The Mentality of Apes Book

This book is a classic of primate psychology, based on experiments Köhler carried out on captive chimpanzees in Tenerife in the Canary Islands just before and during the First World War. He was among the first investigators to reject the dogmatic insistence of most psychologists that animals were incapable of intelligent behavior and demonstrate experimentally that chimpanzees, at least, were capable of solving problems by considering the situation and adopting "roundabout" methods, including making and using simple "implements". He also rejects the lay anthropomorphism which exaggerates similarity to humans, and tries to determine what the limits of the chimpanzees abilities are and what that can teach about the origins of human intelligence. Of course, since that time much more has been learned, such as the abilities of chimpanzees to learn sign language and the way they behave in the wild, but this was the beginning.