superprimate
See also: super-primate
English
Alternative forms
- super-primate
Etymology
super + primate
Noun
superprimate (plural superprimates)
- A primate that is markedly superior in some way to other primates.
- 2000, Larry Nucci, Geoffrey B. Saxe, & Elliot Turiel, Culture, Thought, and Development, →ISBN:
- Without cultural programming, they could never become symbolizing organs. They would become something else, very powerful perceptual-motor systems, like those of a superprimate, perhaps, but not truly symbolic.
- 2006, Ann Allart Wilcock, An Occupational Perspective of Health, →ISBN, page 59:
- We are not a whole new experiment in the evolutionary process, but a superprimate. A quantitative change in the evolving human brain, however, has produced a qualitative change of extraordinary significance.
- 2010, George Lysloff, Poems, Visions, Reflections, →ISBN:
- Was I still in a close relationship with the biology that spawned me, or was I a “parvenu” kind of animal, a superprimate?
- 2014, Robert F.Morneau, A New Heart: Eleven Qualities of Holiness, →ISBN:
- If you are looking about for things to even out the disparity between the brains of ordinary animalsand the great minds of ourselves, the superprimate humans, this apparatus is a good one to reflect on in humility. Compared to the common dog, or any rodent in the field, we are primitive, insensitive creatures, biological failures.
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Usage notes
This term is used primarily to refer to human beings or early hominids in an evolutionary context, because of their well-developed brains.