Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Evolutionary reconstructions of great ape intelligence
- 2 Enhanced cognitive capacity as a contingent fact of hominid phylogeny
- PART I COGNITION IN LIVING GREAT APES
- Introduction
- 3 The manual skills and cognition that lie behind hominid tool use
- 4 The cognitive complexity of social organization and socialization in wild baboons and chimpanzees: guided participation, socializing interactions, and event representation
- 5 Gestural communication in the great apes
- 6 Great ape cognitive systems
- PART II MODERN GREAT APE ADAPTATION
- PART III FOSSIL GREAT APE ADAPTATIONS
- Part IV INTEGRATION
- Author index
- Species index
- Subject index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Evolutionary reconstructions of great ape intelligence
- 2 Enhanced cognitive capacity as a contingent fact of hominid phylogeny
- PART I COGNITION IN LIVING GREAT APES
- Introduction
- 3 The manual skills and cognition that lie behind hominid tool use
- 4 The cognitive complexity of social organization and socialization in wild baboons and chimpanzees: guided participation, socializing interactions, and event representation
- 5 Gestural communication in the great apes
- 6 Great ape cognitive systems
- PART II MODERN GREAT APE ADAPTATION
- PART III FOSSIL GREAT APE ADAPTATIONS
- Part IV INTEGRATION
- Author index
- Species index
- Subject index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
This first section offers a compact overview of great ape cognition. We did not attempt to review this material comprehensively because others have done so recently (e.g., Byrne 1995; Matsuzawa 2001; Parker & McKinney 1999; Parker, Mitchell & Miles 1999; Russon, Bard & Parker 1996; Suddendorf & Whiten 2001; Thompson & Oden 2000; Tomasello & Call 1997). Our primary aim was to revisit cognitive phenomena in living great apes considered to need evolutionary explanations beyond those applicable to other anthropoid primates. We then favored discussions of cognition as it develops in species-typical rearing conditions and applies to species-typical problems, and we emphasized the social and ecological cognition that have been the focus of discussions on primate cognitive evolution. We also revisited this topic to bring newer findings on great ape cognition to the broader community of scholars interested in cognitive evolution. Great apes are regularly taken as the best living models of the ancestral cognitive platform from which human cognition evolved (e.g., Donald 1991; Mithen 1996), so accurate portrayals of their cognition are essential to reconstructing human cognitive evolution accurately.
Byrne, Chapter 3, discusses “technical” skills, which have been major candidates for the defining force in great ape cognition. He argues that research focus on great apes' tool-based foraging skills, while important, has distracted attention from other impressive achievements equally likely to represent cognitive adaptations (Yamakoshi, Chapter 9, this volume takes a similar view) and that great apes' technical skills may be as cognitively complex as those of some pre-modern hominins.
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- The Evolution of ThoughtEvolutionary Origins of Great Ape Intelligence, pp. 29 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004