Richard Wrangham

He studied zoology at the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry from 1967 to 1970, earning a B.A., and from 1971 to 1975 pursued a PhD in zoology (animal behaviour) at the University of Cambridge under R. A. Hinde, with a thesis on the behavioural ecology of chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, Tanzania.⁠[1]

He spent the formative years of his career researching chimpanzees in Tanzania and working as a protégé of Jane Goodall.⁠[2]

He did postdoctoral work at the University of Bristol in 1975 and Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry in 1976, and taught in the Departments of Anthropology and Biology at the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry from 1980 to 1989.⁠[3]

His curriculum vitae lists his nationality as British and records his marriage to Elizabeth Ross in 1980; they have three children.⁠[1]

In 1987 he was named a MacArthur Fellow as a primate ethologist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.⁠[3]

In 1987 he founded the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in western Uganda, with the goal of learning more about human behavior and ecology through the study of chimpanzees.⁠[4]

A member of Harvard’s faculty since 1989, he has taught human evolutionary biology and anthropology and for several years co-taught the Core course “Evolution of Human Nature.”⁠[5]

In 1996 Houghton Mifflin published Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, written with science writer Dale Peterson; it describes male chimpanzees’ border raids and lethal intergroup violence, suggests that chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human warfare, and rejects the presumed inevitability of male violence and male dominance.⁠[6]

In 1997 his wife, Elizabeth Ross, created the Kasiisi Project to encourage local Ugandans to preserve the Kibale Forest where he studies chimpanzees; begun at a single school, it served 14 schools and some 9,980 students by 2011.⁠[7]

In 2008 he and Ross became co-masters of Currier House, a Harvard undergraduate residence, where he had previously served as an academic adviser.⁠[8]

In 2009 he published Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, arguing that cooking, by making more calories available and reducing the cost of digestion, was the technological breakthrough that allowed humans to support big brains; he favors a date about 1.8 million years ago, when Homo erectus emerged, while his colleague Ofer Bar-Yosef has noted there is no evidence of fire use before 800,000 years ago.⁠[9]

On December 20, 2010, he and Sonya Kahlenberg published a Current Biology study using 14 years of Kibale data showing that young female chimpanzees often carry sticks, sometimes taking them into their nests, much like dolls, while young males do so less often — the first suggestive evidence of a wild nonhuman species playing with rudimentary dolls.⁠[10]

In June 2013, then Ruth B. Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, he and Ross said in a Harvard talk that Kibale’s chimpanzees face severe threats from forest loss and poachers’ snares; his project follows about 50 of the forest’s estimated 1,000-plus chimpanzees and runs snare removal and ecotourism efforts.⁠[11]

In 2015 he and Ross announced they would step down as Currier House masters at the end of the school year to focus on research; during an earlier sabbatical he had been writing a book on human aggression.⁠[8]

In 2019 he published The Goodness Paradox, which distinguishes hot, “reactive” violence from cold, premeditated “proactive” violence and argues that self-domestication reduced human reactive aggression; its discussion of the “execution hypothesis,” that capital punishment may have aided this by culling the reactively aggressive, drew controversy.⁠[12]

In an interview he said, “Genocide is appallingly human, it’s just [that] it’s only one side of us.”⁠[13]

In 2020 he, Alexandra Rosati and others published a Science study using more than 20 years of Kibale Chimpanzee Project data on male chimpanzees aged 15 to 58, finding that older chimpanzees were more selective in their friendships and more likely to have mutual relationships.⁠[4]

He appeared on episode 229 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, whose description calls him a Harvard biological anthropologist specializing in primates and the evolution of violence, sex, cooking and culture; topics included violence in humans versus chimpanzees, human evolution and violence, The Goodness Paradox and Catching Fire, how cooking changed human evolution, and preserving nature.⁠[14]

After Jane Goodall’s death in October 2025, he was interviewed as her protégé about her work and legacy; by then he was Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology, Emeritus, at Harvard.⁠[2]

Personal website: Public link: https://heb.fas.harvard.edu/people/richard-w-wrangham (opens in a new window)⁠[14]

Harvard University: Official website: https://www.harvard.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]

University of Michigan: Official website: https://umich.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[3]