all Richard Wrangham stories

Chimps in wild appear not to regularly experience menopause

404132862 — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 11:05:03 -0500

A pioneering study of wild chimpanzees has found that these close human relatives do not routinely experience menopause, rebutting previous studies of captive individuals which had postulated that female chimpanzees reach reproductive senescence at 35 to 40 years of age.

Together with recent data from wild gorillas and orangutans, the finding -- described this week in the journal Current Biology -- suggests that human females are rare or even unique among primates in experiencing a lengthy post-reproductive lifespan.

Seeing the forest, from the trees

50443248 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 09:17:48 -0400

It was Valentine’s Day 2000 and Alain Houle was not quite sure what to do. He was alone in a fruit tree and the chimps were coming back.

“I thought I’d be killed,” Houle said later. “They climbed up, looked at me, barked at me, and then settled down to eat.”

After Houle climbed down that day, he returned to the research station in Uganda’s Kibale National Park and met Richard Wrangham, Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, who has studied the park’s chimpanzees since 1987.

Though Houle was in the park studying the diets of monkeys for his doctoral work at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Wrangham expressed interest in Houle’s experience and said that chimpanzees had never been studied at eye-level in the treetops before.

Evolving ideas

50443248 — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:17:32 -0400

Is the problem with evolution A) people don't believe in it; B) people believe in it but don't understand it; or C) evolution comes packaged with troubling implications that we don't want to accept? According to speakers at a spirited Askwith Education Forum - "How Do We Teach Evolution" - on Feb. 22 at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the answer is "all of the above."

From the point of view of Richard Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Research Professor, "The real issue is that large numbers of people don't believe that organisms evolve, and our first problem that we have to integrate into teaching about how they evolve is to begin by convincing doubters that organisms do evolve."

The accidental 'best friend'

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:17:35 -0400

Harvard researchers studying Siberian foxes have uncovered evidence that the ability to interpret human expressions and gestures that helped transform the wild wolf into humankind's cooperative "best friend" may have occurred by accident. The research casts doubt onto a previous theory that domestic dogs' ability to interpret human communication results from generations of selection for that specific trait by ancient breeders. Rather, the research indicates that the "social intelligence" shown by dogs may have been an unintended byproduct of wolves becoming domesticated and losing their fear and aggression toward humans. Previous research with both wild wolves and nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees shows the dog is superior at being able to interpret human gestures such as pointing to hidden food sources. But the Siberian research shows that foxes bred only for tameness are the equal of the domestic dog in the task.

Cooking up a story of apes and humans

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:22:19 -0400

For humans, cooking played a major role in the development of smaller jaws and teeth, bigger brains, smaller guts, shorter arms, and longer legs, according to Richard Wrangham, professor of biological anthropology at Harvard University. He also believes that cooking is associated with females getting heavier and more fertile. That, in turn, changed mating and social behaviors. Instead of large males beating each other with clubs for the relatively rare privilege of mating, smaller guys mated more regularly and began to dine with the family more often. There's a lot of agreement among anthropologists that human ancestors were cooking their food as long ago as 250,000 to 500,000 years, but Wrangham and a few of his colleagues see evidence that cooks spoiled the broth as long ago as 2 million years. That's about the time when our ancestors became less like apes and more like humans.