Dorothy Leavitt Cheney (August 24, 1950 – November 9, 2018) was an American scientist who studied the social behavior, communication, and cognition of wild primates in their natural habitat.
[1] After Cambridge, Cheney (along with her husband) joined the laboratory of Peter Marler at Rockefeller University, where she held a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship and later became an Assistant Professor.
In 1977, as post-doctoral fellows working with Peter Marler, they began an 11-year study of behavior, communication, and cognition among vervet monkeys in Amboseli National Park, Kenya.
[11] Between 1985 and 1992, working jointly with their post-doctoral colleague Michael Owren, Cheney and Seyfarth carried out cross-fostering experiments on rhesus and Japanese macaques at the California National Primate Research Center (UC Davis).
[13] Since 2005, research conducted jointly with Joan Silk has shown that, as in humans, individuals who establish close, stable bonds with others experience increased fitness in the form of greater longevity and offspring survival.
These results suggest that natural selection has favored individuals who have both the skill and the motivation to form strategic social bonds, and that the evolutionary antecedents of human cooperation can be found even in species without language or culture.