About this item
Planet Without Apes demands that we consider whether we can live with the consequences of wiping our closest relatives off the face of the Earth. Leading primatologist Craig Stanford warns that extinction of the great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—threatens to become a reality within just a few human generations. We are on the verge of losing the last links to our evolutionary past, and to all the biological knowledge about ourselves that would die along with them. The crisis we face is tantamount to standing aside while our last extended family members vanish from the planet. Stanford sees great apes as not only intelligent but also possessed of a culture: both toolmakers and social beings capable of passing cultural knowledge down through generations.
About the Author
Stanford is the author of more than 120 scholarly and popular articles on animal behavior and human nature topics, including the widely used text book Biological Anthropology. Stanford has recently published Planet Without Apes (Harvard University Press, 2012) about the race against extinction for the great apes. He is currently working on a book about the behavioral biology of chimpanzees.
