Living links to monkey business

Michael Alexander speaks to St Andrews University psychologist Dr Amanda Seed about the 10th anniversary of a pioneering monkey research project run in collaboration with Edinburgh Zoo

It’s often said that a person of sound mind should never work with children or animals, but St Andrews University comparative psychologist Dr Amanda Seed is delighted to work with both. That’s because the senior lecturer at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience is also the director of Living Links, a collaborative project between St Andrews University and Edinburgh Zoo, which studies our closest living relatives – monkeys and apes – to learn more about the origins of the human mind.

The project celebrates its 10th anniversary today. And in an interview with The Courier to mark the occasion, Dr Seed said benefits of the research include the design of better enclosures for captive primates and a richer understanding of the evolution of cognition.

“It’s really a relatively short amount of time evolutionarily speaking since we humans diverged from monkeys, explained Dr Seed, who compares different species to triangulate on core principles about psychological evolution.

“When you consider our closest living relatives the bonobos and the chimpanzees, it was just six million years ago that we shared a common ancestor. For the monkeys that we study it is more like 30 million years.

“That’s a little bit longer but still not a huge amount of time – just 10% of the 300 million years since we split evolutionarily from the dinosaurs. But a lot of the change in humans has happened relatively recently. Our research aims to understand why.”

Opened in 2008, Living Links is a field station and research centre of St Andrews University, established in partnership with the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and Edinburgh Zoo.

Funded through a grant from the Strategic Research Development Scheme of the Universities’ Scottish Funding Council, it is designed to support studies by scientists at the universities of St Andrews, Stirling, Edinburgh and Abertay, who together form the Scottish Primate Research Group (SPRG).

At Edinburgh Zoo, Living Links has large outside and inside enclosures in which capuchin monkeys and squirrel monkeys live together. This reflects the fact that they form mixed-species groups in the wild.

As ‘living links’ to the cousins from which we all evolved, the study of their behaviour is at the core of research into how they have evolved in parallel.

While anthropological fossil research has concluded that the catalyst for human development was when ancestral monkeys evolved to stand up and literally walk out of the forests of Africa for the savannah, Dr Seed said it’s still a “big puzzle” why this happened.

What is known is that human ancestors “exploited a new niche” of landscape and climate while the other great apes continued living in the same tropical rainforests as before.

Today, the bodies and minds of these monkeys are more suited to the forest living environment where they remained.

But just as humans have adapted to their new environments, the monkey species that stayed have changed as well in that as much time has passed and they’ve had as many descendants.

Exploitation of the new environment was in itself a causation of change for human ancestors. For example, big game hunting would have required widespread co-operation which required changes in how humans think, changes to how social structures work, and more role differentiations. But while a diverse array of human cultures developed, what’s common worldwide is that they exist.

With the research facilities at Edinburgh Zoo transparent to the public, and because the capuchin and squirrel monkeys come from tropical rainforests that are under threat, Dr Seed said that by showing the monkeys up close and personal, it’s another way to motivate conservation efforts and raise awareness.

A squirrel monkey at Edinburgh Zoo.