Primatology in the context of "Evolutionary anthropology"

Prehistoric warfare refers to war that occurred between societies without recorded history.

The existence—and the definition—of war in humanity's state of nature has been a controversial topic in the history of ideas at least since Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651) argued a "war of all against all", a view directly challenged by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a Discourse on Inequality (1755) and The Social Contract (1762). The debate over human nature continues, spanning contemporary anthropology, archaeology, ethnography, history, political science, psychology, primatology, and philosophy in such divergent books as Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization and Raymond C. Kelly's Warless Societies and the Origin of War. For the purposes of this article, "prehistoric war" will be broadly defined as a state of organized lethal aggression between autonomous preliterate communities.

Animal culture can be defined as the ability of non-human animals to learn and transmit behaviors through processes of social or cultural learning.Culture is increasingly seen as a process, involving the social transmittance of behavior among peers and between generations. It can involve the transmission of novel behaviors or regional variations that are independent of genetic or ecological factors.

The existence of culture in non-humans has been a contentious subject, sometimes forcing researchers to rethink "what it is to be human".The notion of culture in other animals dates back to Aristotle in classical antiquity, and more recently to Charles Darwin, but the association of other animals' actions with the actual word 'culture' originated with Japanese primatologists' discoveries of socially-transmitted food behaviours in the 1940s. Evidence for animal culture is often based on studies of feeding behaviors, vocalizations, predator avoidance, mate selection, and migratory routes.

Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship lines within the family Hominidae, working from biological evidence (such as petrified skeletal remains, bone fragments, footprints) and cultural evidence (such as stone tools, artifacts, and settlement localities).

The field draws from and combines primatology, paleontology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology. As technologies and methods advance, genetics plays an ever-increasing role, in particular to examine and compare DNA structure as a vital tool of research of the evolutionary kinship lines of related species and genera.

In zoology, mammalogy, from Latin mamma, meaning "breast", and -logy from λόγος (lógos), meaning "study", is the study of mammals – a class of vertebrates with characteristics such as homeothermic metabolism, fur, four-chambered hearts, and complex nervous systems. The archive of the number of mammals on earth is constantly growing, but is currently set at 6,495 different mammal species including recently extinct. There are 5,416 living mammals identified on earth and roughly 1,251 have been newly discovered since 2006. The major branches of mammalogy include natural history, taxonomy and systematics, anatomy and physiology, ethology, ecology, and management and control. Mammalogists are typically involved in activities such as conducting research, managing personnel, and writing proposals.

Mammalogy branches off into other taxonomically oriented disciplines such as primatology (the study of primates), and cetology (the study of cetaceans). Like other studies, mammalogy is also a part of zoology which is also a part of biology, the study of all living things.

Primate cognition is the study of the intellectual and behavioral skills of non-human primates, particularly in the fields of psychology, behavioral biology, primatology, and anthropology.

Primates are capable of high levels of cognition; some make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; some have sophisticated hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative and capable of deception; they can recognise kin and conspecifics; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence.