Around that time, his academic advisor had heard that Jane Goodall was looking for research assistants. But Wrangham’s mongoose dreams never came to be-his department rejected his study proposal because he had poor grades. “They were also social animals that ate meat,” he explained. He first set his sights set on a somewhat unlikely candidate: the banded mongoose. Wanting to learn more about human evolution himself, Wrangham decided to study animals that share key social behaviors with humans. He read works by Australian zoologist Konrad Lorenz and American paleoanthropologist Robert Ardrey, both of whom believed that humans evolved to be aggressive to hunt animals and compete for resources with each other. In 1967, Wrangham started college at the University of Oxford. After high school, he took a gap year to conduct wildlife research in Zambia with John Hanks, an English zoologist who later became the international projects manager for the World Wildlife Fund. Starting at age 15, Wrangham regularly went on overseas birdwatching expeditions. ![]() Wrangham’s fascination with nature began in the countryside of Yorkshire, England, where he spent his childhood birdwatching and playing hide-and-seek in the woods. ![]() His research has been immensely important in terms of how we think about human evolution and how to understand why we are the way we are.” “A lot of people like to think of chimps and other primates as being gentle, peaceful creatures, but Richard has explored some of their darker sides. “Although many people rightfully point to Jane Goodall as kind of the founder of modern chimpanzee behavioral biology, it’s really Richard who was one of the great scientific innovators at the very beginning of research on chimp behavior,” said Daniel Lieberman, a researcher of human evolutionary biology and colleague of Wrangham’s at Harvard. In 1987, he won a MacArthur award for his work comparing the social behaviors of chimps and humans. He has also studied how female feeding patterns structure primate societies, how cooking led humans to evolve smaller jaws and larger brains, and, most recently, how self-domestication, or evolution away from aggression, occurred similarly in humans and other animals. This is one of three or four big ideas that have characterized Wrangham’s career as an illustrious primatologist and pioneer in the study of human evolution. “Natural selection favors aggression when there’s a low risk of cost to the individual,” he said. Now a professor of anthropology at Harvard, Wrangham believes that human males are biologically adapted for aggression, particularly when there’s an imbalance of power in their favor. Observations like this set the stage for Wrangham’s later theories on aggression in human males, which he summarized in a controversial 1997 book called Demonic Males. “A lot of people like to think of chimps and other primates as being gentle, peaceful creatures, but Richard has explored some of their darker sides.” They had wanted to beat up on the lone individual.” “But, when they heard five more calls add to the first one, they immediately turned around and raced back to their site. “Their hairs became erect, they touched their genitals and the males ran toward the sound,” he said. One day he saw a group of chimps react to the cry of a single chimp from a neighboring group. It was the early 1970s, and he was stationed at Goodall’s field site in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania. It was during his time as a research assistant for Jane Goodall that Wrangham witnessed his first acts of chimp aggression. He is also an avid botanist, has eaten bushmeat, had a girlfriend who was kidnapped by guerrilla terrorists, and once asked Jane Goodall if he could live naked in the forest with the chimps they studied. He is responsible for some of the most influential theories in human evolution, including the idea that we are biologically predisposed to violence. (Proceeds from the safari went towards the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, Wrangham’s nearly 30-year chimp study in Uganda.) Seduced both by the ideas and the execution of science, he’s as comfortable exchanging pet theories with colleagues in Cambridge as he is hacking through steep forest terrain in Tanzania. Richard Wrangham is a celebrity primatologist - the kind who, last winter, commanded a $25,000 per person price tag for a two-week safari to Uganda co-led with his friend and colleague at Harvard, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. ![]() Richard Wrangham with chimp in background.
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