1967 "First American Edition" stated; "A Zologist's study of the human animal"; "Book of the Month Club Selection"; McGraw-Hill Book Company publishers, New York; hardbound in forest green boards with white and lime lettering on spine; quite good condition with unmarked pages; dust jacket has minor edge wear - see pics.
 
Description -
The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal is a 1967 book by zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris that looks at humans as a species and compares them to other animals. The Human Zoo, a follow-up book by Morris that examined the behaviour of people in cities, was published in 1969.
 
Summary -
Morris said that Homo sapiens not only have the largest brains of all higher primates, but that sexual selection in human evolution has caused humans to have the highest ratio of penis size to body mass. Morris conjectured that human ear-lobes developed as an additional erogenous zone to facilitate the extended sexuality necessary in the evolution of human monogamous pair bonding. Morris further stated that the more rounded shape of human female breasts means they are mainly a sexual signalling device rather than simply for providing milk for infants.
 
Morris framed many features of human behaviour in the context of evolution at a time when cultural explanations were more orthodox. For example, Morris wrote that the intense human pair bond evolved so that men who were out hunting could trust that their mates back home were not having sex with other men, and suggested the possibility that sparse body hair evolved because the "nakedness" helped intensify pair bonding by increasing tactile pleasure.
 
Like many other writers in the late 1960s and 1970s, Morris warned against the "population explosion" and overcrowding that might cause terminal damage to heretofore relatively stable social structures that humans had evolved in the long course of their development.