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Today, scholars from numerous and highly diverse fields are not only addressing the question of what makes us human, but also seeking input from other disciplines to inform their answers to this fundamental issue. However, for the most part, evolutionary anthropologists are not particularly prominent in this discussion, or at least not acknowledged to be. Why is this the case? One reason may be that although evolutionary anthropologists are uniquely positioned to provide valuable insight on this subject, the responses from any one of us are likely to be as different as the research specializations and intellectual experiences that we bring to the table. Indeed, one would anticipate that a paleoanthropologist would not only have different views than a primatologist, geneticist, or behavioral ecologist, but from other paleoanthropologists as well. Yet if asked by a theologian, psychologist, or political scientist, and perhaps most importantly, by any curious person outside the walls of academia, do we have a response that most evolutionary anthropologists could agree on as reflecting our contributions to the understanding of being and becoming human? Our introductory textbooks usually begin with this fundamental question, yet seldom produce a concise answer. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The emerging manifesto, center of the essay collection this commentary is part of, points out that primatology is a primate's science and field of endeavor. It is about primates, and constructed and carried out by primates. But the relationships between different primates involved in primatology cannot be described merely as scientific, zoological, or conservatory. A main point emerging from this perspective is that the relationships amongst primates (as scientists and as subjects) are affected by primatologists' experiences outside of academic science and within the cultural schema that we acquire as members of human societies. My contribution focuses on the primatologists and their sometimes discussed, but too often ignored, cultural and ethnic contexts as influences on how they study, think about, and interact with other primates. In our views and bonds with other primates, do national, class, and ethnic factors count?

The explication of altruistic behavior in primates remains complex. Gregarious, socially complex primates are characterized by a diverse array of social behavior patterns with seemingly altruistic behavior being relatively commonplace. Human societies are a form of primate society but with much higher levels of social complexity and extremely high levels of cooperative and apparently altruistic behavior. It is likely that there are elements of primate (at least anthropoid) sociality that act as baseline for subsequent expansion and elaboration during human evolution. Can understanding patterns and contexts of primate social complexity and cooperation help us understand human altruism? In this chapter we have two primary objectives: to examine three nonhuman primate genera to show how social cooperation, social bonding, and niche construction can affect our understandings of altruism and to illustrate where we think that such nonhuman primate information is a good model for humans and where it is not.

An explicit role for emergent group-level traits, social role diversification, and coordination makes good sense when thinking about human evolution. To most effectively understand these and other facets, we need to move toward an integrative model that assumes niche construction and encompasses positive feedback systems at individual, subgroup and larger group levels, demographic processes, and local ecologies.

Nearly 60 years ago, Sherwood Washburn issued a call for a "New Physical Anthropology," a transition from measurement and classification toward a focus on the processes and mechanisms of evolutionary change. He advocated multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the understanding of human behavior, biology, and history. Many interpret this as a call for a practice that is both biological and anthropological. Is this what we do? Are we biological anthropologists yet? In this essay, I explore what we, Physical Anthropologists, as a discipline are doing in the context of a New Physical Anthropology, where we might be headed, and why this discussion is crucial to our relevance.

The distribution of wildlife parasites in a landscape is intimately tied to the spatial distribution of hosts. In parasite species, including many gastrointestinal parasites, with obligate or common environmental life stages, the dynamics of the parasite can also be strongly affected by geophysical components of the environment. This is especially salient in host species, for example humans and macaques, which thrive across a wide variety of habitat types and quality and so are exposed to a wealth of environmentally resilient parasites. Here, we examine the effect of environmental and anthropogenic components of the landscape on the prevalence, intensity, and species diversity of gastrointestinal parasites across a metapopulation of long-tailed macaques on the island of Bali, Indonesia. Using principal-components analysis, we identified significant interaction effects between specific environmental and anthropogenic components of the landscape, parsing the Balinese landscape into anthropogenic (PC1), mixed environment (PC2), and non-anthropogenic (PC3) components. Further, we determined that the anthropogenic environment can mitigate the prevalence and intensity of specific gut parasites and the intensity of the overall community of gut parasites, but that non-anthropogenically driven landscape components have no significant effect in increasing or reducing the intensity or prevalence of the community of gut parasites in Balinese macaques.

