionary history as well as variation in adaptations.
    • 5.3: Primate Diversity
      As we begin exploring the primates of primates, it is important to keep in mind the hierarchical nature of classification (discussed in Chapter 2). The goal of taxonomic classification is to place species into categories that reflect the relationships between the groupings.
    • 5.4: End of Chapter Review
      Discussion questions and key term definitions.
    • 5.5: Meet the Authors

     

    Acknowledgements

    The author would very much like to thank the editors for the opportunity to contribute to this textbook, along with two anonymous reviewers who provided useful feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. She would also like to thank Karin Enstam Jaffe for her support and encouragement during the writing of this chapter. Most of all, the author would like to thank all of the Introduction to Biological Anthropology students that she has had over the years who have listened to her lecture endlessly on these animals that she finds so fascinating and who have helped her to hone her pedagogy in a field that she loves.

     

     


    This page titled 5: Meet the Living Primates is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Beth Shook, Katie Nelson, Kelsie Aguilera, & Lara Braff, Eds. (Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.