Primate Classification Chart
Venessa Daywalt
Taxonomic charts of the living primates can be found below. The primates are divided into two major taxonomic groups: strepsirrhines, which retain primitive characteristics, such as the lemurs of Madagascar and the bushbabies of Africa, and the more derived haplorrhines, that is, the tarsier, monkeys, and apes. The older terms for the suborders that are still in popular use are Prosimii (see figure 2.3) and Anthropoidea. However, tarsiers (small, nocturnal prosimian from the islands of the Southeast Asian archipelago) have characteristics of both groups. The strepsirrhine primates have more typical mammalian noses or rhinaria (see Figure 2.4) that are moist and more complex. They have a larger olfactory bulb in the frontal cortex of their brains and scent glands in various locations on their bodies. They use those glands to communicate to other members of their species. We haplorhines have simpler, dry noses and do not smell as good!
As we learn more about biochemical and evolutionary relationships among the various groups of primates, primate taxonomy is changing. The New World monkeys (see Figure 2.5) have changed substantially in recent years, with the creation of multiple families that were formerly grouped into two or three.
We apes share a suite of characteristics (in varying degrees), and we humans have radically changed as we abandoned a more typical ape habitat and adapted to a more open terrestrial landscape. The table below lists great ape characteristics.
Apes live a relatively long time and consequently all of our life stages are prolonged as well, especially our juvenile dependency period. Of the nonhuman primates, orangutans win. Female orangutans have an interbirth interval (i.e. a period of time in between births) of eight years and juveniles do not even start wandering off until they are seven. That is not good news from a conservation perspective!
All great apes build nests and scientists speculate that our ancestors likely did as well, at least until they left the trees. We also use tools. Chimps are the champs when it comes to tool use, e.g. nut cracking, ant fishing, etc. Orangutans are very adept at tool use as well, but their thumbs are short and more distant from their fingers, so that their opposability is poor. Consequently, they use their mouths to trim sticks and manipulate them for the desired task. In captivity, they also use their mouths to draw and paint. While gorilla tool use had been known from observations of gorillas in captivity, the use of a tool in the wild was finally recorded in 2005 when a female used a stick to test water depth. Of course, we humans are on a whole different level and we can trace the development of hominin technology in the archaeological record to over 3 mya.
Great ape social organization varies by species. The chimps and bonobos (genus: Pan) are most like the majority of human traditional societies in that they live in male philopatric, multi-male/multi-female communities. Philopatry refers to the sex that remains in their natal group, i.e. the group into which they were born. This type of social organization is seen in some ripe fruit specialists, such as the chimps and bonobos of Africa and the New World spider monkeys. Since fruit is an ephemeral resource, females cannot cooperatively defend it. Groups of related males cooperatively defend a home range against outsider males. Females emigrate from their natal community and join a different community when they reach sexual maturity. Group members come together intermittently into larger aggregations wherein they may interact. This grouping pattern is termed fission-fusion. Since males patrol and protect the area and females are relatively large and powerful and can climb, the danger of predation is relatively low and they therefore have less of a need to congregate. The mating pattern is termed polygynandry, meaning that males and females are promiscuous and may have multiple sexual partners. Males may attempt to monopolize and coerce females to mate but females are adept at getting around bullying males and may even mate with males outside of their group.
Gorillas live in one-male groups, except for the mountain gorillas, where two males may reside, an older dominant and younger subordinate. Both sexes tend to leave their natal group. Females join a male who may or may not already have other female mates. Thus the mating system is also polygynous. Males defend their females and offspring from outsider males who may be infanticidal. In mountain gorillas, females are thought to prefer groups with two males as they provide better protection for her offspring.
It can thus be seen that there are characteristics of the human sexes in all three great ape genera (plural of genus): male defense and mate-guarding, female choice for dominant males and good genes, male philopatry with females maximizing resources for themselves and offspring in chimps and bonobos, etc.
