Coming of age in Ngogo

It's a familiar story in many ways. A child is born, and for years afterward is adored and indulged and anchored to home and family. But then the child grows up and starts crossing that long threshold into adulthood. The transition proves—to say the least—a bit turbulent. Now when I say this story is familiar, I don't just mean familiar to us as human beings. After all, a similar story has long played out among our closest cousins, the chimpanzees.

My guest today is Dr. Rachna Reddy. Rachna co-directs the longstanding Ngogo Chimpanzee Project in Uganda and is an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. For more than a decade now, she has been closely observing the chimpanzees at Ngogo—and especially the adolescents.

Here Rachna and I talk about why adolescence—in all its intensity—is such a scientifically fascinating life-stage. We sketch the Ngogo research site, home to the largest group of chimpanzees ever studied. We unpack the different stages of chimpanzee life history. We zoom in on chimpanzee adolescence using a variety of different lenses—we talk about greetings, dominance hierarchies, grooming, social rejection, mentorship, deference, patrolling, female dispersal, and more. We discuss the so-called civil war that has taken root at Ngogo. And, finally, we talk about Rachna's in-progress novel (if that's the right word), which tells the story of one chimpanzee's coming of age in immersive detail.

I think you'll enjoy this one, folks. Chimpanzees offer us a kind of parallel universe, a funhouse mirror version of human life—one that is deeply relatable in some ways, and totally alien to us in others. And the parallels and non-parallels are arguably all the more striking in adolescence.

But before we get to it, one humble ask: As the new season of Many Minds ramps up, this would be a great time to support the show. You could do this by rating us, writing a review on Apple Podcasts or a comment on Spotify, or by doing the old-fashioned thing of just recommending us to a friend or colleague. Your support is—as always—much appreciated.

Alright friends, without further ado. Here's my conversation with Dr. Rachna Reddy. Enjoy!

Notes

4:00 – Damien and several other chimpanzees discussed in this episode feature in the Netflix documentary series Chimp Empire.

8:00 – See here for a study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on caregiving behavior in recently orphaned chimpanzee siblings.

13:00 – See here for a comprehensive recent article by Dr. Reddy and colleagues about puberty and adolescence in chimpanzees.

16:00 – The Ngogo fission—and subsequent "civil war"—is treated in detail in Chimp Empire and was the subject of a recent, widely discussed research paper (which includes Dr. Reddy as an author).

26:00 – "Tanner stages" are a widely used scale for measuring different phases of puberty in humans.

29:00 – For more discussion of life history stages and how these differ across species, see our earlier episodes here and here. For a recent report that Ngogo females experience menopause, see here.

36:00 – For some of Dr. Reddy's work on dominance hierarchies in adolescent male chimps, see here.

39:00 – For a detailed discussion of the chimpanzee "pant grunt" and its development, see here.

47:00 – For a study of female dispersal in a different chimpanzee population, see here.

54:00 – A video of a Tai chimpanzee playing "airplane" with her baby.

1:04:00 – A classic study of boundary patrolling at Ngogo.

1:11:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on sociosexual behavior in chimpanzees.

1:15:00 – A study by Dr. Reddy and a colleague on relationships between chimpanzee mothers and sons.

1:17:00 – A recent study conducted by Dr. Laura Simone Lewis (former guest!), Dr. Reddy, and others on social curiosity in chimpanzees and human children.

1:26:00 – For classic work by Jane Goodall featuring chimpanzee characters, see her 1971 book, In the Shadow of Man.

Recommendations

Work by Kazuya Toda in bonobos (e.g., here)

Work by Caitlin A. O'Connell in orangutans (e.g., here)

Work by Ella Brown in gorillas (e.g., here)

Tile art credit: Image of Jarman at age 11, courtesy of Rachna Reddy

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd.

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