For this discussion post I explored Kent State’s website for anthropology and found their page on Primate anthropology.  Primate anthropology relates to the broader themes of anthropology through the comparative research we can do between primates and humans to garner a better understanding of humans.  This comparative analysis often leads us to compare humans to primates molecularly, linguistically, and culturally. Such a focus on comparisons embodies the nature of anthropology, since Anthropology is broadly comparative.

The molecular analyses done in Primate anthropology helps us, by using their molecular evolution as a model for human evolution helps us produce an early story of humanity – the study of humanity being integral to anthropology.  As an example of research done in primate anthropology, it says on Kent State’s website, “my research has revealed significant Y-chromosomal exchange between modern primate lineages, and uncovered genetic patterns consistent with the notion of “hybrid origin” species.  Such findings suggest, by comparison, that hybridization may have been a significant mechanism in hominin evolution, and highlight the possibility of chimeric ancestral hominin forms.”  This research, takes the molecular structure of primates at the start of their species development and shows how the hybridization of different species helped produce the species in question, exposing a way that humans could have evolved.  Understanding how humans evolved relates back to anthropology, for it gives us a way to track back our modern condition through this history of evolution and hopeful have a sort of explanation for why we are the way we are.  The use of a comparison between primates and humans, at a molecular level, itself, helps us pull out what about our molecular composition makes us in some way distinct from other species, and deserving of a title which is other than another animals, or even a title which is often understood to entail that we are other than animal.  

Given that primate research can show us what we are not, comparing our linguistic capacities to primates can also reveal that in some way we are other than them in our ability to speak, but even more than this, can show us a snapshot of what out capacity to speak looked like before it progressed to the point that we are at now.  

A similar argument can be applied to how we can uncover some information about the cultural constitution of humanity as a whole.  Given that it seems that primates have some social organization, such as a power hierarchy and the general intention to help other in their in-group, we can postulate that we formed as humans with these behaviors in place.  Weather these behaviors were institutionalized, or somehow more bound to our biology is a question which can not be uncovered by this comparison, but can place them within our ancestors, who may or may not have the ability to institutionalize behaviors via a project informed by an ideal.  

These vignettes on the analytical directions available to primate anthropology, exposes the myriad ways that comparative analysis, which is using humanity as one of it’s subjects, is central to primate anthropology, that roots it deeply within the anthropological project.