Lydia Luncz: "Tool use, a window into cultural behaviour of primates"

Dr. Lydia Luncz - Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution Lab

I am a primatologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. I received my PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig where I worked on the emergence and maintenance of cultural diversity in wild chimpanzees. I am particularly interested in the origin and evolution of tool use in primates in general and have been using archaeological methods to compare the development of percussive technologies of wild primate species, including capuchin monkeys, macaques and chimpanzees. My current Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship focuses on percussive wooden tools in chimpanzees and early hominins.