William McGrew is a behavioral ecologist, specializing in
primatology. He studies monkeys and apes in captive, naturalistic, and natural
settings, using ethological and ecological methods. He has worked mostly on
wild chimpanzees, over three decades in East, Central, and West Africa, from
Tanzania to Senegal. He focuses on subsistence, especially the elementary
technology of making and using tools. Comparison across populations of
chimpanzees allows for cross-cultural variation to be analyzed in depth, and
the results are applied to modelling the emergence of culture in human
evolution. With Dr. Linda Marchant (Anthropology), he studies hand use,
especially laterality and prehension, in both nonhuman and human primates.
This entails observations of individuals in such captive settings as zoos, as
well as in the wild, or in the human case, in real-life settings or in
cinematic and video archives.
In applied primatology, Dr. McGrew has done research with environmental
enrichment in laboratories and zoos in which findings from field studies are
incorporated into captive diet, husbandry, furnishings, and social life. Also,
he consults on studies of rehabilitation and release in which captive primates
are taken from captivity to the wild or to naturalistic settings.
Dr. McGrew teaches courses on socio-ecology of primates, mammalogy, evolution
of human behavior, and biological anthropology.
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Recent publications:
McGrew, W. C., Marchant, L. F., and Nishida, T., eds. 1996. Great Ape
Societies, 335pp., Cambridge University Press.
Marchant, L. F., McGrew, W. C., and Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. 1995. Is human
handedness
universal? Ethological analyses from three traditional cultures. Ethology
101:239-258.
Wrangham, R. W., McGrew, W. C., and de Waal, F. B. M., eds. 1994. Chimpanzee
Cultures, 424pp., Harvard University Press.
McGrew, W. C. 1992. Tool-use by free-ranging chimpanzees: the extent of
diversity.
J. Zoology 226: 689-694.
McGrew, W. C. 1992. Chimpanzee Material Culture: Implications for Human
Evolution, 277 pp., Cambridge University Press.