Origin Stories Episode 04: How to Document a Society
This episode of Origin Stories is about what it takes to document the daily lives of chimpanzees, what we’ve learned, and how to handle all the data that’s been collected during the longest running study of any animal in the wild.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/originstories/OriginStoriesEpisode04.mp3
In the 55 years since Louis Leakey sent Jane Goodall to the Gombe forest to study chimpanzees, we’ve
Chimpanzee ‘Laugh Faces’
Marina Davila-Ross was awarded a grant from The Leakey Foundation in the spring of 2015 for her research project entitled “Systematically testing facial thermal imaging as a most sensitive and reliable novel technology to directly compare subtle emotion changes in apes and humans.” Her work on facial expressions and laughter in chimpanzees was recently published in the journal PLOS ONE.
New Species of Early Human Discovered in Ethiopia
A new relative joins “Lucy” on the human family tree. An international team of scientists led by seven-time Leakey Foundation grantee Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has discovered a 3.3 to 3.5 million-year-old new hominin species (more closely related to humans than to chimps). Upper and lower jaw fossils recovered from the Woranso-Mille area of
Baboons prefer to spend time with others of the same age, status, and personality
New research funded in part by The Leakey Foundation shows that chacma baboons within a troop spend more of their time with baboons that have similar characteristics to themselves: associating with those of a similar age, dominance rank and even personality type such as boldness. This is known as homophily, or ‘love of the same’.
Grooming. Photo courtesy of Alecia
Apes under pressure show their ingenuity – and hint at our own evolutionary past
By Susana Carvalho, George Washington University
Chimpanzees are wily enough to adapt in some ways when people encroach on their turf. Kimberley Hockings, CC BY-NC-ND
In the mid 20th century, when paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey sent three pioneering women to study great apes in their natural habitats, the Earth’s wilderness was still untouched in many places. Jane Goodall went to Gombe