Erica Cartmill is a professor of anthropology, cognitive science and animal behavior at Indiana University Bloomington. She studies the evolution of cognition and communication.
Back in 2005, she started researching orangutan communication for her Ph.D. She witnessed fascinating interactions that she didn’t know how to categorize or analyze. Fast forward nearly 20 years, Cartmill has now written an interesting and fun piece in Scientific American magazine titled "Great Apes Joke Around, Suggesting Humor Is Older Than Humans: Studies of Great Apes Hint at why and When Clowning Behavior Evolved."
