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This episode of The PrimateCast: Origins is taken from CICASP's International Primatology Lecture Series: Past, Present and Future Perspectives of the Field.

The IPLS is dedicated to providing origin stories told by experienced researchers in primatology and related fields. The lectures are conducted via Zoom within our CICASP Seminar in Science Communication for graduate students of our program at Kyoto University. We are releasing the audio from these lectures right here on The PrimateCast: Origins.

For anyone interested in viewing the video versions of these lectures, head over to the CICASP TV YouTube channel, where you can also watch them live as we stream our Zoom feeds there.

For the 12th international primatology lecture we invited distinguished professor Dr. Mewa Singh to share his origin story with us. This lecture took place on May 25, 2022.

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"One need not have a formal degree in a discipline, to become a specialist in that discipline"
-Mewa Singh, 2022
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Dr. Mewa Singh is Life-Long Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology and Institute of Excellence at the University of Mysore. Throughout his career he has investigated the behavior and ecology of mammals, most notably primates, and has been heavily invested in their conservation and management in different regions throughout India.

In this lecture, he describes his activities related to the conservation of primates in India, particularly through distinctions between forest-dependent species and others that are more adaptable to human-dominated landscapes. He then describes various behavioral adaptations that have allowed more commensal macaque species to thrive in urban settings.

Key topics that come up are:

• genetic diversity in lion-tailed macaques with respect to habitat fragmentation
• protecting habitat and regrowing wildlife corridors with rainforest trees
• primate commensalism and behavioral plasticity in urban environments
• acquisition of novel foraging strategies as adaptations to extracting human resources

He begins the lecture talking about how he became a wildlife biologist and primatologist, and that it wasn't exactly a straight line or so predetermined from a young age. And he closes with some further advice about studying primates ethically in human landscapes. 

In between, he provides numerous pieces of advice and bits of wisdom that will no doubt have value for all listeners. 

Enjoy!. 

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

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This episode features paleoanthropologist and science educator Dr. Briana Pobiner.

Briana works in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. She is also Associate Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at George Washington University. 

Briana’s anthropological research focuses on understanding the human diet, and changes therein over the past few million years. Her work on science education and communication focuses on promoting understanding of evolution through examples from our own bushy branches of the evolutionary family tree. 

In the interview, we cover a range of topics including:

• the question "what makes us human?"
• reconstructing the diets of our ancestors using paleontological 'time machines'
• ancient hominins sharing the savannas - and food? - with ancient carnivores
• busting some common myths, like the idea of linear evolution and the 'paleodiet'
• balancing doing, teaching and communicating science to broad audiences
• how to go about becoming a strong communicator of scientific ideas
• being a mom in the field with kids

There is so much in this interview for everyone, and we couldn't be happier to be sharing it on The PrimateCast. 

Here are a few links to help you learn more about Briana Pobiner and her work:

• Briana's professional bio
• Briana's research website
• Answer the question "what does it mean to be human" yourself on the Smithsonian Human Origins Program’s website 
• A brilliant 2016 paper on accepting, understanding, teaching and learning evolution in the US
• Briana's academic page on GWU's website

Photo Credit: Smithsonian

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

• Connect with us on Facebook, X, or Instagram
• Subscribe where you get your podcasts
• Email [email protected] with thoughts and comments

If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above. 

Thanks for being part of The PrimateCast Community!

Send us Fan Mail

This episode of The PrimateCast: Origins is taken from CICASP's International Primatology Lecture Series: Past, Present and Future Perspectives of the Field.

The IPLS is dedicated to providing origin stories told by experienced researchers in primatology and related fields. The lectures are conducted via Zoom within our CICASP Seminar in Science Communication for graduate students of our program at Kyoto University. We are releasing the audio from these lectures right here on The PrimateCast: Origins.

For anyone interested in viewing the video versions of these lectures, head over to the CICASP TV YouTube channel, where you can also watch them live as we stream our Zoom feeds there.

For the 8th international primatology lecture we invited Dr. John Mitani to share his origin story with us. This lecture took place on January 27, 2022.

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"If you find good [mentors], lean on them"
-John Mitani, 2022
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John Mitani is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, who has conducted over 40 years of research on gibbons, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. 

He is the 2022 recipient of the Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Biological Anthropologists. And, listening to his lecture really gives one a sense of why! So much of his work found its way into the textbooks.

In the lecture, he shares many of the key discoveries he and his colleagues have made about social behavior in primates. These covered topics like:

• territoriality and indices of home range defensibility 
• how ape vocalizations play a role in territorial defense and spacing
• how male orangutans can have hugely different mating strategies that coincide with huge differences in body size and other physical features
• how chimpanzee social behavior and alliances are determined by genetic relationships among males

He then goes on to provide some sage advice for any up-and-coming scholars out there. He spends a good deal of time acknowledging his mentors, and implores all of us to do the same. He also acknowledges the importance of serendipity, and the need to be opportunistic in the face of new observations. 

With eloquence and humility, John tells us the story of his career, in the hopes it can provide some inspiration to those of us out there on similar paths. 

One thing's for sure: I sure felt inspired after hearing him speak!

