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Website(s)About Richard's Work
Richard Wrangham is a primate ethologist, focused on chimpanzees and their behavior.
He has spent three decades studying chimpanzee cultures in the wild and comparing chimp cultures to human ones. His work, which combines primatology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology, has provided standards and models for the field and insights into the social organization of early hominoids and human ancestors. Wrangham has done research in Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zaire, and Uganda, and is recognized for his broad field experience, his theoretical sophistication, and his interest in controlled experimentation. He is co-author of Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (1997); and co-editor of Current Problems in Sociobiology (1982), Ecological Aspects of Social Evolution: Birds and Mammals (1986), Primate Societies (1987), and Chimpanzee Culture (1994).
Biography
Wrangham was a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Biology at the University of Michigan (1980-89). He is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology and curator of primate behavioral biology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard University.
Wrangham received a B.A. (1970) from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. (1975) from the University of Cambridge. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Bristol (1975) and at Stanford University (1976).
Recent News
In 2009, Richard Wrangham published Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books). Catching Fire interprets many aspects of human biology and behavior as adaptations to humans being biologically dependent on the control of fire. Also in 2009, Wrangham and Martin Muller co-edited Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans (Harvard University Press), and in 2008 he and Elizabeth Ross co-edited Science and Conservation in African Forests: The Role of Long-term Research (Cambridge University Press).
Updated July 2015
Published on July 1, 1987
