I understand if you want to Sandbox the last dozen or so posts! This is, after all, a 'sticky thread".
Your approach (smart) is a necessary part of studying anything complex: pick a level of abstraction that is manageable. it sounds like you're picking "primate behavior" or maybe "social interactions within their social group".
That might be a practical level of understanding, but my guess is that most of the one-semester papers specialized in certain kinds of behavior to keep it more manageable. The more things you're trying to correlate at the smae time, the harder it is.
If primatology is like fields of science that I've been exposed to, most practitioners specialize very tightly within that field, I'm guessing things like "feeding behavior", "dominance", "child care", hunting".
Trying to understand (all at the same time), their role in human politics, agriculture, poaching, tourism, zoo policies, land use policies, epidemiology (human and other), genetics, evolution, and endangered status would be unmanageable.
The higher the level of abstraction, the fewer details are considered. But when high-level behavior is determined by low level details, I think the field is just plain hard to handle. Like ecology, medicine, psychology, economics and politics.
Even soil science is a toughie! Microbiology was hard enough for me.
