Cat Hobaiter on communication in apes

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2018

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Dr Catherine Hobaiter studies how apes communicate with each other. Although she's based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, she spends a lot of her time in the forests of Uganda, at the Budongo Research Centre. There, she's endlessly fascinated by the behaviour of great apes. Cat Hobaiter tells Jim al-Khalili about the difficulties of carrying out research on chimps in the wild. It can take years to win the trust of the apes. She says that her approach is to adopt the attitude of a moody teenager. Look bored and the chimps will ignore her, but at the same time she is watching them closely. Her particular research area is in understanding not the sounds that apes make, but their gestures. From her observations she's found that they use around 80 different gestures - many of which are common, in the sense that they have the same meaning, across different species like chimps and bonobos. One thing she and her team hope to learn from these studies is how we humans have evolved spoken language.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service.
0:04.7	Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests.
0:08.8	Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook.
0:11.2	Technology doesn't want to be good or bad.
0:15.0	It's in the hands of the creator.
0:16.7	It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room.
0:20.7	If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes,
0:24.6	you're doing the wrong thing.
0:26.0	Julie, at your service.
0:27.8	Listen to all episodes on BBC sales.
0:31.4	This is the BBC.
0:36.0	Hello I'm Jim Alkalele and you're about to listen to the quite excellent
0:40.0	podcast of the Life Scientific in which I get top scientists to tell me how they got to where they are today.
0:47.5	There can't be many scientists who reference Dr. Doolittle in the first line of a serious research paper. But that's exactly what my guest today did.
0:55.8	She is the primatologist Catherine Cat Hobbator, who maybe doesn't talk to the animals, but she does study how apes communicate with each other.
1:05.0	Although she's based at the University of St Andrews in Scotland,
1:08.0	she spends a lot of her time in the forests of Uganda at the Boudongo Research Center. There she's endlessly fascinated by the
1:15.1	behavior of great apes. Kat says that you have to adopt the attitude of a
1:19.6	moody teenager to gain the trust of chimpanzees. You sit slouched and try to look bored and
1:25.6	the chimps will ignore you. Act completely disinterested in them while at the
1:29.7	same time watching them closely. Her particular research areas in
1:33.5	understanding not the sounds that apes make, but their gestures. From her
	...

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