INTRODUCTION

This first section offers a compact overview of great ape cognition. We did not attempt to review this material comprehensively because others have done so recently (e.g., Byrne 1995; Matsuzawa 2001; Parker & McKinney 1999; Parker, Mitchell & Miles 1999; Russon, Bard & Parker 1996; Suddendorf & Whiten 2001; Thompson & Oden 2000; Tomasello & Call 1997). Our primary aim was to revisit cognitive phenomena in living great apes considered to need evolutionary explanations beyond those applicable to other anthropoid primates. We then favored discussions of cognition as it develops in species-typical rearing conditions and applies to species-typical problems, and we emphasized the social and ecological cognition that have been the focus of discussions on primate cognitive evolution. We also revisited this topic to bring newer findings on great ape cognition to the broader community of scholars interested in cognitive evolution. Great apes are regularly taken as the best living models of the ancestral cognitive platform from which human cognition evolved (e.g., Donald 1991; Mithen 1996), so accurate portrayals of their cognition are essential to reconstructing human cognitive evolution accurately.

Byrne, Chapter 3, discusses “technical” skills, which have been major candidates for the defining force in great ape cognition. He argues that research focus on great apes' tool-based foraging skills, while important, has distracted attention from other impressive achievements equally likely to represent cognitive adaptations (Yamakoshi, Chapter 9, this volume takes a similar view) and that great apes' technical skills may be as cognitively complex as those of some pre-modern hominins.