Victoria Wobber, a Menlo Park resident who attended Castilleja School, has been honored for work in anthropology that has taken her far from home — and from her original interests.
Ms. Wobber, who graduated from Harvard in January with a concentration in anthropology, received the Captain Jonathan Fay Prize from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study for her work in dog cognition. The institute awards the prize to members of the graduating class who have produced an outstanding work or piece of research in any field, according to its press release.
When Ms. Wobber enrolled at Harvard, she didn’t know what she wanted to major in, according to her father, Ted Wobber. He said that she didn’t like biology in high school, but became interested in it after taking a large survey course, “The Evolution of Human Nature,” that explored human development by comparing it with that of other species.
The subject formed the basis for Ms. Wobber’s current research and has taken her to Germany and Africa, where she spent the summer studying chimpanzees in the Congo, her father said.
In her thesis, Ms. Wobber examined the evolution of dogs’ use of cooperative signals and suggested that human communication may have developed in a similar manner. She compared domesticated dogs with a previously unstudied breed, New Guinea Singing Dogs, that had gone without human contact for more than 6,000 years.
Ms. Wobber found that dogs perform better than chimps on some signal tests, which suggests a close tie between canines and humans. For example, in tests where she would hide food under a cup, then gaze at it or point to it, the dogs she studied understood the cues faster than chimps.
She suggested that the way in which dogs developed an understanding of communicative cues over a number of generations may be similar to the way in which humans did so.
Ms. Wobber’s early graduation didn’t mean she took a break from her studies. Instead, she traveled to Leipzig, Germany, to work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In May, she returned to Africa — she had spent last summer in Uganda studying chimpanzees.
She plans to return to Harvard in the fall to begin a doctoral program in biological anthropology and continue to work on domestication as it pertains to human evolution.
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