What can an Ethiopian monkey tell us about being human?

Humans are unique in our capacity for extreme violence and, just as remarkably, in our ability to restore peace once a conflict is over. High in the Ethiopian highlands, geladas live inside one of the most intricate societies known among primates. Watching how they repair broken relationships offers a rare window onto the deep roots of reconciliation: the behaviour that lets a society hold together instead of coming apart.

A natural laboratory for social life

Gelada society scales from small family units, the one-male units, up to communities of hundreds, bound by an exceptionally rich repertoire of calls, faces and gestures. Found nowhere else on Earth, and far more vocal than their baboon cousins, geladas place communication at the very centre of how they keep the peace. That makes them an extraordinary model for questions about proximity, play, aggression and cooperation that reach all the way back to us.

What we study in the field

Our research in the unprotected area of Debre Libanos follows wild groups day after day, combining high-resolution video analysis, statistical modelling and genetic studies. We look at how animals prevent conflict, how they manage tension when it arises, and how they reconcile afterwards, as well as how they cope with a landscape increasingly shaped by people, roads, livestock and free-roaming dogs.

• Reconciliation and post-conflict behaviour in a multi-level society
• Vocal exchanges and the detection of emotional and prosocial cues
• Yawn contagion and behavioural synchronisation in a female-bonded society
• Interactions between geladas and neighbouring primates such as Papio anubis
• Behavioural flexibility and resilience in human-impacted habitats

These questions connect ethology, conservation and genetics, and they are pursued jointly by researchers from Italy and Ethiopia, so that data collection, video analysis and statistical work are shared across the whole team.

See the list of publications