International Journal o f Primatology, VoL 9, No. 4, 1988

Book Review

Apes of the World. Their Social Behavior, Communication, Mentality and Ecology. By Russell H. Tuttle, Noyes Publications, Park Ridge, New Jersey, 1986, 421 pp., $55.00.

In 1929, Robert and Ada Yerkes published their landmark book The Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life. In it, they summarized all availa- ble information about the apes. Reliable scientific information about apes was sparse, and they were sometimes forced to cite anecdotal reports and observations of unique events involving single individuals. They would prob- ably be gratified to read Apes of the World, R. H. Tuttle's admirable suc- cessor to their volume. His book carefully documents the contemporary body of knowledge about gibbons, siamangs, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans that has been accumulated in the last 50 years. We now know much more than the Yerkeses did about the origins of the apes, their taxo- nomic relationships to one another and to ourselves, their morphological adaptations, their social organization and behavior, their cognitive capaci- ties, and their communication repertoires.

The book is arranged topically, and each chapter focuses upon a differ- ent subject. Tuttle begins with the taxonomy, distribution, and phylogeny of the hylobatid and pongid apes. In Chapter 2, he describes their positional behavior. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the ecological adaptations of the apes, their feeding strategies, ranging patterns, interspecific interac- tions, and sleeping behavior. In Chapter 5, Tuttle describes tool use by apes in captivity and the wild, and in Chapters 6 and 7 he focuses upon the cogni- tive capacities and communicative skills of the apes. In the last chapter, Tuttle details the social organization and social behavior of the apes.

This organizational scheme is useful for developing comparative ana- lyses. If you want to know what apes eat and to compare their diets, you can proceed directly to Chapter 3. On the other hand, information about each population and species is distributed through many chapters. If you are interested in the bonobos of Wamba, the orangutans of Kentambe, or

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the gorillas of Mt. Visoke, you have to rely upon the index or skim the en- tire book to find out what they eat, where they sleep, and how they interact.

As far-ranging as the book is, there are some gaps in this com- pendium. Tuttle elected not to survey data on the behavior of apes in captivity or to discuss the conservation of the apes in the wild.

One of the great strengths of this book is that it synthesizes so much information from so many disparate sources. It could have been subtitled "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Apes but Did Not Have Enough Time to Look Up." I estimated that the 72-page bibliography con- tains approximately 1500 references. Virtually every reference that I know of is included. Tuttle has made a monumental effort to collect, organize, and report the findings of these studies. The book contains a great wealth of information that will be valuable for many different purposes and pro- vides a very useful contribution to the literature on the apes. For nearly any question about the apes, this is clearly the first place to turn. For the most part, Tuttle is a fair and critical guide through this literature. He warns the reader about methodological problems that limit the value of some observa- tions, points out logical flaws in the interpretation of data, and notes incon- sistencies between studies.

One problem with the book is that it often reads like a tersely annotat- ed bibliography. Although many studies are described in detail, synthetic discussions of the results of these studies are quite limited. Tuttle does not fully discuss the theoretical issues that motivate much of the work on many of these topics. This will limit the book's usefulness to undergraduate stu- dents and its appeal for nonspecialists. It may also limit the impact of the data on readers. I found it difficult to retain much of the information that Tuttle has so carefully compiled.

Perhaps tedium is inevitable in a book like this. In the Preface, Tuttle notes that he attempted to relieve the tedium of facts with puns and word play and warns that "unless the reader agrees that wordplay is almost as much fun as foreplay, he or she had best not proceed with the book" (p. xiii). I did not fully appreciate these efforts, particularly the frequent use of slang terms for sexual acts (e.g., "hunching," "humping," and "shooting blanks"). For the reader who finds graphs, tables, and maps as illuminating as words, if not as much fun as foreplay, more of these visual devices might also have improved the flow of the text. There are few figures to illustrate patterns in the quantitative data, few maps to locate the main study sites at which apes have been studied, and no summary table describing the sites, investi- gators, and tenure of the major research projects. The inclusion of more graphs, maps, and tables might also make it easier to consult this book as

Book Review 387

a reference. Many of the black-and-white photographic illustrations of the apes do not do justice to their subjects.

Joan B. Silk Department of Anthropology

University of California Los Angeles, California 90024