Simone Pika lectures in evolutionary anthropology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Manchester. She wrote her Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany, in collaboration with the Department of Ethology, University of Münster, Germany. Her research centres on the evolutionary roots of language by pinpointing similarities and differences in signal use and associated processes of cognition in humans, non-human primates, birds and elephants both in captivity and in the wild.