Humans and nonhuman primates have coexisted and interacted for millennia in Asia. Interspecies interaction is particularly intensive at religious sites that are commonly referred to by Westerners as “monkey temples” or “monkey forests”. These monkey temples are found throughout South and Southeast Asia, and some have evolved into significant tourist destinations, often contributing substantially to the economic base of the communities in which they are located. In Bali, the location and structural layout of temples are guided by the Balinese Hindu philosophies of Nawa Sanga (the ritual grid organizing space) and Tri Hita Karana (the three ideals for achieving balance between humans, gods, and the natural world). Balinese culture emphasizes harmony between humankind and nature. Adherence to these traditional values has contributed to the preservation of forests and other natural landscape features associated with the temple areas and protection of nonhuman denizens found at these sites (Fuentes et al. 2005).

An in-depth understanding of the contexts and patterns of human-macaque interactions can play an important role in assessing and managing the potential for pathogen transmission. The Padangtegal Monkey Forest in Bali, Indonesia, and the Upper Rock Nature Reserve in Gibraltar are two sites that have been relatively well studied in regard to human-macaque interactions. This article presents an overview of interaction patterns between humans and macaques at these sites along with a description of the cultural, demographic, and contextual differences between local and nonlocal humans at the sites. Differences in these two sites' interaction patterns included bite rates, the role of food in aggressive interactions, and the context in which the interactions took place. Similarities included overrepresentation by adult male macaques in interactions and a substantial impact by local cultural and demographic factors. These similarities and differences are interpreted as resulting from differences in macaque species and behaviors, and human demography, culture, and behavioral patterns.

Contact between humans and nonhuman primates (NHPs) frequently occurs at monkey temples (religious sites that have become associated with free-ranging populations of NHPs) in Asia, creating the potential for NHP-human disease transmission. In March 2003 a multidisciplinary panel of experts participated in a workshop designed to model the risk of NHP-human pathogen transmission. The panel developed a risk assessment model to describe the likelihood of cross-species transmission of simian foamy virus (SFV) from temple macaques (Macaca fascicularis) to visitors at monkey temples. SFV is an enzootic simian retrovirus that has been shown to be transmitted from NHPs to humans. In operationalizing the model field data, laboratory data and expert opinions were used to estimate the likelihood of SFV transmission within this context. This model sets the stage for a discussion about modeling as a risk assessment tool and the kinds of data that are required to accurately predict transmission.

We observed 420 aggressive interactions between tourists and Macaca fascicularis at the Padangtegal Wanara Wana Temple forest site in Bali, Indonesia, during the months of June and July 2001. The data collected included patterns of aggression, presence or absence of food, and demographic information on resident macaques and human visitors. Analyses of the interactions suggest that macaques respond differentially to humans according to the age/sex classes involved. Additionally, adult and subadult male macaques participated in more aggressive behaviors than expected, while adult female macaques and immatures participated in such behaviors less than expected. These variations in interaction patterns between macaques and tourists may have substantial implications for management issues and the potential for pathogen transmission.

In many ways, this book is about the social expansion of primate kinship in the human lineage: an evolution of imagined communities (a la Benedict Anderson) of human kinships emerging from the social webs common in our primate kin. Read argues that it is humans’ abilities to self-modify, to ratchet up new and multiple forms of envisioning social relations, that separates human societies from those of other primates. He invokes Levi-Strauss’s notion of “the advent of a new order” to identify the unique nature of the extent of human social processes: the cultural definition of kin and society. Read centers the role of shared cultural systems, cognitive complexity, and the “culturally constituted universe,” in narrating a broad understanding of how humans are in the world and how this differs from the “world-beings” of other primates. In making his case, Read effectively uses theory-of-mind concepts and recent work in the extended mind/ social-brain realm (e.g., Dunbar, Gamble, and Gowlett 2010) as central components in modeling the development of human social relationships from a broader primate behavioral profile. I greatly appreciate his connection between cognitive processes and the expansion of social complexity and complex kinship systems in humans. Importantly, Read notes how direct comparisons between human and other primate social structure are rife with problems and that while we share much with our primate kin, core areas such as working memory and other cognitive processes differentiate us. He states, “Our societies are not based on genetically prescribed behaviors, but on our ability to build creatively on our genetic endowment in ways that are not predictable in simply by knowing what constitutes that endowment” (p. 12), and this is correct. However, it is worth noting that this can also be true of other organisms (and not just other primates), more so than Read gives them credit for. It is Read’s holding to a relatively simple model of evolutionary patterns and processes for other organisms and to

