I found this week’s topic very interesting. I have a very basic knowledge of primates and their connection with the evolution of human’s. I haven’t studied this subject since high school, and it was just scathing the surface. I learned a lot of information this week that I found very interesting and found it very easy to relate it to human behavior and how humans have evolved. It is clear that studying primates is a way of looking into the past and where we, humans, have evolved from. It shows us where our behaviors started and where and why our senses began.

Although humans are known to be more complex it is easy to see from the lectures and readings that when it comes down to it, we are not much different from our primitive ancestors. One of the things that I found really interesting was chimpanzees warfare behavior that we read about in the article “What is War Good for? Ask a Chimpanzee.” Although I was aware that chimpanzees have shown violent behavior, I had never thought of it as organized warfare the same way that humans have had organized warfare throughout history. The article explained violence through social behavior rather than innate, biological ties which I found very interesting. It talks about how fission-fusion societies open doors for violence to occur. This is similar in both chimpanzee and spider monkeys, as well as humans. The ending statement that the article made sums it up very well, I thought. “Today, human biology, ecology, and culture interact in ways that allow humans to be the most violent, despicable beings on Earth—as well as the planet’s most compassionate, cooperative creatures.”

This week lecture talked about different primitive features and their origins which I found extremely interesting. One sense that I had never considered is color vision. We learned in lecture that color vision evolved so that primates could pick things out in the high contrast environment of the jungle. We also discussed the brain and how it has evolved. Humans possess more complexity, which in turn requires more to feed the brain. Primates show the basis of where our complex brains began, however. These are things that you don’t consider where they may have come from or started, so I found this information really interesting.

It’s very cool to learn about different types of primates and their social structures because it is comparable to the human race. We are more complex, yes, but we are not much different from the primates from which we have evolved. Between primates there are societies that are more violent than their counterpart, consume different foods, have different sexual behaviors, etc. Similarly, humans have different cultures, religions, and belief systems which encompass similar things. In the videos about primate behavior they discuss the similarities in social structure. They talk about how chimpanzees grow up, play, and learn just like humans do as they are children who grow into adults. Studying non-human primates is extremely important because they very clearly show us where we have evolved from.