Red Ape
razib | June 18, 200920 years ago Jeffrey Schwartz published The Red Ape, making the case that humanity's closest extant relatives within the animal kingdom were orangutans, not chimpanzees. This was contemporaneous with the media hullabaloo around African Eve, so either you could say that Schwartz's timing was perfect, or it was disastrous. Certainly he was swimming against the spirit of the age, and I recall assuming that The Red Ape was a piece of crankery when I first heard about it, its thesis was so outrageous. But historically the idea that humanity descends from Asian apes is less anomalous, and many…