There is a major debate going on in my house and I need the straight dope. My brother insists that Curious George is not a monkey, but is a chimpanzee because he has no tail, walks upright, and has a bare face and hands. However, in the book he is described as a “good little monkey” plus he is brown, not black like most chimpanzees.
A google search has just added further confusion as I learned that not all monkeys have tails…and chimpanzees are not always black. Furthermore I read (not sure if this is true) that the author of Curious George, H.A. Rey, worked in a zoo prior to writing the books, so I would expect him to know the difference between a monkey and a chimp…and as stated previously, he describes George as a monkey.
So what do the teeming millions think-monkey or chimpanzee?
And not-so-colloquially. Cladistically speaking, the great apes are a subset of the monkeys. That is to say, any group based on common descent which includes both the Old World monkeys and the New World monkeys must also include the great apes, including chimps and us. So I really am a monkey’s uncle.
George is a monkey. Plenty of illustrators routinely get details wrong, if only because it ‘looks better’.
Curious George’s facial features look more like a monkey’s to me. When I was little, in the '60s, my grandmother’s neighbour ‘Fireman Jim’ had a monkey. Organ grinders are usually depicted with monkeys. I’ve always had the impression that monkeys were more popular as exotic pets than chimpanzees were. And of course I grew up knowing Curious George as a monkey instead of a chimp. So I accept him as a monkey, and that the illustrator just left off the tail.
Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga
Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga
Oh, the monkeys have no tails
They were bitten off by whales
Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga
The lack of tail could also be part of the tragic accident (or simple birth defect) that caused George to be abandoned in the wild, leading to his eventual adoption by the Man in the Yellow Hat.
Everthing about George’s appearance indicates he is modeled on a chimpanzee rather than any species of monkey.
And despite frequent attempts at hyper-correction, it is perfectly correct to refer to a chimpanzee (or any other great ape) as a monkey in both a colloquial and a scientific sense:
From Merriam-Webster:
Now while a distinction between monkeys and apes is often made, it is not a necessary one, and referring to an ape as a monkey is not incorrect.
Historically speaking, in English “ape” is the older term, and monkeys were originally considered a sub-category of ape. (“Ape” was sometimes applied especially to certain tailless monkeys like the Barbary Ape/Barbary Macaque.) Later, when chimps, gorillas, and orangutans were discovered, scientists began to classify them in a category separate from the smaller monkeys. At that point, based on that distinction, some began to insist that the popular usage shoud conform to the scientific one; but there is really no reason that it needs to.
As it turns out, according to modern cladistic classification (as Chronos has already said), the previous scientific distinction was incorrect. The great apes (and humans) are more closely related to the Old World (catarrhine) monkeys than they are to New World (platyrrhine) monkeys. Therefore “monkeys” do not form a homogeneous group; if you want to refer to a group including both the Old and New World forms as “monkeys” you also must include apes in that group. So scientifically speaking, apes are a kind of monkey.
Curious George is a chimpanzee; and he is also a monkey. There is no contradiction between these terms.
Still, could we possibly regard him as both without collapsing the moral ambiguities inherent the representation of his free will? Would you simply relegate the scope of his ranging indentity–the animal-imp allegory–to a mere curiosity, rather than the process and vehicle for his proper transformation as the Bildungsroman protagonist? I think not.
There are two different questions: What does Curious George look like, and what did H.A. Rey base Curious George on?
Curious George looks like a chimpanzee, no question.
But I happen to have a book about H.A. Rey next to me, and it says that he got the idea from the time he spent in Brazil and noticed the antics of the monkeys there: marmosets in particular.
He’s depicted as a very young chimp, which makes him cuter. Like a lot of characters in comics and kids’ books, he never grows up. And if he were a full sized chimp, he couldn’t get into some of the scrapes he does.
Much as I approve of cladistics in principle, I find myself increasingly annoyed by cladists’ insistence that it is improper under any circumstances to establish a clade-less-crown group taxon, even though the members of such a group may be united by a number of shared characteristics superseded in the crown group. Saying that “monkeys” constitutes Anthropoidea less Hominoidea (Hylobatidae, Pongidae, and Hominidae) makes perfect sense. Otherwise we are forced to the conclusion that Curious George, like ourselves, chimps, monkeys, thylacines, dinosaurs, hummingbirds, and axolotls, is actually a fish – since no group includes sharks, rays, sturgeons, guppies, tunas, and lungfish which does not also include mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles.
Or we decide that “fish” is a cladistically meaningless term, and keep the colloquial meaning of “fish”, that is, a creature that lives in the water.
But it’s just silly to insist that a Chimanzee is not a monkey. Monkey is a perfectly reasonable work, and it doesn’t break the word to try to insist that an ape is a kind of monkey. A human is a kind of ape, an ape is a kind of monkey, a monkey is a kind of primate, a primate is a kind of mammal, a mammal is a kind of vertebrate.
Yes, “fish” is nonsense cladistically, because to make sense it would have to be practically synonymous to “vertebrate”, and we already have a good term for “vertebrate”, namely “vertebrate”.
But “monkey” is a perfectly natural word, and it turns out that folk usage of the term happens to match our understanding of relationship between apes and monkeys. Yes, it used to be the case that pedants would insist that apes were a sister group of monkeys and therefore technically not monkeys. However, now we know that apes are a subgroup of monkeys, and therefore apes are monkeys. When a person sees a chimp and says “Oh, the monkey is so cute!”, they aren’t saying anything incorrect, any more than if they said “Oh, the mammal is so cute!”. It’s silly to insist that apes aren’t monkeys.
Colloquially, you can call anything you want a fish, as long as it’s an animal that lives in the water: starfish, jellyfish, shellfish, crayfish, etc. (According to this usage whales are fish too, even though nitpickers insist they can only be called mammals.)
Scientifically, there isn’t anything that is called a fish, but rather members of various clades with Latin names. So we are members of the Craniata along with the hagfish and lampreys, and the Gnathostomata along with the sharks and bony fish, and the Sarcopterygii along with the lungfish.
Sometimes we say that in a cladistic sense humans are apes, and apes are monkeys, and birds are reptiles, but in these cases we are using the colloquial terms in order to describe relationships in a simple form without resorting to scientific terminology. Cladists don’t demand (or shouldn’t, anyway) that English usage change in order to reflect cladistic classification. It’s fine to talk about reptiles without including birds; however if you talk about the clade Reptilia, that necessarily includes birds.
And if he were a full grown chimp, he would probably attack and mutilate the Man With The Yellow Hat, so it’s probably a good thing that he never grows up…
