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A p e T a n k | Know thy Origins

A p e T a n k | Know thy Origins

Our team*+ researches the origins of human behaviour and mind, and are focused on shedding insight into language origins, dance and music evolution, and the precursors of imagination.
Why, in more than 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, did these motoric and cognitive systems emerge from our ape-like ancestors, but no other animal lineage? How did the biology and behaviour of our hominid ancestors pave the path towards "humanhood"?
We study great apes as living replicas of our own extinct ancestors, their communication, cognition and culture, and we complement this by studying children. We rely on behavioural observations and experiments in the wild and accredited zoos to assemble real-world data, and we test children in our department's baby lab.
We are committed to using new research and evidence for sophisticated traits in great apes and new insights into human mind's building blocks to (i) improve primate welfare & husbandry in captivity, (ii) advocate primate conservation & protection in the wild, (iii) inform superior bio-inspired computer modelling and AI applications and (iv) advise stakeholders and law-makers.



*Principal investigator: Adriano R. Lameira
+Join us! We have opened positions.

Fresh from the Press | Recent featured articles

Great apes reach momentary mental states by spinning

with Marcus Perlman,

Primates, 2023
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Life of p: A consonant older than speech

with Steven Moran
BioEssays, 2023
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Arboreal origin of consonants and thus, ultimately, speech

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2023
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Sociality predicts orangutan vocal phenotype

with Guillermo SantamarĂ­a-Bonfil, Deborah Galeone, Marco Gamba, Madeleine Hardus, Cheryl Knott, Helen Morrogh-Bernard, Matthew Nowak, Gail Campbell-Smith, Serge Wich
Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2022
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Orangutan information broadcast via consonant-like and vowel-like calls breaches mathematical models of linguistic evolution

with Antonio Alexandre, Marco Gamba, Matthew Nowak, Raquel Vicente, Serge Wich
Biology Letters, 2021
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Orangutans show active voicing through a membranophone

with Robert Shumaker
Nature Scientific Reports, 2019
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Understanding language evolution: Beyond Pan-centrism

with Josep Call
BioEssays, 2020
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Chimpanzee lip-smacks confirm primate continuity for
speech-rhythm evolution

with Andre Pereira, Eithne Kavanagh, Catherine Hobaiter, Katie Slocombe
Biology Letters, 2020
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Couple whole-body rhythmic entrainment between
two chimpanzees

with Tuomas Eerola, Andrea Ravignani
Nature Scientific Reports, 2019
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Time-space-displaced responses in the orangutan vocal system

with Josep Call
Science Advances, 2019
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