PDF-(BOOK)-Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence

Whatever their virtues men are more violent than women Why do men kill rape and wage war and what can we do about it Drawing on the latest discoveries about human evolution and about our closest living relatives the great apes Demonic Males offers some startling new answers Dramatic vivid and firmly grounded in meticulous research this book will change the way you see the world As the San Francisco Chronicle said it dares to dig for the roots of a contentious and complicated subject that makes up much of our daily news. Primates. Why study primates?. Social behavior offers clues to human behavior.. Many ‘human’ behavioral traits are seen in primates.. Examples?. Behavioral analysis combined with morphological comparisons allow us to determine probable behavior of human ancestors.. Anthropology. Primatology. Mammalian Characteristics. Fur covering body. Endothermy. Viviparous. Mammary glands. Omnivorous. -Specialized teeth. Primate . Characteristics. Opposable thumbs. Prehensile (Grasping) hands & feet. . Professor Gwen Adshead. May 2015. Perpetrators of human violence. Violence as a complex act of human meaning. Not all violence is the same. . What do we know about . the perpetrators?. Acknowledgments: Peter . -Darwin (1871) . The Descent of Man. Mt-DNA Primate Tree. Our Living Sisters. Pan. Gorilla. http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/a_tree.html. Living Asian Apes. Gibbon (. Hyalobates. ). Orangutan (. Pinker’s. past work. Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist, makes his name for being on the ‘nature’ side of the nature-nurture debate. Critical of the ‘blank slate’ view of human psychology. Why?. What was the result?. Violence. What is it?. Violence: . the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maladaptive development, or deprivation.. Stretching across continents and centuries, The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory provides a fascinating examination of executions, torture, ritual sacrifices, and other acts of violence committed in the prehistoric world. Written as an accessible guide to the nature of life in prehistory and to the underpinnings of human violence. Combines symbolic interpretations of archaeological remains with a medical understanding of violent acts. Written by an eminent prehistorian and a respected medical doctor. What do we think about when we think about human evolution? With his characteristic wit and wisdom, anthropologist Jonathan Marks explores our scientific narrative of human origins—evolution—and examines its cultural elements and theoretical foundations. In the process, he situates human evolution within a general anthropological framework and presents it as a special case of kinship and mythology.Tales of the Ex-Apes makes a strong case that human evolution cannot be reduced to purely biological properties and processes given that it has incorporated the emergence of social relations and cultural histories that are unprecedented in the apes. Marks contends that human evolution over the past few million years has involved the transformation from biological to biocultural evolution. Over tens of thousands of years, new social roles—notably, spouse, father, in-laws, and grandparents—have co-evolved with new technologies and symbolic meanings to produce the human species, in the absence of significant biological evolution. We are biocultural creatures, Marks argues, fully comprehensible by recourse to neither our real ape ancestry nor our imaginary cultureless biology. In a journey across four continents, acclaimed science writer Steve Olson traces the origins of modern humans and the migrations of our ancestors throughout the world over the past 150,000 years. Like Jared Diamond\'s Guns, Germs and Steel, Mapping Human History is a groundbreaking synthesis of science and history. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the latest genetic research, linguistic evidence, and archaeological findings, Olson reveals the surprising unity among modern humans and demonstrates just how naive some of our ideas about our human ancestry have been (Discover).Olson offers a genealogy of all humanity, explaining, for instance, why everyone can claim Julius Caesar and Confucius as forebears. Olson also provides startling new perspectives on the invention of agriculture, the peopling of the Americas, the origins of language, the history of the Jews, and more. An engaging and lucid account, Mapping Human History will forever change how we think about ourselves and our relations with others. Current primate research has yielded stunning results that not only threaten our underlying assumptions about the cognitive and communicative abilities of nonhuman primates, but also bring into question what it means to be human. At the forefront of this research, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh recentlyhas achieved a scientific breakthrough of impressive proportions. Her work with Kanzi, a laboratory-reared bonobo, has led to Kanzi\'s acquisition of linguistic and cognitive skills similar to those of a two and a half year-old human child. Apes, Language, and the Human Mind skillfully combines a fascinating narrative of the Kanzi research with incisive critical analysis of the research\'s broader linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications. The first part of the book provides a detailed, personal account of Kanzi\'sinfancy, youth, and upbringing, while the second part addresses the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues raised by the Kanzi research. The authors discuss the challenge to the foundations of modern cognitive science presented by the Kanzi research the methods by which we represent andevaluate the abilities of both primates and humans and the implications which ape language research has for the study of the evolution of human language. Sure to be controversial, this exciting new volume offers a radical revision of the sciences of language and mind, and will be important readingfor all those working in the fields of primatology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive and developmental psychology. It is a long time since I have been as enthusiastic about a book on human evolution as I am about Richard Klein\'s The Human Career.--Leslie Aiello, Times Higher Education Supplement[This book] will set a standard by which future books, setting out the course of human evolution, may measure their success.--Bobby Joe Williams, Quarterly Review of BiologyThe best introduction to the problems and data of modern palaeoanthropology yet published.--Penny Dransart, Antiquity The astonishing new story of human originsWas Darwin wrong when he traced our origins to Africa? The Real Planet of the Apes makes the explosive claim that it was in Europe, not Africa, where apes evolved the most important hallmarks of our human lineage--such as dexterous hands and larger brains. In this compelling and accessible book, David Begun, one of the world\'s leading paleoanthropologists, transports readers to an epoch in the remote past when the Earth was home to many migratory populations of ape species.Drawing on the latest astonishing discoveries in the fossil record as well as his own experiences conducting field expeditions across Europe and Asia, Begun provides a sweeping evolutionary history of great apes and humans. He tells the story of how one of the earliest members of our evolutionary group--a new kind of primate called Proconsul--evolved from lemur-like monkeys in the primeval forests of Africa. Begun vividly describes how, over the next 10 million years, these hominoids expanded into Europe and Asia and evolved climbing and hanging adaptations, longer maturation times, and larger brains, setting the stage for the emergence of humans. As the climate deteriorated in Europe around 10 million years ago, these apes either died out or migrated south, reinvading the African continent and giving rise to the lineages of the gorilla, chimpanzee, and, ultimately, the human.Presenting startling new insights about our fossil ape ancestors, The Real Planet of the Apes is a book that fundamentally alters our understanding of human origins. While those who study human origns now agree that the evolution of the modern human form extends back much further in time than originally thought, they disagree sharply as to how to interpret the substantive data. The purpose of this volume is to examine those conceptual differences and to explore the reasons why a consensus might never be possible. Susan Thomas . GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. Hands and feet. Fingers and toes. Shoulder and hip. Presence of clavicle. Improved vision. Arms that can rotate around shoulder joints.