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Int J Primatol (2011) 32:524529
DOI 10.1007/s10764-010-9481-8
BOOK REVIEW
Christophe Boesch: The Real Chimpanzee: Sex Strategies in the Forest
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2009. 181 pp., (USD 48.00, paper)
Martin N. Muller
Received: 15 February 2010 /Accepted: 4 March 2010 /Published online: 18 December 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
Psychologists are periodically admonished by primatologists or other ethologists for making premature claims about the singular nature of human cognition. Complex tool use, mirror self-recognition, and insight, to give just three examples of traits once portrayed as uniquely human, have all been documented not only in the great apes, but also in corvids (Bird and Emery 2009; Prior et al. 2008). Among primatologists, Christophe Boesch has long been a dogged advocate for continuities between ape and human cognition, regularly reminding researchers that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and that the abilities of captive individuals may not reflect the capacities of their wild counterparts, all while documenting wonderfully complex behavior by chimpanzees at his study site in Ivory Coasts Ta forest.
It is a small irony, then, that Boesch has sometimes been accused of erecting the same kind of cognitive barrier between the Ta chimpanzees and those in other populations that he has worked so hard to efface in a broader context. Whether it be their alleged proclivity for exceptional forms of cooperation, virtuoso tool use, or sophisticated symbolic communication, the notion that the Ta chimpanzees are something rare and wonderful pervades most of Boeschs work, and he has been criticized for citing the same absence of evidence that he decries in other settings as support for unique faculties in his own focal subjects.
Consequently, when I saw that Boesch had titled his latest book The Real Chimpanzee, I initially assumed that the title was ironic, and thus defensive, or even conciliatory. In this, however, I had underestimated Boesch. Intentional irony is nowhere on display in this slim volume, which really is a meditation on the urgent question, How did the Ta chimpanzees get to be so exceptional?
Boeschs answer is straightforward. Ta, he says, is the only long-term study site where chimpanzees live in dense rain forest with intense leopard predation. Boesch
M. N. Muller (*)
Department of Anthropology, University...