superprimate

See also: super-primate

English

Alternative forms

• super-primate

Etymology

super +‎ primate

Noun

superprimate (plural superprimates)

1. 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.

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.