Traces the interpretation of the ambiguously human-like great apes and ape-like ancestors of present-day humans. It shows how, from the days of Linnaeus to rece... » 

Traces the interpretation of the ambiguously human-like great apes and ape-like ancestors of present-day humans. It shows how, from the days of Linnaeus to recent research, the sacred and taboo-ridden, animal-human boundary was time and again redrawn to cope with these challenges. At stake was the unique human dignity, a basic idea and value in the West which was, and to some extent still is, centrally on the minds of ethnologists, archaeologists, and primatologists. This book is thus the first to offer an anthropological-cum-epistemological analysis of the burgeoning anthropological disciplines in terms of their own cultural taboos and philosophical preconceptions. It maps their unwilling retreat from the notion of human unicity and from the relentless policing of the animal-human boundary. «