Christophe Boesch
Christophe Boesch was a professor and director emeriti of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, and founder of the Taï Chimpanzee Project, before his passing in January 2024.
His research took an inclusive approach, addressing from many different points of view, the biology of the chimpanzees and used this contribution to improve our understanding of the evolution of human and its cognitive and cultural abilities. From the start, he adopted a field worker approach, whereby he went in the field and studied the chimpanzees, and more recently gorillas, in their natural habitats to understand their flexible adaptations, and then took this knowledge to address questions about “what makes us humans?”
Boesch worked most recently on the following areas (in his own words):
1- Evolution of cooperation: Chimpanzee’s territorial and hunting behaviour are demonstrably part of the most elaborate forms of cooperation seen in animal species. After having worked for years on the hunting behaviour of the Taï chimpanzees and tried to elucidate the factors explaining the important population differences observed in this behaviour, I am now turning my focus on the territorial behaviour and the complex cooperative strategies that are observed in this context. Our long-term data based on synchronous observations on 3 different communities of chimpanzees in the Taï forest will be the base of this analysis.
2- Evolution of culture and tool use: Humans have long been proposed to be the only species having culture. However, the ever increasing data collected on wild animal population are challenging this view. Chimpanzee’s culture has been a central aspect of my research as this will allow us to gain much insight into what is special in human cultural abilities. I documented and studied the acquisition of tool use in Taï chimpanzees illustrating the important for tools in the life of this species. Recently we have expanded our field work in Central Africa to expand our knowledge on the behaviour of chimpanzees in this region that have remained surprisingly unstudied until today. This will allow us to dramatically increase our knowledge of the breadth of cultural variation existing in chimpanzees.
3- Evolution of reproductive strategies: The development of new technologies to work non-invasively to do genetic studies with wild animals has been a important extension of our research leading to many new insights into the reproductive strategies of chimpanzees as well as a more complete understanding of some of the reasons for the existence of social dominance and the role of kinship within the social group. Despite the presence of a fission-fusion society and many adult males reproducing, paternal behaviour could be demonstrated in Taï chimpanzees.
4- Population dynamic in wild chimpanzees: Long-term projects allow following the variations in population size and structure. We have been able to collect many data on that aspect in Taï chimpanzees and invested a lot of time in pinning down the causes of mortality in this population. This has led me to develop a large collaboration with the Robert Koch Institute trying to find the often unknown pathogens that are responsible for their death and elucidating the transmission mechanisms that lead to their contamination.
