welcome to the primate cast I'm your host Chris Martin and I'm Andrew Macintosh now Andrew our last podcast was with fron dwall and in case our listeners missed out on that one please be sure and check it out yeah and also don't miss out on the chance to see the video of Chris introducing the telenoid to Dr France dwall well on YouTube right that was from when we visited a robotics laboratory with him it was really a shame that we didn't talk about that during the podcast because uh we had a really great time there and I'm sure a lot of interesting stories could have come out of that so we'll be sure to get we'll be sure to get friends on that topic in the next time we interview him absolutely So today we're going to introduce the second of our series of five podcast from the IAS conference and today we're going to be joined by Dr Bill mcru now bill is Meritus professor of evolutionary primatology in the division of biological anthropology in the department of archaeology and anthropology at the University of Cambridge now he's had a long and illustrous career in the field of primatology uh and as a self-proclaimed chimp Chaser and he's also a world expert on chimp chimpanzee material culture now he's currently involved in a number of projects but these include the development of the field of cultural primatology and uh interestingly primate archaeology right and that's a project that's uh being taken place in West Africa with uh some students that do a lot of work here at PRI like Susanna carvalo right you have a fairly long-term collaboration going with Professor Manawa at bosu in West Africa that's right so we asked him about his interactions with Japanese primatology and that's where we're going to start the interview we so often do so here's Dr mcru my history with Japanese primatology goes back almost 40 years I came here first in 74 hosted by Toshi Sada Nishida and have come back periodically over the years more recently in in connection with PRI but of course as someone who's been a chimpanzee chaser for 40 years and has gone for breadth rather than depth that is rather than commit myself to a single field site instead flitted around from west to east to Central Africa I've run into Japanese primatologist in all those places so fair enough I think there's been an ongoing and I hope mutually advantageous relationship with Japanese primatology so for you how has that was something you mentioned in your talk here at the IAS as well but so for you how does that um compare then so you talk about breadth versus depth you what has that allowed you to do for example I think it's allowed me to be a little more self-indulgent than a person who is responsible for the ongoing uh commitments that a a long-term feel side and tales I have immense admiration for people who take on a commitment and then stick to it for in some cases decades I mean ini it comes to mind as the person who not only started Mahal back in ' 65 but who went out not every year but almost every year until you know very very recently and uh that that's wonderful but what I wanted to do was to take particular questions to particular places where they could best be answered at least that was my hope so when so you've been to so many field sites on so many different times and I'm wondering when you when you typically go to a field site do you go there with a question in mind and and and kind of think about that while you watch The Chimps or do you kind of watch them and let the questions come to you or how what's your method for doing field work as someone that goes for bread I think that's changed over the years um when we started the asteris site in uh the mid '70s we had definite ideas about what it would be like to work with a svan population of chimpanzees that is it was very environmentally ecologically driven on the other hand when I was in Tanzania this past summer I was interested in in some very specific aspects of of pounding technology so I I think it's horses for courses you know it depends on where you are at the stage of your career and where you are at the stage of your intellectual development and what the opportunities are I shamelessly parasitize my former students I I'll be straightforward in that if if they found interesting field sites then I'm probably likely to turn up there but you've been able in in that respect to have some really important insights and synthesize a lot of data that have been collected from those various sites I hope so u i time will tell but I think there is well let's put it this way I think there is a necessity for there to be people who do the in-depth studies and I think there's also a utility value to people who stand back and do the bread stuff and maybe there's a balance there balance polymorphism or something so one of the things that may be most relevant to that especially in current conversations with in primatology is the idea of culture um particularly across chimpanzee populations where it's probably most talked about but can you maybe I just want to start by asking you what is culture in the context of a a non-human primate I'll say straight way that I think there is no consensual definition and probably never will be anymore than there ever was in sociocultural anthropology for Homo sapiens and I think that's probably a good thing because we may well need different definitions for culture for different problems if I'm tackling culture conceptually I may need a different definition than if I'm tackling it uh empirically where an operational definition is important but I think there are certain elements that are going to crop up in anybody's definition of culture obviously social learning as opposed to individual learning some extent of persistence or endurance Maybe over Generations um some aspect of collectivity uh and so on and standardization I mean there are a number of of of themes that are in in everybody's definition of culture what I've always said about uh definitions of culture is I don't care how you define it just make it precise make it operational make it you know make it feasible and I want to ask you a little bit about material culture and also the recent Trend that you're uh involved in especially with some of your students to combine disciplines between primatology and archaeology well I think I have to say that two of the most important moves in my career were forced upon me one was to to to turn to culture as an explanatory uh Force when the Natural Science tools that I had given in my training as a zoologist did not suffice to explain what the chimpanzees were showing us so in that sense I turned to the social sciences out of desperation similarly um when I realized the extent of which we are trapped in the present with the field work that we can do now there was this this thought that can we actually take what we are seeing today back into the past by parasitti in archaeology and apply their methods so that we can have some idea about the time depth of what we're seeing at the present I we don't know whether chimpum Z's were cracking nuts at bosu for the last 400 years for the last 400,000 years or for the last 4 million years at the moment and the only way