ANTH100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Prehensile Tail, Knuckle-Walking, Simian

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Anthropology
• Course: ANTH100
• Professor: Robert Park

Document Summary

Primates - generalized, arboreal (trees) and intelligent animals broadly spread throughout the. Homologies - similarities between species due to common descent. Homoplasies - similarities you nd in living species not due to descent from a common ancestor but function (wings of eagle vs butter y) Order (primate) - suborder(strepsirhini) - infraorder (anthropoidea) - paryorder (platyrhini) - superfamily (hominoidea) - family (hominidae) Almost all are diurnal (active in day) Many are arboreal, although some are terrestrial. Sexual dimorphism (males and females are very different from each other) Platyrhini ( at nose - new world monkeys (howler monkey and spider monkey)) Some species have a prehensile tail (grasping tail) Cercopithecoidea (old world monkeys (macaque and baboon)) All but one species possess a tail but not prehensile tails. Distinctive upper trunk anatomy (shoulder and arm) Pentadactyly (5 digits on hands and feet) Nails (instead of claws) on the digits. Prehensility (grasping) - exible hands and feet.