A fantastic and easy visual mnemonic to help you learn your primates! All credit to Tdadamemd on Wikipedia for this beauty.
No prizes for guessing who’s revising for their Human Origins course.
”This image is a hand mnemonic used to help students learn a categorization of primates. The right hand (held palm upward) correlates to the apes, including the great apes and lesser apes. Humans are distinct from that group as the thumb is distinct from the other four digits of the hand. Apes are distinct from other primates in that they evolved to be tailless. Old world monkeys have a family name that means “tailed ape” and are indicated on the left thumb that points toward the right hand of apes. Old world monkeys are grouped with all of the apes in the parvorder called Catarrhini. New world monkeys on the left index finger form their own parvorder called Platyrrhini (meaning “flat nosed”). These are the only monkeys with prehensile tails. The group of simians (higher primates) are all apes and monkeys, so includes all of the above (Catarrhini and Platyrrhini). The three remaining digits on the left hand form the group of prosimians (lower primates).
The hand phalanges are not to be mistaken for a phylogeny as the branching geometry is not accurate. And the ten hand digits do not correspond to any single particular level of taxonomy. The specific correspondence of digits is:
- right thumb = genus Homo => 1 species: homo sapiens,
- right index = genus Pan => 2 species: common chimpanzees (4 subspecies) and bonobos,
- right middle = subfamily Gorillinae => genus Gorilla => 2 species: western gorillas (2 subspecies) and eastern gorillas (2 subspecies),
- right ring = subfamily Ponginae => genus Pongo => 2 species: Bornean orangutans (3 subspecies) and Sumatran orangutans,
- right pinky = family Hylobatidae => 4 genera of gibbons => nearly twenty species in total, including siamangs, lar gibbons and hoolock gibbons,
- left thumb = superfamily Cercopithecoidea (old world monkeys) => well over one hundred species including baboons and macaques,
- left index = parvorder Platyrrhini => superfamily Ceboidea (new world monkeys) => well over one hundred species including marmosets, tamarins, titis, howlers and squirrel monkeys,
- left middle = infraorder of tarsiers,
- left ring = superfamily of lemurs,
- left pinky = superfamily of lorisoids.
Categorization of humans has not been without controversy. One position is that homo sapiens are above apes and that it is improper to categorize the species as one of the great apes. The opposite extreme is the view that humans are “the third chimpanzee”, based upon the very high percentage of genetic commonality between the species. This image follows a convention found between these two positions.
All primates are mammals. The word ‘mammal’ emphasizes the mother-offspring bond established through breastfeeding (mammary gland feeding > mammals). Humans are unique among primates and mammals, and the name ‘man’ can be understood as an emphasis of the exceptional human ability to manage and control our environment through manipulation with manual labor using our hands. The words ‘manual’, ‘manipulate’ and ‘manage’ are from the root ‘manus’ which is Latin for ‘hand’ (manus/hand control over nature > man). The term ‘primate’ means ‘first rank’, similar to the word ‘prime’. An objection could be made that this is an entirely human-centric bias and is lacking in due consideration for other highly evolved species such as dolphins and elephants. It is conceivable that when humanity achieves the ability to fully step away from an ego-center-of-the-universe attitude, a replacement blanket term for this order will be used instead of ‘primate’.”
The original page can be found here.