SummaryHomo sapiens is just one of some 400 extant species allocated to the mammalian order Primates, originally proposed by Linnaeus in the mid-18th Century. As George Gaylord Simpson tartly noted in his seminal 1945 classification of the class Mammalia: “The primates are inevitably the most interesting of mammals to an egocentric species that belongs to this order.” Intense interest in our own origins is directly reflected by ever-increasing research into primate biology, including morphology, physiology, behaviour and ecology, as well as genetics and genomics. Over the past four decades, the number of recognized primate species has more than doubled, due to expanding field studies and molecular investigations. Across primates, comparisons of both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA have led to the identification of many ‘cryptic’ species that were not immediately evident from general morphology.