Masaki Tomonaga

Yasuhiro Go

Hiroo Imai

Michael A. Huffman

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

Hirohisa Hirai

In 2001, first reports of the human draft genome were published. Since then, genomes of many other organisms have been sequenced, including several primate species: the chimpanzee, rhesus macaque, gorilla, orangutan, gibbon, baboon, marmoset, tarsier, galago, lemur, and more recently Neanderthals. In a new era of "post-genome biology", scientists now have the vast amount of information revealed by genome research to confront one of the most challenging, fundamental questions in primatology and anthropology: What makes us human? This volume comprises a collection of articles on a variety of topics relevant to primate genomes, including evolution, human origins, genome structure, chromosome genomics, and bioinformatics. The book covers the cutting-edge research in molecular primatology and provides great insights into the functional diversity of primates. This valuable collection will benefit researchers and students, including primatologists, anthropologists, molecular biologists, evolutionary biologists, and animal behaviorists.

Yasuhiro Go

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