Chimpanzee Cultures

Chimpanzee Cultures is a title to catch the eye...The aims are made explicit at the outset: to create a discipline of 'cultural primatology' by using the tools to the cultural sciences and encouraging the use of ethnography in comparing chimpanzee populations...The quality of material on the subject animals is high. All the papers are original, many containing previously unpublished data, and they do an excellent job of highlighting behavioural diversity...This is a book chiefly aimed at the scholarly community, yet it carries an important message for all of us. Wild chimpanzee populations continue to decline through habitat destruction and hunting for bush-meat: the bare bones of this are made clear in the book's final chapter by Jane Goodall. The dwindling of any species through human short-sightedness is depressing, but chimpanzees present a special case. Chimpanzee Cultures provides ample evidence that chimpanzees are not simply carbon copies of one another. The species may survive but the extinction of cultures may be proceeding as we speak.De Waal, Frans B. M. is the author of 'Chimpanzee Cultures' with ISBN 9780674116627 and ISBN 0674116623.