While human history is usually studied from the perspective of a few hundred years, anthropologists consider deeper causes for the ways we act. In this course, anthropologist Barbara J. King uses her wealth of research experience to open a window of understanding for you into the legacy left by our primate past.
These lectures look for the roots of human behavior in the behavior of other primates: monkeys, apes, and human ancestors.
In these lectures, you explore such questions as:
Are language and technology unique to humans?
Have human love and loyalty developed from emotions of our primate cousins?
Do the ways in which human males and females relate to each other come from our primate past?
Have we inherited a biological tendency for aggression?
How much of our behavioral, cognitive, and cultural identity have we inherited from our closest living relatives?
How can the study of monkeys and apes lead us to a fuller picture of who we are?
As human beings who value our advanced technologies and complex cultures, we are accustomed to viewing ourselves as unique. Since the 1960s, however, when dramatic new findings about monkeys and apes burst onto the scene, it has become increasingly clear that many of the behaviors that we have taken as distinctly human were present before human evolution began.
Thus we look back to a forest in Africa, millions of years ago, when a generalized great ape ancestor split into distinct lineages, then evolved and divided further to create our closest living relatives, and human beings.
Elsewhere, in Asia and the New World, other anthropoid primates followed their own evolutionary course, separate from the human lineage, yet still connected in important ways. From this vantage point, we can see the vast and vibrant range of species to which we are related, not just anatomically, but behaviorally.
An Expert as Your Guide
Dr. King has spent 22 years on the cutting-edge of biological anthropology, not just in the academy but on the plains of Kenya at Amboseli National Park, where she studied baboons, and as a researcher of lowland gorillas at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park.
She has taught at The College of William and Mary since 1988 and has won teaching awards, including William and Mary's Thomas Jefferson Teaching Award and the Virginia State Council of Higher Education's Outstanding Faculty Award. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Professor King has published three books on anthropology and is writing a fourth.
Her perspective is scientific, and the lessons she shares in this course are drawn from an analysis of scores of case studies, the researcher's stock in trade. She is careful to offer persuasive arguments, but avoids definitive conclusions unless they are solidly warranted. Her belief is that, for the scientist, ideas are to be tested, evaluated, sometimes discarded, sometimes revised, and always to be refined by the latest data.

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