What great apes can teach us about human nature
Original story by Daniel P. Smith
What can chimpanzees teach us about ourselves? A lot, says Wrigley Institute faculty affiliate Craig Stanford, who’s spent three decades studying the lives of our closest cousins.
Humans share upwards of 98% of their DNA with the great apes — gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans — and Stanford, a professor of biological sciences and anthropology, looks to the nonhuman primates for insights into human evolution and the origins of our behavior.
“People go to therapy to understand how their past influences their present and their future. I do something similar on a species scale,” says Stanford, who arrived at USC Dornsife in 1992 at the invitation of the renowned primatologist Jane Goodall, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Occupational Science at USC.
While careful not to position the great apes as “under-evolved humans” — “They are their own species on their own evolutionary paths,” Stanford says — he notes that by studying them, we gain insights into both our ancestors’ lives and our own modern behavior.
“We turn to the great apes to get an angle from a living creature into what our ancestors might have been like, how they behaved and what they did with their lives — even simple things like how they moved,” says Stanford, who is also a research associate at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.