Our Goals

The study of life history is concerned with those events and developmental processes that occur during the life cycle, and which determine the manner in which organisms invest in growth, reproduction and survival to maximize reproductive success over the course of their lives. Primates show considerable diversity in life history strategies, reflected in such traits as age at weaning, body size growth rates, fertility and life span. What ecological, social and biological factors influence this variation? How does life history variation observed among individuals relate to reproduction and mortality outcomes later in life? How do trajectories of growth and maturation in humans compare to those of our primate relatives? Finally, what retrospective information do bones and teeth reveal about primate life history strategies, as well as the biological, social and ecological contexts shaping variation in these strategies today and over evolutionary time frames?

We approach these and other questions through two main lenses: (1) observational studies of individually-known study subjects from several long-term primate study sites in the wild, and (2) focused hard tissue examinations of naturally accumulated skeletal remains from these same populations.  By integrating developmental, behavioral, ecological, physiological and hard tissue datasets from well-documented populations, this offers unique opportunities to bridge studies of primate life history in both modern and past contexts, and thus contribute towards a more comprehensive understanding of primate life history evolution.