Primate Societies

Dorothy Leavitt Cheney was born in Boston, Massachusetts on August 24, 1950. She received a bachelor's degree in political science from Wellesley College in 1972 and a Ph.D. in zoology from Cambridge University in 1977. She taught at Rockefeller University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Pennsylvania.

She and her husband and research partner Robert M. Seyfarth studied gorillas, baboons, and vervet monkeys in Africa. They wrote several books including How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species and Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. She died from breast cancer on November 9, 2018 at the age of 68.

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