Planet without apes
Allan Wilson Centre Lecture Series 2013
Professor Craig Stanford
Co-Director of the Jane Goodall Research Centre
We are delighted to be hosting the first of a three part lecture series with the Allan Wilson Centre. The first lecture with Professor Craig Stanford asks the question Can we live with the consequences of wiping our closest living relatives off the face of the Earth?
Leading primatologist Craig Stanford, Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology and Co-Director of the Jane Goodall Research Centre at the University of Southern California, warns that extinction of the great apes threatens to become a reality within just a few human generations.
We are on the verge of losing the last precious links to our evolutionary past and the biological knowledge about ourselves that would die along with them. Stanford sees great apes as not only intelligent but also possessed of a culture: they are both toolmakers and social beings capable of passing knowledge down through generations.