The order Primates has been studied with vigour by scientists since the time of Galen of Pergamum. Aristotle and Hippocrates, in the 4th and 3rd centuries bc, recognized the similarity of man and apes, but it was Galen who demonstrated the kinship by dissection. He wrote, “The ape is likest to man in viscera, muscles, arteries, veins, nerves and in the form of bones.” It should be noted that Galen was in fact referring to monkeys, primarily to the Barbary “ape” (a species of macaque, Macaca sylvanus), and not to the true apes, which were unknown to Westerners until the 15th century. None of these early scientists saw any evolutionary significance in the similarity of humans and “apes,” a correspondence that they regarded as purely coincidental. An inkling of humans’ relationship with primates must have penetrated the mind of St. Albertus Magnus, probably the leading naturalist of the Middle Ages, who produced a classification of animal life in his book De animalibus. Albertus’s classification, which placed man between “apes” (monkeys) on the one hand and “animals” on the other, provides the first whiff of the “missing-link” concept, which later was to befog the issue of humans’ place in nature.

The Dark Ages were aptly named as far as knowledge of primates is concerned. The first evidence of a renaissance of interest was in the time of Vesalius, the great Belgian anatomist of the 16th century, who published a comparative anatomy of man and “apes” in order to confound the precepts of Galen. He did not succeed in disproving Galen’s assertion that “ape is likest to man,” but he unwittingly succeeded in stirring up an interest in the biology of primates that has never flagged since. The first true ape studied as a scientific specimen was a chimpanzee dissected by Edward Tyson, an English anatomist, in 1699. Tyson’s specimen, which he called the “Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris,” is housed to this day in the Natural History Museum, London, mounted in a standing position reflecting Tyson’s belief that he had discovered the Pygmy, a race of humans known since the time of the ancient Greeks. Tyson wrote of his “pygmie” that it was “no man, nor yet a common ape but a sort of animal between both.” It never occurred to Tyson or his contemporaries, who believed that all animals had been created independently in their current image, that humans, apes, and monkeys were connected by common evolutionary descent. In 1758 Carolus Linnaeus—the father of animal and plant classification—added the lemurs and bats to the monkeys, apes, and man and called the whole assemblage the Primates. His conclusion was regarded as a grave blow to human dignity, and it was followed by new classifications such as that of Johann Blumenbach in 1776, placing man in a separate order. Man was not again considered part of the primate order until a century later when the English anatomist St. George Mivart, in the climate of post-Darwinian thought, published his classification of primates.

The first evolutionist was a French scholar of the late 18th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who saw animal life as an uninterrupted continuity in which old species were transformed into new species in a sequence of increasing complexity and perfection. However, it was Georges Cuvier, a rabid antievolutionist, who in 1821 had the historic distinction of describing Adapis, the first fossil primate genus ever recognized. Fossils such as Adapis, Cuvier believed, were the remains of animals destroyed by past catastrophes such as floods and earthquakes, and living animals were new stocks divinely created to fill the vacuum—a view consistent with the widely held notion that species were immutable. During the early 19th century, a number of geologists and biologists questioned the doctrine of immutability, but it was not until 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, that positive evidence was provided, along with a sound alternative theory. The Darwinian contention that humans not only had evolved but had evolved from a simian (apelike) ancestor resulted in acrimonious debate among scientists, theologians, philosophers, and laymen. As influential zoologists and anatomists rose to support Darwin, humanity’s primate consanguinity began to be accepted, if not actually relished. Today, few scientists deny that humans and the lower primates belong in the same order; in fact, much current research is directed toward closing the apparent gap between the highest of the nonhuman primates, chimpanzees and gorillas, and humans.

In times past, the public image of primates was largely dictated by prevailing religious beliefs. In Asian countries, where primates abound, monkeys have for a long time been regarded with various degrees of deference that—among Hindus in India, for instance—amounts almost to worship. In Europe and North America, where monkeys and apes are totally absent, no religious sect has attached divine significance to them; in fact, the reverse has been the case, monkeys at various times having been regarded as the personification of evil and depravity, familiars of the devil. This image, however, is fading as a result of instruction in schools and advances in naturalistic presentation of primates in zoos and in the media. The nonhuman primate is generally accepted by Western and other cultures as an animal of peculiar interest to humanity with many amusing and endearing qualities.

The activities of nonhuman primates, however, are less endearing to farmers and agriculturists in certain parts of the world. In South Africa, the chacma baboon (Papio ursinus) competes with domestic sheep for grazing lands and is an occasional predator of lambs; in West and Central Africa, native crops are subject to daily assaults by forest-living monkeys; and in India, macaques, which have been accorded a semisacred status, live alongside people in towns and villages and are parasitic upon them for food and shelter.

Scientific interest in nonhuman primates—their structure at all levels and their way of life—is currently in the ascendancy. Their value as research animals has decreased in recent years, as a result of both conservation concerns and ethical qualms, but, at the beginning of the 21st century, 100,000 or more monkeys were still being consumed annually by laboratories in the study of human diseases, the production of vaccines, experimental organ transplantation, the testing of drugs, and even clinical trials of new cosmetics. Their scientific usefulness has raised important problems of conservation of primate stocks in the wild, and exportation of monkeys is no longer permitted from many countries. Other research fields depending upon observation and experimentation with nonhuman primates include those of endocrinology, neurology, psychology, and sociology. As a result of such studies, much is learned that is of great significance for humans and the betterment of society.