we're going to find out is to do archaeology how did that idea originally come up I mean it seems Seems rather intuitive and a nice logical extension but at the same time it's very recent I I I'm not going to take too much credit because I think um Julio mcer showed that it could be done in Thai whatever it was 5 years ago seven years ago um a couple of people had been trained as archaeologist and tried to tackle chimpanzees in the field from an archaeological point of view like jeene SE uh even Frederick Julian but I think I needed to have collaborators who were genuinely interested in and knowledgeable about both fields and I got lucky with the PHD student Susanna carvalo Susanna is a well-trained archaeologist and she's a well trained primatologist and she's the core of whatever we've been able to do at Cambridge well that's a good lead in for me to ask kind of a selfish question because I've only been to bosu before and actually the the first time I went to bosu was I I I Met You in conre uh you were coming from bosu with um sugiyama Sensei from PR um and I'm just curious from my own perspective I'd like to know what your impression of that particular field site is and and how kind of I'm interested in kind of the range of variability between field sites from your perspective CU you've been to so many of them probably all of them yeah it's got pros and like every fueld site mhm uh and let me do the cons first it's a small group it's perilously close to minimal critical mass MH and it's vulnerable because it's not in a protected area and so that those sound like problems for a lot of West African chimps right with these isolated pockets it certainly would apply to fungi U I'm not sure to what extent these days it applies to taii but they do have multiple groups in that population sure but the pros far outweigh those cons in in in two regards one is that um monawa has shown with the outdoor laboratory that you can do interesting and useful things with some variables being controlled depending on the problem to to varying extents with the population of of truly wild chimpanzees uh second thing is that certain things have been done at bosu which as far as I know have never been done anywhere else which which is particularly human chimpanze relations so Kim Hawkins work and um that's a model that's going to become more and more important as there's more and more engagement interaction friction whatever you want to call it as things get Tighter and Tighter for ganes in Africa and what is encouraging about that is how well the Basu Jims have coped with living cheek to gel with human beings for a considerable period now I'm not saying everything's Rosy we know it's not I mean there are real issues there but somehow it it's managing to to carry home I want to take that just a little bit further because at the end of your talk you brought up um as part of the future directions um in say cultural primatology will be to learn more about how the the chimpanzee cultures themselves may be affected by having such close contact and interactions with human populations as well well it's clear that cultural adaptation know changing your behavior and response to changing circumstances is one of the key issues with regard to culture I mean that's why we as a species are so successful but at the same time we have to keep in mind that cultural Mal adaptation can occur as well because we can make some collective decisions that turn out to be perhaps short-term payoffs but long-term major cost and so uh choosing to engage in corop rating perhaps being forced into engaging and crop rating because you lose your natural resource base and uh instead you find an artificial substitute resource base um may lead to some some Happy Meals but it may lead to some long-term tears and um that's presumbly just going to become more and more of an issue and so how much do you think that the human pres presence kind of feeds back onto the chimp behavior and it's and things like direct directly like things like crop rating but also kind of indirectly like maybe a field abandoned field becoming secondary forest or chimps using human paths is that having a significant impact on their culture even though humans are not there uh directly impacting it I I think you're right to point out indirect as well as Direct effects and I think the Direct effects and and so far I've been talking or we've been talking about local people in chimpanzees of course we need to talk about scientists in chimpanzees and we need to talk about tourists and chimpanzees and we need to talk about right other human groups um and sometimes it may be tempting or maybe maybe necessary to talk about the more Direct effects for example in terms of disease transmission right but in the long term assuming those can be dealt with the the more indirect effects are probably going to be the ones that are important and what what surprises me is is two things about chimpanzees one is their ability to to adapt to living daily lives where they interact with humans every day and secondly they tolerance at being able to do this uh it's extraordinary yeah so sorry we've got enough on this tangent talking about the situation in bosu but just to return to kind of the bigger picture um I'm wondering what what do you recommend for people that want to study chimps do you and your approach has been the the breadth and um do you see do you see the the your approach of the breadth and then the individuals who want to study depth at one site is kind of complimentary or what's the relationship like there I can only speak from personal experience and I'm not sure to the extent to which could be generalized but I was lucky that my initial experience with wild chimpanzees was 13 months uh without a break uh at gome so I went to a place that was well established and I got a good you know total immersion experience and I would hope that before anyone went out and started flitting around from place to place they would somehow ground themselves in that kind of experience if it was possible to do so right so I guess the answer is to me personally the thing that's worked for me is a bit of depth and a bit of breadth but the older I've got and perhaps I hope the wiser I've got then I've been able to make more out of the breath than I would have done when I was younger I think now let me just say one more thing which is you can only play the Bret strategy if people are generous and there's no reason why they should be altruistic so if you're going to do the bread thing I think you have to figure out ways to do research that is mutually advantageous to yourself and to your host so thanks thanks both for joining us in the primate cast you are most welcome my pleasure you have been listening to the primate cast a podcast series dedicated to the study and conservation of primates around the world brought to you by the center for international collaboration and advanced studies in primatology of the Primate Research Institute of Kyoto University visit us online at www. cicas p.p. photo hyphen u.ac.jp newws SLP podcasts and follow us on Facebook at www.fb.com thee primate cast and on Twitter at the primate cast