ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of primate societies as social systems, to discover a common ground for dealing with the patent diversity among species in patterns of social organization. The ancestral primates are characterized as primitive nocturnal insectivores living in a solitary state in which adult males and females have separate centers of activity and encounter each other primarily during the breeding period. With regard to the factors shaping the evolution of primate social structures, Eisenberg et al. share with other theorists the belief that resource distribution, feeding strategies, and predation have been major selection pressures. Multiple instances of convergence are found within the order Primates; moreover, it is difficult to support the claim that there is anything truly distinctive in the organizational patterns that the primates have evolved. For every known variety of primate social structure, a similar pattern can be found in other vertebrate species.
