Michael A. Huffman

Jean-Baptiste Leca

Paul L. Vasey

The Arashiyama group of Japanese macaques holds a distinguished place in primatology as one of the longest continuously studied non-human primate populations in the world. The resulting long-term data provide a unique resource for researchers, allowing them to move beyond cross-sectional studies to tackle larger issues involving individual, matrilineal and group histories. This book presents an overview of the scope and magnitude of research topics and management efforts that have been conducted on this population for several decades, covering not only the original troop living around Kyoto, Japan, but also the two subgroups that were translocated to Texas, USA and Montreal, Canada. The chapters encompass topics including life history, sexual, social and cultural behaviour and ecology, giving an insight into the range of current primatological research. The contributors underscore the historic value of the Arashiyama macaques and showcase new and significant research findings that highlight their continuing importance to primatology.

60 Years of Primatological Research on the Japanese Macaques of Arashiyama

The Monkeys of Stormy Mountain

Reviews the most important topics in current primatology using research on the long-studied Arashiyama population of Japanese macaques.

Masaki Tomonaga

Yasuhiro Go

Hiroo Imai

Naofumi Nakagawa

(tentative) What bring about biodiversity are not always genes. As is the case with humans, cultural diversity of non-human animals has also been found. Most of well-known examples of animal cultures are those of food acquisition behaviors, such as sweet-potato-washing by Japanese macaques and nut-cracking by chimpanzees. First author, Naofumi Nakagawa, introduces cultural diversity of social behaviors in wild Japanese macaques, such as the embracing behaviors between adult females in a wild group in each population of Yakushima, Kinkazan, and Shimokita. The subtle local difference in embracing can be identified as the first evidence for social customs in wild Japanese macaques. The next author, Michael A. Huffman, introduces the self-medicative behavior in non-human primates, which is a relatively new study in primatology. Parasites cause a variety of diseases that affect the behavior and reproductive fitness of an individual. He classifies health maintenance and self-medicative behaviors observed in non-human primates into four levels. Not only humans but also apes and monkeys are maintaining their health. The third authors, Hiroo Imai, Masaki Tomonaga, and Yasuhiro Go, are promoting comparative cognitive sciences of primates including human and chimpanzees. Recently, human personal genome projects progresses as related to the phenotypes including cognition, while there was no similar project for non-human primates. They started personal genome and transcriptome projects of chimpanzees in Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, years ago. They introduce recent progresses of the project and related results based on the primate genome sciences.

Primatology in Japan

Monkeys, Apes, and Humans

Anindya Sinha

Sindhu Radhakrishna

The concept of this book arises from a symposium entitled “Human-Macaque Interactions: Traditional and Modern Perspectives on Cooperation and Conflict ” organized at the 23rd Congress of the International Primatological Society, that was held in Kyoto in September 2010. The symposium highlighted the many aspects of human-macaque relations and some of the participants were invited to contribute to this volume. The volume will include about 11 chapters by a variety of international authors and some excerpts from published literature that illustrate cultural notions of macaques. Contributions from invited authors will engage with four main perspectives – traditional views of macaques, cooperative relationships between humans and macaques, current scenarios of human-macaque conflict, and how living with and beside humans has affected macaques. Authors will address these concerns through their research findings and reviews of their work on the Asian, and the lone African, macaques. ​

Michael A. Huffman

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