Book review The evolution of thought: evolutionary origins of great ape intelligence

Russon, Begun, and the other distinguished contributors to this volume take on one of the most vexing and intriguing questions in science today, namely, the origins and functions of intelligence in great apes and humans. The volume begins and ends with insightful summaries and reviews of what is currently understood about the cognitive abilities of great apes, the likely traits of the last common ancestor of extant great apes and humans, and the climatic, ecological, and social selection pressures that may have contributed to the evolution of these traits. The integrative reviews are complemented by three sets of chapters written by leading experts in biological anthropology, paleontology, and primatology, which, in total, provide a thorough and fascinating analysis of cognition (Part 1) and other adaptations (Part 2) in living great apes, as well as inferred adaptations in ancestral apes based on the fossil record (Part 3). This is not a work for the casual reader, but it is an important contribution and a must read for serious scholars with an interest in the evolution of the mind. The first set of chapters opens with Byrne’s excellent critical review of manual dexterity visà-vis tool use and its potential evolution in great apes. Manual dexterity includes the use of obvious tools as well as the seemingly planned manipulation of other objects (e.g., branches, leaves) in ways that facilitate feeding. Although chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) tool use in the wild is well known, as are the abilities of other apes in captivity (Tomasello & Call, 1997), Byrne goes well beyond this, providing a fine-grained analysis of the manual skills associated with tool use and making a good case for a long evolutionary history of sophisticated manual skills in the great ape lineage. Although there is a substantive gap between the tool-using abilities of humans and great apes (Povinelli, 2000), Byrne and others (Johnson-Frey, 2003) make the case that one of the evolutionary pillars of human tool use is a long-standing ability to manipulate the environment in ways that expanded foraging opportunities. Parker follows with a discussion of social organization in Hamadryas baboons (Papio hamadryas) and chimpanzees. Both species show complex, nested social groups (e.g., a clan is composed of several families) and nuanced social behavior, but they differ in important ways. Parker argues that social behavior among these baboons and other monkeys is scripted, that is, that most interactions follow a more or less stereotyped sequence of context-specific behaviors. Although the social behavior of the great apes is scripted to some extent, it is also Evolution and Human Behavior 26 (2005) 206–212