Foreword Karen Strier Introduction Agustin Fuentes and Linda D. Wolfe Part I. Science and Nonhuman Primates: 1. Anthropology and Primatology Phyllis Dolhinow 2. Resistance to the cross-species perspective in anthropology Mary M. Pavelka 3. The ethics and efficacy of biomedical research in Chimpanzees with special regard to HIV research Roger S. Fouts, Deborah H. Fouts and Gabriel S. Waters Part II. Cultural Views of Nonhuman Primates: 4. Introduction to section Agustin Fuentes and Linda D. Wolfe 5. Monkey as food, monkey as child: Guaja symbolic cannibalism Loretta A. Cormier 6. Ethnoecology of monkeys among the Bari of Venezuela: perception, use and conservation Manuel Lizzaralde 7. Primates in Matsigenka subsistence and world view Glenn Shepard 8. Monkey King in China: basis for a conservation policy Frances Burton 9. Local population, conservation efforts and the mountain gorillas of Rwanda Pascale Sicotte and Prosper Uwengeri Part III. Conservation of Nonhuman Primates: 10. Introduction to section Agustin Fuentes and Linda Wolfe 11. Monkeys, humans and politics in the Mentawai Islands: no simple solutions in a complex world Augustin Fuentes 12. Conservation must pursue a human-nature biosynergy in the era of social chaos and bushmeat commerce Anthony L. Rose 13. A cultural primatological study of Macaca fascicularis on Ngeaur Island, Republic of Palau Bruce Wheatley, Rebecca Stephenson, Hiro Kurashina and Kelly Kautz 14. Monkeys in the back yard: encroaching wildlife and rural communities in Japan David Sprague Part IV. Local Economics: Goverment Actions and Nonhuman Primates: 15. Introduction to section Agustin Fuentes and Linda Wolfe 16. The primatologist as minority advocate Ardith Eudey 17. Monkey Business? The conservation implications of macaque ethnoprimatology in southern Thailand Lesley E. Sponsel, Nukul Ruttanadakul and Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel 18. Rhesus macaques: a comparative study of two sites, Jaipur, India and Silver Springs, Florida Linda Wolfe.

Examining homology in biological and cultural evolution is of great importance in investigations of humanity. The proposal presented in the target article retains substantial methodological weaknesses in the identification and use of “cultural traits.” However, with refined toolkits and the incorporation of recent advances in evolutionary theory, this overall endeavor can result in substantial payoffs for biological and social scientists.

The target article effectively assesses multiple hypotheses for human sexuality, demonstrating support for a complex, integrated perspective. However, care must be taken when extrapolating human universal patterns from specific cultural subsets without appropriate ethnographic contexts. Although it makes a strong contribution to the investigation of human sexuality, the basal reliance on a reductionist perspective constrains the full efficacy of this research.

The Mentalities of Gorillas and Orangutans: Comparative Perspectives. Sue Taylor Parker. Robert W. Mitchell. and H. Lyn Miles. eds. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 419 pp.

Conditional mating strategies and within-sex variation in mating patterns occur across a wide range of primate taxa. Attempts to model the evolution of human mating strategies should incorporate current primatological data sets and phylogenetic perspectives. However, comparisons between interview and questionnaire-based human behavioral data and observationally and experimental generated nonhuman behavioral data should be conducted with prudence.

Modeling the evolution of human behavior, including language, is a complex but important undertaking. The over-reliance on chimpanzees as models to assess basal hominin patterns and the implicit assumption that hominin mothers did not have significant assistance in caring for young weaken this model for the emergence of language from mother-infant vocal interactions.