Overview
Another difficult concept to get across, in addition to the time scale problem, is the idea that the natural world is not divided into human and nonhuman, or human and animal or, worse yet, man and nature. In the context of anthropology, this problem is often seen in the tendency among students, and some professionals, to use the term "primate" to mean nonhuman primate, as if the hominids were somehow qualitatively different. (In fact, the term "hominid" is all too often used to mean any bipedal primate other than modern Homo sapiens). This chapter, then, begins with a discussion of taxonomy, science's way of expressing biological relationships at a given point in time, as well as the phylogenetic implications of those relationships. Although, of course, I discuss taxonomic categories by continually narrowing down the taxa considered to those to which our species belongs, I hope that the way it is presented will help students understand that we do have a "place in nature" and what that place, relative to other creatures, is. Comparing phenetic and cladistic taxonomies is not only important but helps in this understanding.I then define the primates by looking at their general characteristics—organized into five categories that could be used to describe any group of animals. The variety of the species-specific expressions of the primate traits is a point of the next section, "Survey of the Living Primates," which should show students that each primate is, in its own way, a unique version of the general primate theme. I end, naturally, with a specific discussion of the human primate.