Author : Nicolas Langlitz
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691204284
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)
Book Synopsis Chimpanzee Culture Wars by : Nicolas Langlitz
Download or read book Chimpanzee Culture Wars written by Nicolas Langlitz and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decades later, starting in the 1980s, Japanese cultural primatology was given a second look as Euro-American primatologists began to debate amongst themselves the question of whether Homo sapiens is the only cultural animal. In the most recent chapter of this controversy, field researchers such as the Swiss primatologist Christophe Boesch have accused experimental psychologists such as Michael Tomasello of underestimating and even denying the capacity of chimpanzees for culture because they limit their studies to captive animals, brought up under cognitively debilitating conditions and tested in laboratory settings bound to favor human test subjects with whom the animals are compared. These controversies raise serious questions about what sort of laboratory culture is best for the study of primate cognition. .