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Event Series Event Series: Virtual

Where’s the love? The secrets of chimpanzee relationships

February 8, 2023 @ 6:00 pm 7:00 pm PST

Are humans the only animals that experience love?

Primatologist Rachna Reddy and psychologist Jan Engelmann discuss possible evidence of love among chimpanzees and bonobos and share observations from new research aimed at understanding this complex emotion.

This program features a 30-minute discussion on Zoom with Dr. Rachna Reddy, and Dr. Jan Engelmann, followed by a chance to ask the experts your questions about love, primate behavior, and evolution.

Presented by The Leakey Foundation’s Evolution Exchange (formerly Young Professionals Group). Learn more and join!


Dr. Rachna Reddy is a Postdoctoral Associate in Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University and Research Associate in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She is a Leakey Foundation grant recipient who investigates how social relationships shape human life by studying our closest living relatives in the wild. By following known individual chimpanzees and bonobos through rainforests, Rachna observes their day-to-day experiences and learns how and why they form, break, and maintain different types of relationships as they grow up and grow old. Most of her research takes place at Ngogo in the Kibale National Park, Uganda.

Dr. Jan Engelmann is Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jan studies the evolution of cognition and behavior by comparing chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives, to humans across different cultures. One main research focus is the evolution of cooperation. Most of what makes humans such unusual primates has to do, in one way or another, with our especially social and cultural lifestyles, which result in cooperative forms of thinking and acting. Jan is interested in how cooperation in chimpanzees differs from, and is similar to, cooperation in humans.


Sponsored by:
The Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, and The Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.

Free