Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
(Female dominance in primates is unique to prosimians.) Social bonds within
the group are established and reinforced by grooming. Prosimians groom in
a rather unique way, all prosimians (ringtail lemurs included) have six lower
teeth that stick straight out from their jaw, forming a comb that the animals
use to groom their fur and the fur of other members of their social group.”
(http://www.duke.edu/web/primate/).
Lemur catta
is very popular with many people because these creatures are seen
as very gentle and 'friendly' primates. According to Jolly (1966), the fact that
social lemurs show the usual primate type of society and social learning with-
out the capacity to manipulate objects as monkeys do, might indicate the pri-
macy of social intelligence in the evolution of primate intelligence. Although
it is likely that lemurs can interpret a variety of social cues and use body lan-
guage and social grooming as social cohesion mechanisms, they are not known
to be elaborate story-tellers. According to Nelson (Nelson 1993: 12), when hu-
man primates are growing up “an important development takes place when the
process of sharing memories with others through language becomes available
as a means of reinstating memory...Language opens up possibilities for sharing
and retaining memories in a culturally shared format for both personal and
social functions. Sharing memory narratives is important to establish the new
social function of autobiographical memory,aswellastomakereinstatement
through language possible.” Thus, autobiographical memory as we know it, i.e.
human-style autobiographical memory, seems to go hand in hand with the de-
velopment of language. Lemurs are not likely to be able to communicate with
us by telling stories about themselves and others, although their non-verbal
communication system might be rich (and, as one can speculate, possibly even
have narrative structure (Dautenhahn 2001)). However, humans interpret the
lives of these gentle and beautiful lemurs in the most natural way, namely as
stories and tales, and we cannot do otherwise.
For investigations into animal minds we cannot hand out questionnaires or
conduct interviews, information can only be gained via observing natural be-
havior in the wild and/or conducting laboratory experiments under controlled
conditions. Due to the difficult nature of gaining results that can withstand sci-
entific/methodological scrutiny, many issues regarding animal minds (e.g. imi-
tation, empathy, mindreading) are still highly controversial. We cannot directly
look into a lemur's mind, neither do we know what kind of stories elephants or
cetaceans
are telling, and what a story could mean to their lives in the first place.
However, imagine that young dolphins grow up while being taught the struc-
ture of narratives through story-telling, with their parents, peers and relatives,
then the structure of these stories can be expected to be well adapted to life and
