Close, stable social bonds enhance longevity in wild baboons, providing clues about the importance of social bonds in our own evolutionary history.

Center for the Study of Human Origins, Department of Anthropology, New York University, 25 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003, USA New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology, New York, NY 10024, USA Evolutionary Studies Institute and Center for Excellence in PalaeoSciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, Wits 2050, South Africa Department of Anthropology, Hunter College, Ci...

their disciplines, it seemed a possibly useful contribution to write a book that would draw from all the relevant disciplines about the past, from primatology to historical linguistics, with genetics as the common thread to weave all these findings together into a coherent narrative. I was amazed at how much detail can now be filled in on the largely blank pages of human prehistory extending fr...

Discussions about the underrepresentation of women in science are challenged by uncertainty over the relative effects of the lack of assertiveness by women and the lack of recognition of them by male colleagues because the two are often indistinguishable. They can be distinguished at professional meetings, however, by comparing symposia, which are largely by invitation, and posters and other ta...

For comparative primatology proper recognition of basal taxa (i.e. species) is indispensable, and in this the choice of a suitable gene with high phylogenetic resolution is crucial. For the goals of species identification in animals, the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (cox1) has been introduced as standard marker. Making use of the difference in intra- and interspecific genetic variation--the D...