Humans, across the eons that we have dominated the globe, have made their mark through our evolution and remarkable ingenuity. When observing the larger evolutionary tree of Homo Sapiens, the features that have made humanity excel in the way that it has are also prevalent in our evolutionary relatives. Out of all our relatives, monkeys in particularly stand out due to their intelligence, adaptations and social behavior. The larger simian classification group can be split into two; the old world subgroup and the new world subgroup.
Old world monkeys, the closer relatives to humans out of the two groups, are native to Africa and Asia and include several species such as macaques, baboons and others. The reason for the distinction between old world and new world isn’t so much biological as it is geographical. The old world name was only given to monkeys of this group due to their presence in Africa and Asia as opposed to the new world monkeys in the Americas, which was a world not yet discovered by the Europeans who created the distinction. However, biological do differences exist between the two. Their scientific classification, Catarrhine, means down-ward nosed in ancient Greek, whereas new world monkeys are classified as Platyrrhine, indicating their flat-noses.
The new world monkey family includes a smaller pool of species compared to Its old world counterpart. Notably, the family includes capuchins, spider monkeys as well pygmymarmosets, the smallest species of monkey there is. The animals belonging to this order are typically of smaller sizes due to their arboreal lifestyle. Compared to the primates of Asia and Africa, who can often walk on the ground, when need be, new world monkeys virtually only live on trees, meaning their smaller stature is an adaptation to their environment. As well as their size, their prehensile tails are also adapted to living in the trees since these primates can use it to grasp or hold objects, an attribute old world monkey don’t possess.