The History of Our Tribe: Hominini Copyright 2017 by Barbara Helm Welker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Primates have large brains (relative to body size) compared to other mammals, as well as an increased reliance on visual acuity at the expense of the sense of smell, which is the dominant sensory system in most mammals. These features are more developed in monkeys and apes, and noticeably less so in lorises and lemurs. Some primates, including gorillas, humans and baboons, are primarily ground-dwelling rather than arboreal, but all species have adaptations for climbing trees. Arboreal locomotion techniques used include leaping from tree to tree and swinging between branches of trees (brachiation); terrestrial locomotion techniques include walking on two hindlimbs (bipedalism) and modified walking on four limbs (quadripedalism) via knuckle-walking.
Primates are among the most social of all animals, forming pairs or family groups, uni-male harems, and multi-male/multi-female groups. Non-human primates have at least four types of social systems, many defined by the amount of movement by adolescent females between groups. Primates have slower rates of development than other similarly sized mammals, reach maturity later, and have longer lifespans. Primates are also the most cognitively advanced animals, with humans (genus Homo) capable of creating complex languages and sophisticated civilizations, and non-human primates are recorded to use tools. They may communicate using facial and hand gestures, smells and vocalizations.
Close interactions between humans and non-human primates (NHPs) can create opportunities for the transmission of zoonotic diseases, especially virus diseases including herpes, measles, ebola, rabies and hepatitis. Thousands of non-human primates are used in research around the world because of their psychological and physiological similarity to humans. About 60% of primate species are threatened with extinction. Common threats include deforestation, forest fragmentation, monkey drives, and primate hunting for use in medicines, as pets, and for food. Large-scale tropical forest clearing for agriculture most threatens primates.
The English name primates is derived from Old French or French primat, from a noun use of Latin primat-, from primus ('prime, first rank').[3] The name was given by Carl Linnaeus because he thought this the "highest" order of animals.[4] The relationships among the different groups of primates were not clearly understood until relatively recently, so the commonly used terms are somewhat confused. For example, ape has been used either as an alternative for monkey or for any tailless, relatively human-like primate.[5][6]
Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark was one of the primatologists who developed the idea of trends in primate evolution and the methodology of arranging the living members of an order into an "ascending series" leading to humans.[7] Commonly used names for groups of primates such as prosimians, monkeys, lesser apes, and great apes reflect this methodology. According to our current understanding of the evolutionary history of the primates, several of these groups are paraphyletic, or rather they do not include all the descendants of a common ancestor.[8]
In contrast with Clark's methodology, modern classifications typically identify (or name) only those groupings that are monophyletic; that is, such a named group includes all the descendants of the group's common ancestor.[9]
All groups with scientific names are clades, or monophyletic groups, and the sequence of scientific classification reflects the evolutionary history of the related lineages. Groups that are traditionally named are shown on the right; they form an "ascending series" (per Clark, see above), and several groups are paraphyletic:
Thus, the members of the two sets of groups, and hence names, do not match, which causes problems in relating scientific names to common (usually traditional) names. Consider the superfamily Hominoidea: In terms of the common names on the right, this group consists of apes and humans and there is no single common name for all the members of the group. One remedy is to create a new common name, in this case hominoids. Another possibility is to expand the use of one of the traditional names. For example, in his 2005 book, the vertebrate palaeontologist Benton wrote, "The apes, Hominoidea, today include the gibbons and orangutan ... the gorilla and chimpanzee ... and humans";[12] thereby Benton was using apes to mean hominoids. In that case, the group heretofore called apes must now be identified as the non-human apes.
As of 2021[update], there is no consensus as to whether to accept traditional (that is, common), but paraphyletic, names or to use monophyletic names only; or to use 'new' common names or adaptations of old ones. Both competing approaches can be found in biological sources, often in the same work, and sometimes by the same author. Thus, Benton defines apes to include humans, then he repeatedly uses ape-like to mean 'like an ape rather than a human'; and when discussing the reaction of others to a new fossil he writes of "claims that Orrorin ... was an ape rather than a human".[13]
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