Featured series 
Tag: Richard Wrangham
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Nation & World
How violence pointed to virtue
Richard Wrangham’s new book examines the strange relationship between good and evil.
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Nation & World
Eden as a storyteller’s paradise
A conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Stephen Greenblatt on his new book, “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.”
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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.
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Nation & World
From fresh food to magic mushrooms
Author and journalist Michael Pollan has spent a fellowship year at Radcliffe changing directions and focusing on a fresh project, exploring a budding rebirth of psychedelic drugs for medicinal uses.
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Nation & World
Cooking up cognition
A new study suggests that many of the cognitive capacities that humans use for cooking — a preference for cooked food, the ability to understand the transformation of raw food into cooked, and even the ability to save and transport food to cook it — are shared with chimpanzees.
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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.
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Nation & World
Hierarchical differences
Female academics are less likely to collaborate across rank, a Harvard study found.
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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.
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Nation & World
MBB recognizes graduating seniors
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committee on Mind/Brain/Behavior (MBB) recognized 35 seniors in a ceremony at the Harvard Faculty Club on May 29.
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Nation & World
A milestone for juniors
Welcoming the parents of the Class of 2014 in Sanders Theatre during Junior Parents Weekend, President Drew Faust spoke of the importance of something that people may strive to avoid: the risk of failure.
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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.
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Nation & World
Barbecue’s beginnings
Steven Raichlen, author of “The Barbecue Bible” and “Planet Barbecue,” discussed on barbecue’s origins among early humans and barbecue customs around the world in a recent Harvard talk.
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Nation & World
Why cooking counts
In a first-of-its-kind study, Harvard researchers have shown that cooked meat provides more energy than raw meat, a finding that challenges the current food labeling system and suggests humans are evolutionarily adapted to take advantage of the benefits of cooking.
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Nation & World
The efficient caveman cook
Harvard researchers say the rise of cooking likely occurred more than 1.9 million years ago and bestowed on human ancestors a gift of time in the form of hours each day not spent eating.
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Nation & World
Where men have more than one wife
Radcliffe researcher explores the connection between cultures where men have more than one wife and increased violence.
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Nation & World
Harvard Thinks Big
Ten great ideas from 10 great professors in 10 minutes or less. Harvard Thinks Big, a student-organized discussion that paired leading lecturers with eager listeners, attracted these great minds to help explore and inspire new ways of thinking, in the first session of what organizers hope will become an annual experience.
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Nation & World
For bonobos, it’s one for all
Daycare workers and kindergarten teachers tend to offer young humans a lot of coaching about the idea of sharing. But for our ape cousins the bonobos, sharing just comes naturally.
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Nation & World
Looking at cooking
Harvard biology professor Richard Wrangham talks about the importance of cooking in human origins.
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Nation & World
Chimps in wild appear not to regularly experience menopause
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…
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Nation & World
Seeing the forest, from the trees
Alain Houle thinks higher-status chimpanzees likely feed on more, higher-quality fruit — found higher up in the tree — than lower-status chimpanzees, which leads to the chimps being in better physical shape and greater breeding success. “I thought I’d be killed,” Houle said later. “They climbed up, looked at me, barked at me, and then…
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Nation & World
The accidental ‘best friend’
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…