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

• Connect with us on Facebook, X, or Instagram
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• Email [email protected] with thoughts and comments

If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above. 

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Send us Fan Mail

This episode features distinguished primatologist Dr. Charles Snowdon, or Chuck Snowdon, as he’s maybe better known by.

Chuck is Hilldale Professor of Psychology Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and he’s widely known for his work on primate social development, communication and cognition. He ran the Snowdon Primate Center in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where so much was learned about the small Neotropical primates known as marmosets and tamarins. 

In the interview, we deep dive one specific topic that Chuck has worked on over the past couple of decades: musicality in nonhumans! 

Some of our topics of conversation include:

• the integration of art and science, STEAM, and collaborating with musicians
• how our appreciation of music evolves and affects our mood
• making music for monkeys... and why it matters
• and many more!

Here's a great quote from Chuck from a 2009 article published in the Guardian: “Why should a tamarin find our music comforting? I find the monkey music quite irritating.”

You can read the paper on which a lot of our conversation was based in an article published in the journal Biology Letters (Paywall). There's also more music for tamarins in the supplementary material of that article as well!

In the interview, Chuck also references Snowball, a cockatoo who became YouTube famous for its ability to dance to the beat of popular music. This bird was also the focal point of our conversation with Dr. John Iversen, another fascinating conversation I had when he visited Japan for the Japan Society for Animal Psychology conference back in 2014. He's the middle interview in The PrimateCast 22.

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

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If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above. 

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Send us Fan Mail

This episode presents an interview with Dr. Pamela Asquith, and anthropologist and meta-primatologist who has studied how primatology was done historically in Japan, and tackled the challenge of language, metaphor and anthropomorphism in science.

In March 2022, she delivered an excellent talk for CICASP in our International Primatology Lecture Series: Past, Present and Future Perspectives in the Field. You can find a link to that event here, or go straight to the CICASP YouTube Channel and find it here. 

The interview is not a carbon-copy of the lecture, so I'm sure one can find value in both!

Pam Asquith is currently adjunct professor in Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, but perhaps spent the bulk of her career in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.

Pam is perhaps best known around here as the person who translated - with support from colleagues in Japan - Kinji Imanishi's seminal 1941 book Seibutsu no Sekai 「生物の世界」into English, under the title: "A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things". Imanishi is considered a founder of Japanese primatology- he set up Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute itself! - and was especially instrumental in giving it the flavor it had that set it apart from primatology as it emerged somewhat independently in the West. 

Some of the topics we cover during the conversation include:

• understanding primatology through the lens of history and philosophy, and how Eastern and Western cultural trends influenced the trajectory of the field
• the challenges of anthropomorphism and metaphor in science and the study of animal behavior
• meta-primatology and the process of studying those who study primates, especially in Japan
• marginalization in science, sometimes caused by language constraints and cultural influences on thought
• the legend that is Kinji Imanishi, his views on nature, and his influence on Japanese primatology and beyond

For anyone interested in finding out more about her work, you can visit Dr. Pamela Asquith's website, and check out her book A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things on Amazon or wherever else you might get your reading material. And don't forget to check out her lecture for our International Primatology Lecture Series!

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

• Connect with us on Facebook, X, or Instagram
• Subscribe where you get your podcasts
• Email [email protected] with thoughts and comments

If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above. 

Thanks for being part of The PrimateCast Community!

Send us Fan Mail

This episode of The PrimateCast: Origins is taken from CICASP's International Primatology Lecture Series: Past, Present and Future Perspectives of the Field.

The IPLS is dedicated to providing origin stories told by experienced researchers in primatology and related fields. The lectures are conducted via Zoom within our CICASP Seminar in Science Communication for graduate students of our program, but we decided to release the audio right here on The PrimateCast.

For anyone interested in viewing the video versions of these lectures, head over to CICASP's YouTube channel, where you can also watch them live as we stream our Zoom feeds there.

For the 6th international primatology lecture we invited Dr. Karen Strier to share her story with us.

Many of our listeners should be really familiar with Dr. Strier, as she was until recently president of the International Primatological Society and is the author of 6 editions of the famous textbook Primate Behavioral Ecology - which I assume many of you, like me many years ago, were trained on!

I was lucky enough to interview her for the podcast back in 2016 (#53) at the 26th Congress of the International Primatological Society that was held in Chicago and hosted by Lincoln Park Zoo. She had just become president of the IPS, so now I guess we can bookend her tenure with a follow up episode of The PrimateCast - nailed it!

But I thought we had a really great conversation back then, so it was nice to see the bigger picture of Karen’s work in this IPLS event. And, if you stay to the end, you’ll notice that I left in my own question of Dr. Strier, just because I thought her answer to it really helped fill out the story of why their work on muriquis matters so much, and what we still need to look out for.

In her talk, Karen covers how she got into primatology and ended up studying muriquis, also known as woolly monkeys - those rare faces in the forest, which she writes about so elegantly in a book of that name. Northern muriquis, her main study species, are among the most endangered primates, and the work that Karen and her colleagues have been doing is really shedding light on their ups and downs, and the threats they continue to face.

