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Primates (2008) 49:235236 DOI 10.1007/s10329-008-0090-5
BOOK REVIEW
Susan Perry with Joseph H. Manson: Manipulative monkeys.
The capuchins of Lomas Barbudal
Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 2008, 358pp
Elisabetta Visalberghi
Received: 5 June 2008 / Accepted: 6 June 2008 / Published online: 10 July 2008 Japan Monkey Centre and Springer 2008
Manipulative monkeys is the enlightening description of the lives of the white-faced capuchin monkeys (Cebus capucinus) Susan Perry and her many collaborators, including her husband primatologist Joe Manson, have studied for about two decades. Perrys Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project began in 1990 with the aim of studying one troop of capuchin monkeys in a protected area of Costa Rica. Since then, the project has grown tremendously and so have the goals of her research. During the period 20012006, when Perry was Director of the Independent Junior Research Group in Cultural Phylogeny at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), she succeeded in following the members of ve capuchin troops. This allowed the investigation of intra-group as well as between-groups interactions.
As we learn in the very rst chapters, everything started with Susans Dissertation. After having supported Joe on his dissertation on the macaques living in the island of Cayo Santiago (Puerto Rico), she decided to investigate the quality and complexity of the social relations of capuchins. Traditionally, the social organisation of New World monkeys had been considered of lower complexity than that of their Old World counterparts, and therefore comparing the social organisations of New World and Old World monkeys was important in elucidating the origins of primate intelligence.
As Chap. 1 illustrates, in the 1990s three main competing hypotheses attempted to account for brain expansion: the...