anthropology

#333 Bernard Wood: Paleoanthropology, Human Systematics, And Human Evolution

May 14, 2020

Dr. Bernard Wood is University Professor of Human Origins at the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences at George Washington University. He is a medically trained paleoanthropologist. His research interests are all related in one way or another to a long-standing pre-occupation with hominin systematics. How can we improve our ability to recognize species in the fossil record, and how can we do a better job of reconstructing their phylogenetic relationships? His current research interests are phylogeny reconstruction, hominin systematics, dental evolution, evolvability within the hominin clade, and diet reconstruction. He’s the author of several books, including Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, and Human Evolution: A Guide to Fossil Evidence. More»
#326 Cristine Legare: Child Development, Culture, and Scientific Reasoning

Apr 27, 2020

Dr. Cristine Legare is a professor of psychology and the director of the Evolution, Variation, and Ontogeny of Learning Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines how the human mind enables us to learn, create, and transmit culture. She conducts comparisons across age, culture, and species to address fundamental questions about cognitive and cultural evolution. More»
#324 Edward Fischer: The Anthropology of Wellbeing, The Good Life, Values, And Markets

Apr 23, 2020

Dr. Edward Fischer is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is also the founder of Maní+, an award-winning social enterprise in Guatemala that develops and produces locally sourced foods to fight malnutrition. Dr. Fischer advises the WHO-Europe on the cultural contexts of health, and serves on the board of the Maya Education Foundation. His research focusses on issues of political economy, values, wellbeing, and development. He has authored or edited a number of books, including most recently The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing (2014). Dr. Fischer is currently working on a project that examines the ways moral and economic values are intertwined in the high-end coffee market. More»
#322 Curtis Marean: Zooarchaeology, Human Origins And Evolution

Apr 17, 2020
#315 Edward Hagen: Anthropology, And The Bargaining Model of Depression And Suicide

Apr 2, 2020

Dr. Edward Hagen is Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University. His research takes an evolutionary approach to non-infectious diseases, with a focus on mental health. He investigates tobacco use in the larger context of human use of plant secondary compounds. He investigates depression, suicide, and deliberate self-harm as potential signaling strategies. Child growth and development is a research theme that grew out of his work on postpartum depression. He has also recently begun testing evolutionary models of leadership, as part of his more general interest in the evolution of human social organization. Finally, he has published a number of theoretical papers on evolutionary approaches to ontogeny, cognition, and behavior. More»
#313 Robert Kelly: The Fifth Beginning, And The Lifeways Of Hunter-Gatherers

Mar 27, 2020

Dr. Robert Kelly is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Kelly has shaped and contributed much to our understanding of hunter-gatherer societies. He has a deep interest in Western North American archaeology, especially in the Great Basin area. Current understanding of hunter-gatherer mobility and foraging patterns are also influenced strongly by his research, fieldwork, and ethnology. By examining the Pleistocene colonization of the Americas by examining artifacts and lithic technology, Dr. Kelly reconstructs past life-ways and compares them to current foraging societies, and examines human adaptation to climate change during different periods in the past. He’s the author of books like The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways, and The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell Us about Our Future. More»
#302 Jonathan Marks: Origin Stories In The Science Of Human Evolution

Mar 2, 2020

Dr. Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His primary training is in biological anthropology and genetics. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2012 he was awarded the First Citizen’s Bank Scholar’s Medal from UNC Charlotte. In recent years he has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the ESRC Genomics Forum in Edinburgh, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Templeton Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Notre Dame. He is a significant figure in anthropology, especially on the topic of race. Dr. Marks is skeptical of genetic explanations of human behavior, of "race" as a biological category, and of science as a rationalistic endeavor. He’s the author of books like The Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology, Tales of the Ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution, and Is Science Racist?. More»
#301 Michael Masters: The Anthropology Of Identified Flying Objects

Feb 28, 2020

Dr. Michael Masters is Professor of Anthropology at Montana Tech. His research centers on investigating human ocular, orbital, midfacial, cerebral and neurocranial morphology, and how competition among these features may act to constrain the eye and surrounding ocular tissues during ontogeny, as it relates to the disparate incidence & severity of astigmatism and juvenile-onset myopia. Further research interests center on investigating hominin biocultural evolution, astrobiology, astronomy and the physics of time as they relate to the UFO phenomenon. On that pic, he has written a book, Identified Flying Objects: A Multidisciplinary Scientific Approach to the UFO Phenomenon. More»
#300 Kristen Hawkes: The Grandmother Hypothesis

Feb 27, 2020

Dr. Kristen Hawkes is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah. Dr. Hawkes, an expert in human evolution and sociobiology, is the author of several studies on the “grandmother hypothesis,” which asserts that many of the characteristics that distinguish us from our ape ancestors are thanks to the thoughtful care of our grandmothers. Her research is based on ethnographic observation studies of hunter-gatherer communities such as the Aché and Hadza. She has also developed mathematical models to model evolution over time and trace the influence of grandmothers on human lifespan. Combining mathematical modelling and observational studies she also researches the effects of fire on ancient hunter-gatherers. More»
#299 Thom Scott-Phillips: The Biological And Cultural Bases Of Language

Feb 24, 2020

Dr. Thomas Scott-Phillips is a Senior Research Scientist in the Social Mind Center and the Department of Cognitive Science, at Central European University, Budapest. In particular he studies communication, and how it makes us human. His first book, Speaking Our Minds, was reviewed as “The most important and the best book ever written on the evolution of language” and “The best linguistics book I’ve read in 10 years”. He’s written short pieces for outlets such as Aeon, Scientific American, The Conversation; and he has given public talks for TEDx, British Humanist Association, Skeptics In The Pub, Digital Science and others. His academic articles and broader interests span cultural evolution, primate communication, language acquisition, philosophy of language, and others. More»