International Journal o f Primatology, VoL 9, No.

4, 1988

Book Review
Apes of the World. Their Social Behavior, Communication, Mentality and
Ecology. By Russell H. Tuttle, Noyes Publications, Park Ridge, New
Jersey, 1986, 421 pp., $55.00.

In 1929, Robert and Ada Yerkes published their landmark book The
Great Apes: A Study of Anthropoid Life. In it, they summarized all available information about the apes. Reliable scientific information about apes
was sparse, and they were sometimes forced to cite anecdotal reports and
observations of unique events involving single individuals. They would probably be gratified to read Apes of the World, R. H. Tuttle's admirable successor to their volume. His book carefully documents the contemporary body
of knowledge about gibbons, siamangs, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and
orangutans that has been accumulated in the last 50 years. We now know
much more than the Yerkeses did about the origins of the apes, their taxonomic relationships to one another and to ourselves, their morphological
adaptations, their social organization and behavior, their cognitive capacities, and their communication repertoires.
The book is arranged topically, and each chapter focuses upon a different subject. Tuttle begins with the taxonomy, distribution, and phylogeny
of the hylobatid and pongid apes. In Chapter 2, he describes their positional
behavior. Chapters 3 and 4 are concerned with the ecological adaptations
of the apes, their feeding strategies, ranging patterns, interspecific interactions, and sleeping behavior. In Chapter 5, Tuttle describes tool use by apes
in captivity and the wild, and in Chapters 6 and 7 he focuses upon the cognitive capacities and communicative skills of the apes. In the last chapter, Tuttle
details the social organization and social behavior of the apes.
This organizational scheme is useful for developing comparative analyses. If you want to know what apes eat and to compare their diets, you
can proceed directly to Chapter 3. On the other hand, information about
each population and species is distributed through many chapters. If you
are interested in the bonobos of Wamba, the orangutans of Kentambe, or
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016,4-0291/88/0800-0385506.00109 1988 Plenum Publishing Corporation

386

Book Review

the gorillas of Mt. Visoke, you have to rely upon the index or skim the entire book to find out what they eat, where they sleep, and how they interact.
As far-ranging as the book is, there are some gaps in this compendium. Tuttle elected not to survey data on the behavior o f apes in
captivity or to discuss the conservation of the apes in the wild.
One of the great strengths of this book is that it synthesizes so much
information from so many disparate sources. It could have been subtitled
"Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Apes but Did Not Have
Enough Time to Look Up." I estimated that the 72-page bibliography contains approximately 1500 references. Virtually every reference that I know
of is included. Tuttle has made a monumental effort to collect, organize,
and report the findings of these studies. The book contains a great wealth
of information that will be valuable for many different purposes and provides a very useful contribution to the literature on the apes. For nearly any
question about the apes, this is clearly the first place to turn. For the most
part, Tuttle is a fair and critical guide through this literature. He warns the
reader about methodological problems that limit the value of some observations, points out logical flaws in the interpretation of data, and notes inconsistencies between studies.
One problem with the book is that it often reads like a tersely annotated bibliography. Although many studies are described in detail, synthetic
discussions of the results of these studies are quite limited. Tuttle does not
fully discuss the theoretical issues that motivate much of the work on many
of these topics. This will limit the book's usefulness to undergraduate students and its appeal for nonspecialists. It may also limit the impact of the
data on readers. I found it difficult to retain much of the information that
Tuttle has so carefully compiled.
Perhaps tedium is inevitable in a book like this. In the Preface, Tuttle
notes that he attempted to relieve the tedium of facts with puns and word
play and warns that "unless the reader agrees that wordplay is almost as much
fun as foreplay, he or she had best not proceed with the book" (p. xiii). I
did not fully appreciate these efforts, particularly the frequent use of slang
terms for sexual acts (e.g., "hunching," "humping," and "shooting blanks").
For the reader who finds graphs, tables, and maps as illuminating as words,
if not as much fun as foreplay, more of these visual devices might also have
improved the flow of the text. There are few figures to illustrate patterns
in the quantitative data, few maps to locate the main study sites at which
apes have been studied, and no summary table describing the sites, investigators, and tenure of the major research projects. The inclusion of more
graphs, maps, and tables might also make it easier to consult this book as

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387

a reference. Many of the black-and-white photographic illustrations of the

apes do not do justice to their subjects.
Joan B. Silk

Department of Anthropology
University of California
Los Angeles, California 90024