V. Sommer and C. Ross (eds.), Primates of Gashaka, Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects 35, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7403-7_13, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract A trademark of Homo sapiens is the enormous variation in behavioural patterns across populations. Insight into the development of human cultures can be aided by studies of Pan communities across Africa, ...

There has been a startling change over the last decade in the intellectual context of morphometrics. In the 1990's, this field, which has not altered its focus upon the quantitative analysis of biomedical shape variation and shape change, was principally centered around concerns of medical image analysis; but now it is driven mainly by the demands of researchers in human variability, physical a...

Affiliations: 1. Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1066 Blindern NO-0316, Norway 2. Division of Systematics and Evolutionary Botany, Department of Botany, University of Vienna, Rennweg 14, 1030, Vienna, Austria 3. INRA, UMR1062, CBGP, Avenue du Campus Agropolis, 34980 Montferrier-sur-Lez, France. 4. Department of Primatolog...

in William Kristan’s group at the University of California, San Diego have demonstrated the feasibility of examining ‘behavioral indeterminacy’, analogous to what passes for ‘choice’ or ‘free will’ in human behavior, in terms of variations in the activity of individual neurons in the leech, a remarkable confluence of Gunther’s passions for neurobiology and for philosophy of the mind. During thi...

A field of primate linguistics is gradually emerging. It combines general questions and tools from theoretical linguistics with rich data gathered in experimental primatology. Analyses of several monkey systems have uncovered very simple morphological and syntactic rules and have led to the development of a primate semantics that asks new questions about the division of semantic labor between t...

Understanding sensorimotor, cognitive and social development in animals and robots is a truly interdisciplinary endeavour. Development happens through the progressive organisation of coupled complex systems, at various spatio-temporal scales, and covering a large diversity of levels of abstraction, ranging from coupled mechanical dynamics for low-level body control to higher-level conceptual de...