Insights into the Geographical Origins of the Cabo Verde Green Monkey.

The green monkey Chlorocebus sabaeus, L. 1766, native to West Africa, was introduced to the Cabo Verde Archipelago in the 16th century. Historical sources suggest that, due to the importance of Cabo Verde as a commercial entrepôt in the Atlantic slave trade, establishing the precise place of origin of this introduced species is challenging. Non-invasive fecal samples were collected from feral and captive green monkey individuals in Cabo Verde. Two mitochondrial fragments, HVRI and cyt b, were used to confirm the taxonomic identification of the species and to tentatively determine the geographic origin of introduction to the archipelago from the African continent. By comparing the new sequences of this study to previously published ones, it was shown that Cabo Verde individuals have unique haplotypes in the HVRI, while also showing affinities to several populations from north-western coastal Africa in the cyt b, suggesting probable multiple sources of introduction and an undetermined most probable origin. The latter is consistent with historical information, but may also have resulted from solely using mtDNA as a genetic marker and the dispersal characteristics of the species. The limitations of the methodology are discussed and future directions of research are suggested.

An early representation of a gorilla from fifteenth-century Central Asia.

The present work describes the earliest known image of a gorilla (Gorilla sp.) to appear outside Africa. This is found in an Asian miniature painted on silk from the second half of the fifteenth century, called Four captive demons. The inspirational source of this painting is obscure and the artist unknown, but it may have been created in the Timurid-Turkmen region of Central Asia. A commercial network linking the African Great Lakes region-where the eastern gorilla (Gorilla beringei) still occurs-and the Swahili ports could have served to facilitate trade in fauna at that time in history. Countless African animals were sent by Egyptian and Eastern African rulers to their counterparts in Central Asia as diplomatic gifts, and a captive gorilla specimen could have been kept in one of the "gardens" of the Timurid-Turkmen rulers and portrayed by an artist working at their courts. This image is intriguing and worthy of attention because it opens up new scenarios regarding the extent of knowledge of Great Apes prior to the Age of Discovery, giving potentially important new insights into human-anthropoid interaction.

Perception and description of New World non-human primates in the travel literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: a critical review.

The current work presents the results of a review of most of the European diaries and travel chronicles containing reports of New World non-human primates dating from the discovery of America in 1492 until the end of the sixteenth century. We report the integral texts translated into English of these literary sources, giving a critical interpretation from a historical and scientific point of view. We note the ways these primates were perceived and described, with attention to the most important characteristics that were highlighted by the first explorers. Ethnotaxonomy and vernacular names used to designate non-human primates are also provided. This new body of knowledge, based largely on empirical reports full of details and first-hand observations, emerged as the first nucleus in the natural history of Neotropical Primates.

The concept of species and the foundations of biology, a case study: the Callithrix jacchus group (Primates-Platyrrhini).

The axiomatic theory presented in Galleni and Forti [1999], being part of the foundational programme of Ennio De Giorgi, is based on the fundamental notions of quality, relation, operation and collection, and provides a very general axiomatization of the biological notions of living object, generation, species and speciation. Within this theoretical framework we consider here a difficult case of classification of species: the Callithrix jacchus group of the New World monkeys. Although the morphological analysis strongly suggests the individuation of six different species, nevertheless several experiments of crossing give evidence to fertility of hybrids. Since both the morphological and the hybridological criteria have shown to be of enormous importance in actual classification of species, this apparent contradiction seems very disappointing. Our axiomatization of speciation processes as operations acting in special time intervals permits to avoid the contradiction by allowing for individuals which, during such special periods, may belong to more than one species. Therefore we assume that one or more speciation processes are developing, starting from a unique protospecies and differentiating in six new ones. In order to obtain more evidence of these processes, new observations and suitable experiments are needed.