Departmental News

Posted:  May 17, 2019 - 10:00am

Stephanie Fox, Evolutionary Anthropology graduate student, was awarded a Leakey Foundation grant. The aim of Stephanie’s project is to understand social relationships between female chimpanzees by investigating factors that constrain or promote the formation of social tolerance between females. In doing so, this study will help us understand how variation in social tolerance may have contributed to the evolution of female social relationships in primates, and particularly help explain differences in female-female social behavior between humans, chimpanzees and bonobos. For her project, Stephanie will collect matched behavioral and hormonal data on adult female chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda for the next year. The mission of the Leakey Foundation is to increase scientific knowledge, education, and public understandings of human origins, evolution, behavior and survival. Stephanie has also received a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for her research on "Social Tolerance and Function of Differentiated Relationships in Wild Female Chimpanzees."