Topic 4: Did a Habitat Bottleneck Exist in the Recent History of Japanese Macaques?

Abstract

Human subsistence activities have affected the global environment ever since humans emerged as a species (Goudie 2005). Hunting, pastoralism, and agriculture, in all their varied forms, have shaped habitats for many nonhuman primate populations around the world. This general principle has been long recognized by primatologists, who have speculated about how human alterations of nonhuman primate habitats affected the distribution or even evolution of monkeys and apes (e.g., Richard et al. 1989; Cowlishaw and Dunbar 2000). The principle applies most clearly where nonhuman primate habitats extend over the regions in the world with extremely long histories of intensive human occupation, especially India and East Asia, where some of the largest human populations in the world have lived for millennia. Especially in these regions, conservation ecology and human ecology are two sides of the same coin. The survival or demise of nonhuman primate populations cannot be explained without an understanding of how people expanded and intensified their subsistence activities.