H. Lyn Miles (born August 5, 1944) is an American bio-cultural anthropologist and animal rights advocate.
Miles is known for a 1970s experiment in which a baby orangutan named Chantek was videotaped during sign language acquisition.
[1] In 1978, she earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of Connecticut.
[2] Since 1993, she has lived in Atlanta, Georgia in order to be able to visit Chantek after he was transferred to the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and was sharing the responsibility for Chantek with her colleague Ann Southcombe who for seven years kept visiting Chantek.
Miles advocates that no enculturated great apes should be treated as captive experimental animals, but as true "orang utans", which means "persons of the forest", and eventually be declared as legal persons under the law.