Topic: great apes

Investigate how cultural grooming behaviour relates to communication, coordination and social bonds in great apes in Zoë Goldsborough’s group. The project combines existing video records, wild fieldwork and quantitative behavioural analysis, including the grooming handclasp. The fully funded 3.5-year doctorate is a full-time position paid at 65% of TVöD E13, with a planned start between January and March 2027.

Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very humanlike. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest differences. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. This presentation will summarise the arguments developed in a recent paper with Christophe Heintz. We make a key distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the expression of specifi