Nestled between subdivisions in burgeoning Lawrenceville sits one of the oddest and most interesting places in Georgia.

More than 3,000 primates --- chimps and monkeys --- live in fenced or concrete enclosures surrounded by towering pines. Amid the songs and chirps of birds and insects common to the region are the hoots and grunts of apes and monkeys from Africa and Asia. Overpowering the clean scent of pine is another not-so-pleasant smell that you might expect if, say, 3,000 primates lived for a long period of time in one place.

This breeding center for Emory University's Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center is the office of Frans de Waal, one of the world's top experts on primate behavior and author of a new book, "Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are" (Riverhead, $30). The subtitle may overreach, but the book is a fascinating exploration of how our close cousins on the evolutionary tree behave in ways that tell us about how humans interact.

The book focuses on differences in behavior between chimpanzees and a similar ape, the bonobo. In chimpanzee groups, a hierachy of males rules by force. Violence is common. Sexual activity is rigidly controlled. Bonobo groups are ruled by females. Violence is rare and sexual activity among all members of the group is constant, in part as a way to defuse tensions.

De Waal believes these two approaches tell us much about how early humans developed the unique survival strategies that led them to become the dominant species on the planet.

In his small yellow office tower overlooking a group of chimpanzees, de Waal sat down to talk with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution before the professor embarked on a national book tour. Here are edited questions and answers from that discussion.

Q: You argue in the book that somehow the aggressive side of our nature has been overemphasized. Why do you think that has taken place?

A: After World War II, people were very eager to explain the aggressiveness of our species. And so that's why in the '60s we got all these books. . . . All they could write about was human aggressiveness. Even nowadays, we still have people who write books like that. ''The dark side of human nature.''

So there is this enormous focus which gives the impression that all there is to us as primates is that we are nasty and aggressive. So as soon as we do something nice we try to claim it for ourselves. We say that we came up with that. Our religion, our morality or whatever we call it.

But if we do something nasty, we kill on a large scale, we say we are like animals. I object to that, because I would argue that not only is there a biological component to our nasty side, but also our nice side we share with many animals. We would not be able to be nice and altruistic if we didn't have those qualities of bonding and attachment and empathy that we share with many other animals.

Q: In your study of bonobos and chimps, you discuss sexuality a lot. How has that research informed your view of human sexuality? You seem to think humans are fairly prudish, yet there is one point in the book where you state that has caused us great success.

A: Well, if I say something about prudishness, it's about Americans. Americans are very prudish [laughing]. That is the reason why the bonobos' sexuality was not that much discussed [before by researchers]. People were a bit afraid of it, I think.

But it is true that our species selected the opposite path than the bonobos. So what the bonobo did to avoid infanticide by males, which is a problem in many animals --- the bonobos have sex in all combinations and sex at high frequency. Basically that gives the females a guarantee [that the males] will not kill their offspring because all of the offspring that are running around could be their offspring. In our field we call that ''low paternity certainty.'' That's what these males have. So they are not going to kill infants because potentially that could be their own infant.

What we have done as a species is exactly the opposite because we have increased paternity certainty by involving males in the family, by involving them in parental care. So our success as a species may depend on that. A chimpanzee or a bonobo has a baby every five or six years. We can have them every two or three years because the males are involved and make life easier in terms of caring for the offspring.

For the female bonobo, everything comes down to her. Everything. She usually has a juvenile on her back, a baby on her belly. She has to climb through trees with that. So you can imagine that is not an easy job. If males get involved and provide food and all of this, you get a totally different type of society and you get higher reproduction also.

Q: But you also set up a situation where you are much more likely to have conflict between groups, males and families. Besides providing food for the female, the male also is set up as the protector to stop infanticide against his children.

A: Yeah, to stop infanticide and also to keep other males away from that female. Because once you start investing in that family, from a biological viewpoint, you want to be sure that you are investing in your genes. That is why we get moral restrictions on things, protecting the family, infidelity becomes an issue, which is not an issue for bonobos and chimpanzees. They're promiscuous. There is competition among males, but it is not competition over "this is my female.'' That's not what they are doing.

So human society is in that sense quite different. In human society, the family is the cornerstone. Male, female, kids, family. That is quite different than the bonobos and chimps.

Q: You describe bonobo society as very close to egalitarian, though there is still a hierarchy there. Do you think there is a strain in human society?

A: I would say there is. For example, we have a democracy in this country which is all based on the idea that people in power need to be brought to earth on occasion. So what we have in human history is probably a long time, millions of years, in which we were like the current hunter gatherers. Fairly egalitarian. Meaning we had a tendency to build hierarchies, but we also had a countertendency, which is to keep things sort of level.

You can see some of that tendency with the apes. So for example, the chimpanzees, they have coalitions from below. The supporters sometimes band together against the dominants, basically telling them, "Calm down, you're not the only ones who have influence here.''

What we have done in our current societies is sort of formalized that whole system. Where we do commit people to be in power we [also] recognize that there is a need for hierarchy. We put them in Washington and they can play the big guys, but if they don't perform well, we can call them back, which is a beautiful system because it accommodates basically both tendencies, the egalitarian streak that we have and the hierarchical one.

Q: How do you view the current state of human civilization?

A: My research does provide an angle on human behavior that is a bit different from what you usually hear. What you usually hear is all the nasty things we do we got from our animal nature and all the good things we do we did by ourselves. This is a very arrogant position, I think.

So my research generally tells us that if you look at our close relatives, they have both sides of us in them and also it tells us that although some people don't want to be compared to apes, there is nothing bad about the apes to make us avoid that comparison. . . . What that means for human society is humans have an enormous potential to build fair and fairly peaceful societies if they work on it. It is not as if our nature is dragging us down. It's just a matter of working with it. We have the capacity.

Q: Why aren't we doing that? Or are we?

A: I think we have to some degree within societies. Within industrialized societies there are of course many conflicts and problems going on. But they are fairly civilized, I would say.

But between nations we have a lot of troubles. That is because of our old territorial tendencies that we share with the chimpanzee. We don't treat people of other nations nearly as well as we treat ourselves. We go to Iraq and we start a war there. The Americans are only counting their own dead. Now its about 2,000. That's the number you see constantly in the newspapers. But the other number is about 30,000 Iraqis, which we never see in the newspaper.

That is a typical attitude that you would have to overcome. All lives count. Anybody's life. . . .

Among humans, we have a capacity for peace as well as war. Most of the history between neighboring peoples, the majority of time is spent in peace.

It is interesting to try to figure out why we sometimes abandon the peaceful relations and move to warfare. Because we have the capacity to build peaceful relationships.