Wytse Wilhelm is a PhD student in the Palaeoanthropology section at the University of Tübingen. After completing their Bachelor’s degree in Psychobiology at the University of Amsterdam, they did their Master’s in Comparative, Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology at the University of St Andrews. Their MSc thesis focused on tree selectivity in buttress drumming in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii), for which they collected data at Budongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda.  

They moved to Tübingen to be part of the research group “Pathways to Language”, which aims to provide insight into human language evolution and plasticity in hominid through the comparative study of communication and social coordination in great apes. The goal of their PhD project is to assess communication for social coordination of human children in large-scale industrial and small-scale traditional societies.