Tag: Chimpanzee

  • Nation & World

    How a hormone affects society

    The hormone testosterone provides a backdrop for male aggression and violence, both in nature and in society, argues a Harvard human evolutionary biologist.

    5 minutes
    Carole Hooven and Dan Gilbert.
  • Nation & World

    A mother’s influence

    Researchers have shown, for the first time, that chimpanzees learn certain grooming behaviors from their mothers. Once learned, chimps continued to perform the behavior long after the deaths of their mothers.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Deadly violence a natural tendency in chimps, study finds

    A new study shows that chimps engage in violent and sometimes even lethal behavior regardless of human effects on local ecology.

    4 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Looking at chimp’s future, seeing man’s

    The fate of chimpanzees in Africa is largely in the hands of increasing numbers of poor, rural dwellers crowding the primates’ forest homes. That is why an educational project begun near Uganda’s Kibale National Forest focuses on 14 schools teaching almost 10,000 children, researchers say.

    5 minutes
  • Nation & World

    Watching teeth grow

    For more than two decades, scientists have relied on studies linking tooth development in juvenile primates with their weaning as a rough proxy for understanding similar landmarks in the evolution of early humans. New research from Harvard, however, challenges that thinking by showing that tooth development and weaning aren’t as closely related as previously thought.

    6 minutes
  • Nation & World

    The deciding factor

    What, exactly, distinguishes humans from apes? It’s certainly more than just our genes, renowned anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Hrdy, who received her A.B. in 1969 and Ph.D. in 1975 for work in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, returned to speak on “Mothers and Others: The Origin of Emotionally Modern Humans.”

    2 minutes
  • Nation & World

    For economic success, channel your inner bonobo

    Psychology Professor Marc Hauser dispels misconceptions about human and ape behavior with regard to patience, impulsiveness, and economic interactions in Harvard Museum of Natural History talk.

    4 minutes