Richard Wrangham is a professor in Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. His primary studies include chimpanzee behaviour in Kibale Forest National Park, Uganda. His current interest is the study of human evolution in which he draws conclusions based on the behavioural tendancies of apes. He is the co-author of a book entitled Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violance with Dale Peterson. Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... Type species Simia troglodytes Blumenbach, 1775 Species Pan troglodytes Pan paniscus Chimpanzee, often abbreviated to chimp, is the common name for two species in the genus Pan. ...
Selected Bibliography
Wrangham, R. (1980). An ecological model of female-bonded primate groups. Behaviour, 75, 262-300.
Wrangham, R. (1999). Is military incompetence adaptive? Evolution and Human Behavior, 20(1), 3-17.
Wrangham, R. and Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic males. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Wrangham, R. (1993). The evolution of sexuality in chimpanzees and bonobos. Human Nature, 4(1), 47-79.
Wrangham, R., Conklin, N. L., Chapman, C. A. and Hunt, K. D. (1991). The significance of fibrous foods for Kibale Forest chimpanzees. Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society Of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 334(1270), 171-178, discussion 178.
Wrangham, R., Jones, J. H., Laden, G., Pilbeam, D. and Conklin-Brittain, N. L. (1999). The raw and the stolen: Cooking and the ecology of human origins. Current Anthropology, 40(5), 567-594.
Wrangham, R. and Smuts, B. B. (1980). Sex differences in the behavioural ecology of chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Journal Of Reproduction and Fertility. Supplement, 28, 13-31.
Wrangham uses some discussions of the ways the bonobos are different to support his argument that humans can, in fact, develop toward a less violent society and are, even, beginning to do so in some places.
Wrangham and Peterson begin Demonic Males with a discussion of male bonding and lethal raiding among chimpanzees, and the primary difference between chimpanzee and bonobos seems to be that male bonding does not really take place among the bonobos.
Wrangham and Peterson are careful to specify that labeling a behavior as "nature" is not necessarily to say that that behavior is "good" or intractable, and they are clearly appalled by the endemicity of violence across ape species.
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