The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys

How did human communication and language evolve? Josep Call and Michael Tomasello, editors of The Gestural Communication of Apes and Monkeys, approach this controversial question at two levels-by identifying evolutionary patterns in gestural communication across a variety of non-human primate species, then comparing these naturalistic and experimental research findings to the gestural communication of both prelinguistic and linguistic children. Primate species included for discussion are chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, siamangs, Barbary macaques, and orangutans, observed by a variety of collaborators using a common set of observational methods.

Josep Call (PhD, Emory University) is a Senior Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, Germany Michael Tomasello (PhD, University of Georgia) is the Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany