Volume 55, Number 8 · May 15, 2008
Our Socially Gifted Cousins
By A.C. Grayling
Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man
by Dale Peterson
Houghton Mifflin, 740 pp., $35.00
Harvest of Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating
by Jane Goodall with Gary McAvoy and Gail Hudson
Warner, 296 pp., $14.99 (paper)
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind
by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth
University of Chicago Press, 348 pp., $27.50
Egyptian vultures, Galapagos woodpecker finches, sea otters, some gorillas, and above all chimpanzees resemble human beings in their ability to use tools. But for much of the twentieth century, the ability to make tools was thought to be a skill unique to man and distinctively a product of human intelligence. In 1960, a young British primatologist named Jane Goodall pushed humanity off this self-congratulatory pedestal. Through arduous field studies in the forests of East Africa, she observed chimpanzees stripping twigs to make rods for termite-fishing.
Review, 3430 words
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