I have a question I would like to ask the world:
?
What is this supposed to be? There is no monkey that looks like that. There is no animal on earth that looks like that. Why is this (basically) what everyone thinks of when they hear “monkey”?
As far as I can figure out, it looks sort of like a cartoony chimpanzee (Curious George maybe?) with a tail randomly stuck on. Not that chimpanzees are that color. There are some macaques that have vaguely that color of fur by they all have bright colorations on their exposed skin. There aren’t that many brown monkeys, honestly. Maybe a spider monkey except the proportions are all wrong.
I guess that’s what those are. Fracked up, brown spider monkeys. I want to get an ethnozoologist onto how on earth that’s come to be the number one public image of “primate.” *sigh*
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March 21st, 2008 at 6:51 pm
What’s interesting to me, is that even though you claim this doesn’t look anything like a monkey, you immediately recognized it as an artist’s conception of a monkey. They may have not gotten any of the details right, but if the artist was trying to make a hypothetical monkey, they seemed to have succeeded.
March 21st, 2008 at 8:48 pm
It’s enculturation. That’s what we’re told a monkey looks like.
April 5th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Not to be fussy, buy Chimps are apes, not monkeys.
April 5th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Right… which is why its even worse that they make a ‘monkey’ by sticking a tail on a bad chimpanzee.