Orangutans expand their foraging skills by combining observation with trial-and-error learning

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Female orangutans are generally solitary, but they travel more and eat less in an apparent effort to ensure their offspring have someone to play with

Larger flocks of migrating songbirds orient more accurately toward their population’s migratory direction than smaller flocks.

Experiments show 29 animals moved towards a treat-filled bucket 60% of the time when guided by a researcher

Dismantling the "Cognitive Rubicon": A deep dive into the zooarchaeology, taphonomy, and evidence of Neanderthal feather-harvesting and raptor-talon jewelry.

Abstract. Cultural transmission across generations is key to cumulative cultural evolution. While several mechanisms—such as vertical, horizontal, and obli

Birth complications are widespread across mammalian species, including in the wild

Influential themed journal issues across the life sciences.

Measuring technological complexity across species, as well as across temporal and spatial scales, is an ongoing challenge among authors who work on primatological, archaeological, and/or ethnographic ...

Exploring the evolutionary roots of human behaviour, biology, and culture through interdisciplinary research and debate.

YouTube video by Richard McElreath

Facial expressions are produced through a coordinated system of voluntary and emotional pathways

Scientific Data - CORVIDATA: A global dataset of morphology, ecology, sociality, and life-history in Corvidae

Over a decade of data on wild orangutans were used to program an agent-based model of orangutan diet development. Adult-like diets were attainable only if simulated immature individuals learned from o...

By Dr Elliot Howard-SpinkAdult orangutans eat hundreds of different types of food in the wild, but how do they learn what to eat? In our recently published study, we investigated whether immature oran...

Sequence organization is a fundamental feature of human communication, shaping our interactions. This organization underlies interactions with and without language, appears early in human development ...

Howard-Spink et al. develop an empirically based model of orangutan diet development, which suggests that social learning is vital for orangutans to acquire varied diets.

YouTube video by Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior

Howard-Spink et al. develop an empirically based model of orangutan diet development, which suggests that social learning is vital for orangutans to acquire varied diets.

The call for abstracts for Culture Conference 2026 is NOW OPEN! We call for submissions of abstracts of no more than 250 words, summarising the background, aims, methods and results of your work.&n…

Dispersal is a fundamental aspect of many animal societies, impacting gene flow, knowledge transmission, culture and individual fitness. However, little is known about the information individuals use when dispersing. Mountain gorillas exhibit a flexible ...

Within the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language and its 46 different research groups from a large variety of disciplines across Switzerland, and the University of Zurich ...