Publications

While research over the last 20 years has shed important light on the vocal behaviour of our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, a quantitative description of their full vocal repertoire is absent. Such data are critical for a holistic...

Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum of the meaning of its parts) or nontrivial (one element...

In mammals, female dominance over males is a rare phenomenon. However, recent findings indicate that even in species with sexual dimorphism biased towards males, females sometimes occupy high status. Here we test three main hypotheses explaining...

In many group-living species, cooperative group defense is crucial to the reproduction and survival of group members. In humans and chimpanzees, this adaptive behavior is regulated by oxytocin, a highly conserved neurohormone. In humans, oxytocin can also...

Conservation funding is currently limited; cost-effective conservation solutions are essential. We suggest that the thousands of field stations worldwide can play key roles at the frontline of biodiversity conservation and have high intrinsic value. We...

The potential for aggression is inherent in social interaction, and strategies to reduce the costs of aggression are ubiquitous among group-living animals. One strategy employed by lower-ranking individuals in a variety of species is the production of...