This is our 20th Podcast Episode, in this article, "Primates Are Us", Dr. J. P. Linstroth explains various ideas related to our natural selves but also to the cultural origins of many concepts we take for granted. Who we are has as much to do with what we inherit as it does with our social environments. From analyzing the origins of our monotheistic religions, we know they arose in desert environments where other animals are scarce. Polytheistic religions are common where life is abundant. Our Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions developed in isolation from other non-human primates and thus also influenced our views about nature and it in relation to us. Significant here is this interplay between the biological and the social–the exclusion of either in our analysis being a significant omission. As the eminent cognitive anthropologist Maurice Bloch elucidates, we may think of interactive exchanges between people as the “transactional social,” in contrast to conscious and overt social symbols perpetuated by rituals and ritualistic behavior, which is the “transcendental social.” Our social life is so complex that the prefrontal cortex, the brain part responsible for controlling our sociality, most likely developed last in our evolution. Enormous strides have been made in the neurosciences since the 1970s. Only in the last few years have we begun to understand the many and varied nuances of cognition and neurology associated with human conduct. Some of the more interesting questions about human behavior in recent years have been raised by primatologists like Frans de Waal and Robert Sapolsky. While we are told we diverged on the evolutionary tree from other primates perhaps five million years ago, we are much like non-human primates, especially in our tendency to bond and share.