Primate Communication

There are books that teach you how to communicate better with your fellow human beings. Primate Communication takes a more ambitious route by asking a rather awkward question: before we congratulate ourselves on inventing language, perhaps we should first see what the monkeys and apes have been saying all this time. As it turns out, they have been remarkably busy. Published by Cambridge University Press in 1982 and edited by Charles Snowdon, Charles H. Brown and Michael R. Petersen, this fascinating volume explores the astonishing variety of ways our closest relatives communicate. Long before anyone coined the phrase "social networking," primates had already mastered a complex world of vocal calls, facial expressions, body language, gestures and social signalling. The only significant difference is that baboons rarely feel compelled to announce what they had for breakfast to several hundred acquaintances. This is a serious academic work that brings together leading researchers in animal behaviour, psychology and primatology to examine how communication evolved and what it can reveal about the origins of human language. Chimpanzees negotiate alliances, vervet monkeys issue alarm calls that distinguish between different predators, gibbons sing elaborate territorial duets, and countless other primates demonstrate that meaningful communication existed long before anyone invented the alphabet. Humanity, it seems, did not so much invent communication as develop an exceptionally elaborate version of it. The title itself is delightfully understated. Primate Communication could almost be mistaken for a guide to office meetings, and in fairness there are moments when the distinction becomes wonderfully blurred. Hierarchies are established, alliances shift, subtle signals determine who gets access to valuable resources, and misunderstandings occasionally result in rather energetic confrontations. Evolution, one suspects, has changed the scenery more than the script. One of the book?s greatest strengths is that it captures an exciting period in behavioural science, when researchers were beginning to appreciate just how sophisticated animal communication really is. Earlier generations had often dismissed non-human communication as little more than instinctive noise. By the early 1980s, evidence was accumulating that many primates possessed surprisingly rich signalling systems, forcing scientists to rethink long-held assumptions about language, intelligence and the evolutionary roots of culture itself. Being a Cambridge University Press publication, this is scholarship with substance rather than spectacle. There are no sensational claims that chimpanzees are secretly composing operas or that macaques are about to file tax returns. Instead, readers are presented with careful observation, thoughtful experimentation and the slow, satisfying accumulation of evidence that characterises good science. It is precisely the sort of book that rewards curiosity with genuine insight rather than convenient certainty. This copy is in good condition . The book itself has aged very well, with a sound binding and clean pages throughout. The only notable cosmetic issue is that the dust jacket spine has faded from its original brown to a soft blue , a charming reminder that sunlight has been considerably more interested in the jacket than in the scholarship within. Happily, the contents remain every bit as sharp as the day they were printed. As always, Crappy Old Books delights in rescuing volumes that quietly reshape the way we see the world. Primate Communication reminds us that language did not emerge from nowhere, but from millions of years of evolutionary experimentation among our closest relatives. After reading it, you may find yourself listening rather differently to the chatter of monkeys at the zoo?or indeed to the conversations taking place around the office coffee machine. In both cases, you?ll probably conclude that communication is a far older, r.…