«Darwin’s third book “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872) is revolutionary in many ways. He uses a phylogenetic, cross-species approach to elucidate the similarity between animals and humans. Only in recent years, authors like William McGrew and Frans de Waal have, in their work on non-human primates, done the same. For a long time ethologists had shied way from what was thought to be unscientific anthropomorphism. Comparative ethology is thus one of the new approaches the wise man in his house south of London initiated. Darwin also conducted one of the world’s earliest, perhaps the earliest, international cross-
cultural questionnaire studies by sending letters to Bristish colonial officers, missionaries, traders etc. asking them how the local people in the remote areas of the world where they were stationed expressed nonverbal “yes”, “no” and some basic emotions. Also his collecting data concerning the facial expressions of children born blind opened a new experimental field of evolutionary anthropology. Human ethology, as the evolutionary study of human perception, emotion, thought and behaviour is indebted to the great man in many ways, especially for collecting behavioural data in real life situations. I will compare his findings with my own fieldwork in New Guinea.» – Wulf SCHIEFENHÖVEL