This book has the modest aim of bringing together methodological, theo-
retical, and empirical studies that bear on the phylogenetic placement
of primates and their relatives, and continues a tradition started by
Phylogeny of the Primates: A Multidisciplinary Approach (edited by W. P.
Luckett and F. S. Szalay; Plenum Press, 1975) and The Comparative
Biology and Evolutionary Rela- tionships of Tree Shrews (edited by W. P.
Luckett, Plenum Press, 1980). Although there are several recent
compendia of studies of primate relationships, most of these are
exclusively concerned with the internal arrangement of clades within the
order, not with the place of primates and their relatives on the
eutherian cladogram. Evolutionary theory predicts that primates must be
more closely related to some non primate mammals than to others, but a
continuing problem has been to find reliable procedures for recovering
historical relationships among taxa. Before the 1970s, higher-level
relationships among primates and euthe- rian mammals that might be
closely related to them were rarely treated in detail. Outstanding
exceptions, like Le Gros Clark's Antecedents of Man, were just
that-exceptions. (Clark himself essentially stopped with making a case
for tree shrews; he did not, for example, explore whether bats and
colugos were also related to primates. ) In the 1970s and 1980s, the
rise of cladistic techniques and advances in molecular methods began to
transform primate systematics.