Karen Strier is Vilas Research Professor and Irven Devore Professor of Anthropology at the University of Madison - Wisconsin. For anyone who wants to know more about Dr. Strier, check out her lab's homepage on the University of Wisconsin's website.

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

• Connect with us on Facebook, X, or Instagram
• Subscribe where you get your podcasts
• Email [email protected] with thoughts and comments

If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above. 

Thanks for being part of The PrimateCast Community!

Send us Fan Mail

This is podcast #69 with Dr. Takeshi Furuichi.

I was really excited about this interview. I've known our guest - Dr. Takeshi Furuichi - since I was a grad student in the Section of Social Systems Evolution at Kyoto University's now rebranded Primate Research Institute. He was the Section Head until this year when we were all redistributed together to the Wildlife Research Center.

"I want to behave like ... females of bonobos, but in reality I am a male chimpanzee"

Dr. Furuichi is considered a leading expert in the behavior of bonobos, and has gone to great lengths to better understand how and why they differ from their close cousins, the chimpanzees.

He runs the study site at Wamba village, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and has continued to shed light on the evolution of the genus Pan and what it means for our own evolutionary story as well.

In the interview, we meander through a lot of interesting topics. We discuss why Japanese primatologists have almost exclusively studied Japanese macaques and African Great Apes. Dr. Furuichi then describes how the small village of Wamba in the middle of the Congo Basin became the setting for one of the most influential bonobo study sites in the world. And the trials and tribulations of those who made that happen!

Then we talk about bonobos and chimpanzees, how they're the same, how they differ, and why. This provides a great summary of his work and should be a great primer on ecology and evolution within the genus Pan.

And, he ends with a discussion of how he and his partner, Dr. Chie Hashimoto, are doubling down on uncovering the interrelationships between sex and society.

For anyone listening, it should become apparent early on that Dr. Furuichi is a great storyteller and drops loads of little nuggets of information and wisdom thorughout the interview. I hope you all enjoy listening to this interview as much as I did recording it.

For anyone interested in finding out more about hist work, you can visit Dr. Takeshi Furuichi's profile on the Wildlife Research Center's website. Use a translator where necessary (I recommend DeepL!).

I would also encourage you to visit the website for the NGO that Dr. Furuichi spearheaded called Support for Conservation of Bonobos, where you can learn more about bonobos, the jungles and people of Wamba, and the Kyoto University group's efforts to protect them.

I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr. Takeshi Furuichi on The Primatecast. When you're done, you can browse loads of other audio content from primatologists and conservationists from around the world.

Photo Caption: Takeshi Furuichi with local kids at Wamba Village in the DRC

Photo Courtesy: Takeshi Furuichi

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

• Connect with us on Facebook, X, or Instagram
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• Email [email protected] with thoughts and comments

If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above. 

Thanks for being part of The PrimateCast Community!

Send us Fan Mail

In this installment of The PrimateCast we continue with our International Primatology Lecture Series: Past, Present and Future Perspectives of the Field.

The IPLS is dedicated to providing origin stories about experienced researchers of primatology and related fields, through lectures delivered by those very individuals. The lectures are conducted via Zoom within our CICASP Seminar in Science Communication for graduate students of our program, but we decided to release the audio right here on The PrimateCast.

Unlike most academic lectures, which are usually focused on testing scientific hypotheses, this series is designed to offer a feel for how one becomes a professional in the field of primatology. In a way, we might think of it as a career primer for young primatologists just starting their own journeys into the nether regions of Academia. At the same time, anyone might enjoy the stories told of big dreams, exotic locations and species, and the humanity inherent in forging a new path in life and in work.

For anyone interested in viewing the video versions of these lectures, head over to CICASP's YouTube channel, where you can also watch them live as we stream our Zoom feeds there.

The 5th podcast in our IPL series featured Dr. Elisabetta Visalberghi, who spoke to us back on October 13, 2021.

Dr. Visalberghi was the Research Director at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies, part of the National Research Council of Italy, where she continues to act as Associate Research Scientist.

She is an author of around 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and cowrote The Complete Capuchin: The Biology of the Genus Cebus (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Her research has focused on the behavior and cognition of wild and captive primates, especially capuchin monkeys.

She is probably best known for her work on cognition and social learning in capuchins, and especially as they relate to the amazing use of hammer-and-anvil stone tools by capuchins to crack open nuts

In the podcast, Dr. Visalberghi runs through her background and how she got into primatology, highlighting the importance of serendipity in that process. The second half of her talk details her work on capuchin tool use and social learning.

To learn more about her work, visit her web page and the EthoCebus Project website.

The PrimateCast is hosted and produced by Andrew MacIntosh. Artwork by Chris Martin. Music by Andre Goncalves.

Here's what you can do to get in touch!

• Connect with us on Facebook, X, or Instagram
• Subscribe where you get your podcasts
• Email [email protected] with thoughts and comments

If you value the show, leave ratings and reviews wherever it is that you listen, and consider donating by clicking the "Support the Show" link above. 

Thanks for being part of The PrimateCast Community!