It's #FieldworkFriday! One of the things that I don't post much about is the people I've worked with. In the Australian outback, we went more than a little insane while watching the babblers, but the craziness was so much fun that I made friends I will never forget ❤️ @babblingbirds.bsky.social

📰 🐒 These exciting new results from our consortium are also featured in an article from The New York Times, by Carl Zimmer. 👉 www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/s...

This research sheds light on a fundamental aspect of what makes us human: our capacity for language and how it is passed from one generation to the next. A key part of this process is infant-directed communication - communication directed to children.

Aaand we even made the cover! With beautiful Gloria, who is grooming her infant, Gwen, two bonobos of the Kokoalongo community at the Kokolopori Fieldsite in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

We studied the evolution of infant-directed communication by comparing vocal input rates across great apes! A collaborative study led by @carolinefryns.bsky.social, Johanna Schick and me; www.science.org/doi/epdf/10....

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