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Hi my name is Cyril Grueter, I am a Biological Anthropologist and Primatologist. I am originally
from Switzerland but now I work here as an Assistant Professor at the School of Anatomy,
Physiology and Human Biology at UWA. This school has a very long history of doing research
on human evolutionary biology going back many decades.
We are now standing here in front of some skeletal material - these are all skulls of
fossil hominids and we can learn a lot from these fossils about the evolution of human
morphology. For example we can make inferences about the evolution of human brain size. One
of the most fundamental and fascinating questions in biology pertains to the evolution of human
social organisation and social behaviour and that’s what I am particularly interested
in. But we have a problem, these fossils don’t tell us much about behavioural evolution because
behaviour doesn’t really fossilise. So the approach that I have chosen is to study non-human
primates in the wild so I use a comparative approach. I believe that we can learn a lot
from these non-human primates about the evolution of human social behaviour.
I do a lot of field work, for example for my PhD I spent about two years in the remote
corner of China near the Himalayas doing research on the black-and-white snub-nosed monkey,
an endangered primate. I was actually the first westerner to work in that particular
area. This was a very challenging project, there were a lot of logistical and bureaucratic
obstacles that we had to overcome but in the end it was a very rewarding experience.
And after finishing my PhD I moved on to do a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and I had the privilege to spend almost two years
in central Africa in Rwanda doing research on the world famous mountain gorillas in the
Virunga Volcanoes. I did my research at the Karisoke Research Centre, that’s the research
centre that was founded by legendary Dian Fossey forty-five years ago, and this was
really a childhood dream come true for me. Both species, the snub-nosed monkeys and the
gorillas, have something in common - they live in very rugged, high altitude environments
and I would say that being Swiss is probably an advantage when it comes to doing research
at very high altitudes!
So now I have an ongoing collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and this particular
research project is about the social organisation and social network of these primates. One
of the questions we are interested in is what are the cause and benefits of living in large
groups for primates? We are also interested in finding out how primates achieve conformism
in their behaviour and how they maintain cohesion in these very large groups.
A question I’m particularly interested in is the evolution of large-scale cooperative
behaviour. One of the universals of humans is the ability to overcome hostility between
groups and to establish cooperative alliances with neighbouring groups. I believe these
snub-nosed monkeys are perfect models to understand the evolution of intergroup tolerance because
they live in a society where small family groups tolerate each other’s neighbourhood
and get together in larger bands. So basically the same pattern as we see in human beings.
I may have given you the impression that I do all my research at very exotic locations,
but actually I also have honours students working here in Perth at the Perth Zoo doing
research on primate and non-primate behaviour and cognition and I also do comparative analysis.
I extract data from the literature and from databases and I use this data to investigate
coevolution of behavioural traits. And I’m really looking forward to my next trip to
China to do additional field research on our closest relatives.