I did several grade-school projects on hominid evolution, and my senior term paper in high school was on interspecies law this was not an animal rights-type thing, but rather an examination of the characteristics we might use to define a “person” for the purpose of assigning legal rights.
I have always been fascinated by apes, and to a lesser extent monkeys both for themselves and for what they can teach us about ourselves. A zoologist from outer space would immediately classify us as just a third species of chimpanzee, along with the pygmy chimp of Zaire and the common chimp of the rest of subtropical Africa.
