Shirley Strum's decades of fieldwork on olive baboons in Kenya reshaped how biologists think about primate societies, replacing a model built on male aggression with one built on long-term female relationships and something that looks, from the outside, like a favour economy.
Orangutan mothers organise "playdates" between their children, similar to humans, a new study has revealed. Wild Bornean orangutans are traditionally the most solitary of great apes. But new research has found that mother orangutans plan ahead and arrange meetings so their young can play with other infant apes. Researchers analysed around 30,000 hours of observations, collected over 15 years, of …
For Friday's Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities luncheon we had a presentation from anthropologist/primatologist Amy Parish (an LAIH Fellow) on the work she's been doing with bonobos at a zoo in Stuttgart. She updated us on how bonobo societies work (of all the apes, bonobos are our closest cousins, genetically), and then told us about recent experiments she's been doing with getting them t…
