Barbara J. King
Barbara J. King is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. She is a Chancellor Professor of Anthropology at the College of William and Mary. With a long-standing research interest in primate behavior and human evolution, King has studied baboon foraging in Kenya and gorilla and bonobo communication at captive facilities in the United States.
Recently, she has taken up writing about animal emotion and cognition more broadly, including in bison, farm animals, elephants and domestic pets, as well as primates.
King's most recent book is How Animals Grieve (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Her article "When Animals Mourn" in the July 2013 Scientific American has been chosen for inclusion in the 2014 anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing. King reviews non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement (London) and is at work on a new book about the choices we make in eating other animals. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work in 2002.
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As a new paper describes the planning skills of a drone-smashing chimpanzee whose video went viral, anthropologist Barbara J. King considers the risks and benefits of drones flying through our world.
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The likelihood that any one of us would be caught up in a mass shooting is low. But anthropologist Barbara J. King asks: Is any one of us left unaffected by gun violence?
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Barbara J. King says much is made of how attuned dogs are to humans — but new research shows that cats, too, check out our faces and voices closely when put in unfamiliar or worrisome situations.
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Set your summer table with bruised fruits and vegetables: Anthropologist Barbara J. King takes note of Europe's ugly-food movement.
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In a new paper, biologists suggest that religion evolved in our prehistoric past through processes by which serving one's family and larger social group become synonymous with serving God.
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Ivan spent decades confined within a small department store display, until activists won the gorilla's transfer to a zoo. Anthropologist and ape observer Barbara J. King remembers Ivan and considers the intense impact — positive and negative — that human actions have on individual animals' lives.