Christophe Boesch

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Christophe Boesch (born August 11, 1951 in St. Gallen ) is a behavioral scientist with French and Swiss citizenship . Since 1997 he has been director of the department for primatology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and since 1999 honorary professor at the Institute for Zoology at the University of Leipzig .

Career

Christophe Boesch, son of the German-Swiss psychology professor Ernst E. Boesch , attended the Lycée François Villon in Paris from 1965 to 1968 and the Collège Calvin in Geneva from 1968 to 1970 , where he graduated from high school. Afterwards he studied biology up to the diploma degree (1975) at the University of Geneva , where he wrote his diploma thesis - after a three-month stay with Dian Fossey in the Virunga National Park in Rwanda - on mountain gorillas ; he then taught biology at the Collège Moderne in Geneva (1975 and 1977). In 1976 Boesch spent eight months in Taï National Park in southwestern Ivory Coast preparing for a long-term study of the behavior of nut-cracking wild chimpanzees ; this long-term study began in 1979 and is still ongoing. After Boesch had worked for a few months as assistant to the baboon expert Hans Kummer in the department for behavioral research and wildlife research at the University of Zurich in 1978, he began researching in 1979 for his doctoral thesis on the Ivory Coast, which began in 1984 with a study on nut-cracking behavior of Wild Chimpanzees has been completed.

After completing his doctoral thesis, he was employed as a research assistant at the University of Zurich until 1990 and at the University of Basel from 1991 to 1997, followed by the appointment of director of the Department of Primatology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Honorary professor at the University of Leipzig.

research

Christophe Boesch has been researching the behavior and living conditions of chimpanzees in the Taï National Park since 1976 with the aim of better understanding human evolution - especially the development of their cognitive and cultural abilities. Some recent research projects were also dedicated to the gorillas .

Outside of specialist science, Boesch was best known for his studies on tool use in chimpanzees. However, members of his working group also analyzed the social behavior and reproductive strategies of three groups of chimpanzees in general , as well as their hunting and territorial behavior .

In addition, there are data surveys on population dynamics , the result of which, among other things, a cooperation with the Robert Koch Institute came about after it was recognized that human viruses threaten the population of chimpanzees.

In 2000 Christophe Boesch founded the Wild Chimpanzee Foundation , of which he has been President ever since. Their aim is to secure the preservation of the wild chimpanzees and to avoid that the increasing population pressure leads to an ever greater loss of forest areas in the area of ​​the Taï National Park.

Fonts (selection)

  • with Gottfried Hohmann and Martha M. Robbins: Feeding Ecology in Apes and Other Primates . Cambridge University, 2012, ISBN 978-1107406001
  • with Sanjida O'Connell: Chimpanzee: The Making of the Film. Disney Editions, 2012, ISBN 978-1423153641
  • with Martha M. Robbins (Ed.): Among African Apes: Stories and Photos from the Field. University of California Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0520267107
  • with Emmanuelle Grundmann and Blaise Mulhauser: Manifeste pour les grands singes. Presses Polytechniques et Universitaires Romandes, 2011, ISBN 978-2880749149
  • The Real Chimpanzee: Sex Strategies in the Forest. Cambridge University Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0521125130
  • with Ulrich H. Reichard (Ed.): Monogamy: Mating Strategies and Partnerships in Birds, Humans and Other Mammals. Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0521525770
  • with Linda Marchant and Gottfried Hohmann (eds.): Behavioral Diversity in Chimpanzees and Bonobos. Cambridge University Press, 2002, ISBN 978-0521006132
  • with Hedwige Boesch-Achermann: The Chimpanzees of the Taï Forest: Behavioral Ecology and Evolution. Oxford University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0198505075

Web links

Video

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ eva.mpg.de , dump of April 21, 2012: Curriculum Vitae by C. Boesch
  2. ↑ Josephine S. Head et al .: Sympatric Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) and Gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in Loango National Park, Gabon: Dietary Composition, Seasonality, and Intersite Comparisons. In: International Journal of Primatology , Volume 32, 201, pp. 755–775, doi: 10.1007 / s10764-011-9499-6 , full text (PDF; 1.2 MB) ( Memento from April 5, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ Christophe Boesch and Hedwige Boesch: Sex differences in the use of natural hammers by wild chimpanzees: A preliminary report. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 10, No. 7, 1981, pp. 585-593, doi: 10.1016 / S0047-2484 (81) 80049-8 , full text (PDF; 671 kB) ( Memento from May 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Julio Mercader, Huw Barton, Jason Gillespie, Jack Harris, Steven Kuhn, Robert Tyler and Christophe Boesch: 4300-year-old chimpanzee sites and the origins of percussive stone technology. In: PNAS , Volume 104, No. 9, 2007, pp. 3043-3048, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0607909104
    The Chimpanzee Stone Age. West African chimpanzees have been cracking nuts with stone tools for thousands of years. On: mpg.de of February 13, 2007
  5. ↑ Christophe Boesch, Josephine Heada and Martha M. Robbins: Complex tool sets for honey extraction among chimpanzees in Loango National Park, Gabon. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 56, No. 6, 2009, pp. 560-569; doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2009.04.001
  6. ↑ Linda Vigilant et al .: Paternity and relatedness in wild chimpanzee communitie. In: PNAS , Volume 98, No. 23, 2001, pp. 12890-12895, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.231320498
  7. ↑ Christophe Boesch et al .: Altruism in Forest Chimpanzees: The Case of Adoption. In: PLoS ONE , Volume 5, No. 1, 2010: e8901. doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0008901
  8. ^ Christophe Boesch: Cooperative hunting roles among Taï chimpanzees. In: Human Nature , Volume 13, No. 1, 2002, pp. 27-46, doi: 10.1007 / s12110-002-1013-6 , full text (PDF; 1.0 MB) ( Memento from May 14, 2011 on the Internet Archives )
  9. ^ Ilka Herbinger et al .: Territory Characteristics among Three Neighboring Chimpanzee Communities in the Taï National Park, Côte d'Ivoire. In: International Journal of Primatology , Volume 22, No. 2, 2001, pp. 143–167, doi: 10.1023 / A: 1005663212997 , full text (PDF; 214 kB) ( Memento from May 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Sophie Köndgen et al .: Pandemic Human Viruses Cause Decline of Endangered Great Apes. In: Current Biology , Vol. 18, No. 4, 2008, pp. 260-264, doi: 10.1016 / j.cub.2008.01.012
    Chimpanzee death from human virus. Robert Koch Institute from January 24, 2008
  11. ↑ Christophe Boesch: Why Do Chimpanzees Die in the Forest? The Challenges of Understanding and Controlling for Wild Ape Health. In: American Journal of Primatology , Volume 70, 2008, pp. 722–726, doi: 10.1002 / ajp.20571 , full text (PDF; 66 kB) ( Memento from May 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Boesch, Christophe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss-French primatologist and behavioral scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Gallen