by Andrew Peter Wilson (Author)
Kinship, Friendship, Sex and Aggression in Free-ranging Rhesus Monkeys is an "ethnography" of social behavior. Descended from individuals brought from India in 1938 by the comparative primate psychologist C.R. Carpenter, who anticipating WWII, foresaw the supply of monkeys for medical research being cut off. The colony is located on Cayo Santiago, a forty-acre island, 5/8 of a mile off the coast of Puerto Rico and is by now the best-studied population of nonhuman primates in the world. Following Carpenter's initial studies (1942), a detailed field study of the Cayo Santiago colony was made by Stuart Altmann (1954), a student of E.O. Wilson. Many investigators followed. Noteworthy among them is Donald Sade, an anthropologist, whose many graduate students followed his pioneering work. My own study was initiated under Sade's guidance in July 1964 when I went with Sade for a summer's introductory field work in Puerto Rico from graduate school at Berkeley.