How can the distinct habits of chimps and bonobos inform us about human evolution and behavior?
Today we speak with Richard Wrangham, a research professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. For more than three decades, the English anthropologist, primatologist, and author has studied primate behavior as it relates to human social behavior, evolution, and warfare. Richard Wrangham is also the founder of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project.
In this episode, we’ll hear more from Richard about the difference between chimpanzees and bonobos and how each species can help us understand human nature. We’ll also learn more about the domestication of animals and how violence is a commonality across species.
Episode Quotes:
On discovering violent chimp behavior:
“The discoveries of the 1960s and 70s were that chimpanzees, one of the human's two closest relatives, lived in social groups in which relationships among males were really critical in the sense of dominating ordinary social life because the males were bullies, they got their way[...] And then we find out not only that, that these males do, human-like things of hunting and sharing meat as Jane Goodall had discovered, but now they go off on war raids and attack members of neighboring groups.”
On the role of violence in human societies:
“I think that the answer that Boehm came up with is right, which is that when all of those social pressures fail, you have to resort to execution. Lo and behold, it turns out the hunters and gatherers on every continent use execution. There are lots and lots of descriptions of executions in small-scale societies.”
On the fossil record of domestication:
“When we go back in time and see, as we do our ancestors with increasingly broad faces, as they go back, we can be rather confident in reconstructing that they were increasingly aggressive, reactively, aggressive, go back. So you've got those icon anatomical changes. You've also got genetic changes.”
Show Links:
Faculty Profile: heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/ri...
Kibale Chimpanzee Project: kibalechimpanzees.wordpress.com/
Order Book: Goodness Paradox: amzn.to/3uMtPYe
Order Book: Catching Fire: amzn.to/2Qh9awm
Order Book: Demonic Males: amzn.to/2RMawzt
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11 май 2021
