- General considerations
- Natural history
- Form and function
- Evolution and paleontology
The reduction of the snout in primates is a correlate of the diminution of the sense of smell, or olfaction. To a great extent, visual acuity and manual dexterity have replaced the sensitive, inquiring nose found in so many nonprimate mammals. A marked reduction in the complexity of the nasal concha (“scroll” bones of the nose), the richness of the innervation of the olfactory mucous membrane, and the sensitivity of the moist tip of the nose—the rhinarium—are associated with the reduction in length of the primate snout. Still, although the trend in primate evolution is toward a dethronement of the primacy of the sense of smell, there are still some good snouts to be seen in those lower primates that retain a naked moist rhinarium attached to the upper lip.
Lemurs, lorises, tarsiers, and New World monkeys depend for many aspects of their social and reproductive behaviour on olfactory signals, by means of special scent glands distributed in different regions of the body but congregated principally in the anal and perineal regions (in lemurs and lorises) or in the sternal region (in New World monkeys and tarsiers). Marking behaviour, the placing of scent at various points in the environment, is a prominent feature of the repertoire of communication in these primates. Marking behaviour ceases to be of much importance in the Old World monkeys and apes, with some exceptions such as mandrills, siamangs, concolor gibbons, and even orangutans among the hominoids. All of these primates possess sternal glands, but in all of them the structures by which olfactory signals are given and received are diminished. But all higher primates, including humans, sniff at unfamiliar items of food before placing them in the mouth.
The shape of the nose of higher primates is one of the most reliable means of distinguishing Old World monkeys from New World monkeys at a glance. In New World monkeys (the Platyrrhini, meaning “flat nosed”), the nose is broad, and the nostrils are set wide apart, well separated by a broad septum, and point sideways. In the apes and Old World monkeys (the Catarrhini, meaning “downward nosed”), the nostrils are set close together, point forward or downward, and are separated by a very narrow septum.
Some Old World monkeys—particularly those that have adopted a ground-living way of life, such as baboons and mandrills, of the subfamily Cercopithecinae—appear to have readopted a long snout during their evolution. This structure, however, is not primarily olfactory in function but seems, rather, to be allometric, more closely related to the large size of the jaws and the prominence of the canine teeth; it should be considered a dental muzzle rather than an olfactory one.
Sensory reception and the brain
Among mammals in general, the olfactory system is the primary receptor for environmental information; consequently, the brain of most mammals is dominated by the olfactory centres. In primates the sense of smell is considerably less important than the well-developed visual system and highly refined sense of touch. The primate brain is enlarged in the specific areas concerned with vision (occipital lobes) and touch (parietal lobes) and thus takes a characteristic shape throughout the higher primates.
The skin of the primate hand is well adapted for tactile discrimination. Meissner’s corpuscles, the principal receptors for touch in hairless skin, are best developed in apes and humans, but they can be found in all primates. Structurally correlated with a high level of tactile sensitivity are certain anatomic features of the skin of the hands and feet, such as the absence of pads on the palms and soles and the presence of a finely ridged pattern of skin corrugations known as dermatoglyphics (the basis for fingerprints).
Eyes and vision
The evolutionary trend toward frontality of the eyes has not proceeded as far in most lemurs as in lorises and more advanced primates. In primitive mammals the central axes of the two bony orbits are 140° apart. In lemurs this angle is considerably less, 60°–70°, and in the apes and monkeys and in the slender loris (genus Loris), the divergence has been reduced to 20°. It should be noted that the axes of the eyeballs (as distinct from the bony orbits) in apes and monkeys are, in fact, parallel.
Colour vision is of considerable advantage to arboreal animals living on fruits and insects. Most mammals have both rod and cone receptors in their retinas, and almost all primates have at least two kinds of cones, a short-wavelength (blue) type and a medium–long-wavelength (red-green) type. All, therefore, seem to have well-developed colour vision, the exceptions so far known being some of the nocturnal species: durukulis of South America, the tarsiers, and at least some of the galagos. Catarrhines and howler monkeys have separate red- and green-responding cones, determined by closely linked loci on the X chromosome. In most other investigated platyrrhines (New World monkeys), red and green are determined by alleles at a single locus, again on the X chromosome; thus, males are always dichromatic, whereas females may be either dichromatic (if homozygous) or trichromatic (if heterozygous). It is suggested that, during the evolution of catarrhines, the red-green locus duplicated, one of the daughter loci fixing the red gene and the other the green.