anthropology

#887 Carol Ember: Tight and Loose Cultures, Sexuality, Gender Differences, and Cultural Databases

Jan 15, 2024

Dr. Carol Ember is President of the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University and the editor of the journal Cross-Cultural Research. Most of her research career has been devoted to cross-cultural research on variation in marriage, family, kin groups, gender roles, predictors of war and other forms of violence, but for the last eight years she has been working on cultural adaptations to natural hazards and other resource stressors. She is interested in research that integrates the fields of anthropology as well as anthropology with other disciplines. She is the first author (with Melvin Ember) of Cultural Anthropology, now in its 15th edition and Anthropology (with Melvin Ember and Peter N. Peregrine), now in its 15th edition. More»

#883 Jeremy DeSilva - First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human

Jan 5, 2024

Dr. Jeremy DeSilva is a Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is a paleoanthropologist, specializing in the locomotion of the first apes (hominoids) and early human ancestors (hominins). His particular anatomical expertise-- the human foot and ankle-- has contributed to our understanding of the origins and evolution of upright walking in the human lineage. He has studied wild chimpanzees in Western Uganda and early human fossils in Museums throughout Eastern and South Africa. From 1998-2003, Dr. DeSilva worked as an educator at the Boston Museum of Science and continues to be passionate about science education. He is the author of First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human. More»

#877 Luke Glowacki: Is Human Warfare Ancient or Recent?

Dec 22, 2023

Dr. Luke Glowacki is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Boston University and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Innovation in Social Science. He studies the evolution of complex social behavior, including cooperation and war. More»

#860 Carrie Mongle: Hominin Phylogeny, and Micro and Macroevolution

Nov 13, 2023

Dr. Carrie Mongle is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University and the Turkana Basin Institute. She also heads the Mongle Lab. Her research aims to reconstruct the major trends and transitions that characterize hominin diversity and evolution. Her ongoing work towards that goal involves (1) the discovery and description of new hominin fossils from the Turkana Basin in Kenya; (2) quantification of morphological variation; and (3) comprehensive phylogenetic analyses founded on the careful character assessment of both craniodental and postcranial characters. In addition, Dr. Mongle is interested in evaluating the relationship between variation, evolvability, and macroevolution in the primate dentition. More»

#851 Alecia Carter: Thanatology, Animal Personality, Comparative Psychology, and Culture

Oct 23, 2023

Dr. Alecia Carter is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at University College London. Her current research investigates (1) how primates respond to the deaths of others and what this can tell us about the evolution of cognition and emotion and (2) how individuals access information to make decisions. In particular, she studies how individuals use their social environment to access information, and how their phenotype, their individual characteristics, may limit their use of that information. Her previous research addressed how and why animals' behavior varies from others but is consistent through time. More»

#849 Claudio Tennie: The Differences Between Ape Culture and Human Culture

Oct 19, 2023

Dr. Claudio Tennie is a Tenured Research Group Leader (“Tools and Culture among Early Hominins”) in the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen. In addition, he is an adjunct scientist at the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes. His main research triangulates what (if anything) makes human cognition unique - as well as why (and relatedly, when this happened and how often). In particular, he uses various methods and pathways to study the factors and the prehistorical beginnings that enabled the typical modern human "variant of culture": cumulative culture of know-how. More»

#839 Michael Muthukrishna: A Theory of Everyone

Sep 25, 2023

Dr. Michael Muthukrishna is an Associate Professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics. His other affiliations include Affiliate of the Developmental Economics Group at STICERD, Affiliate of the Data Science Institute, Azrieli Global Scholar at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Technical Director of The Database of Religious History, and Board member of the One Pencil Project. His research focuses on the psychological and evolutionary processes that underlie culture and how culture is transmitted, maintained, and modified. He is the author of A Theory of Everyone: The New Science of Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. More»

#835 William Kelly: The Sociocultural Anthropology of Japan

Sep 15, 2023

Dr. William Kelly is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and the Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies at Yale University. A noted authority on the social and historical anthropology of Japan, Dr. Kelly focused much of his research for two decades on regional society in Japan, based on extensive fieldwork in the Shōnai area of Yamagata Prefecture. He has also written widely on the broader dynamics of class formation in Japanese society. At the same time, much of his research for the past two decades has explored sport and body culture and their significance in modern Japan. He has also written on the history of Japan anthropology and its importance for Japan studies and for sociocultural anthropology. More»

#828 Greger Larson: Animal Domestication and Human Evolution

Aug 31, 2023

Dr. Greger Larson is a Professor in the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Director of the Wellcome Trust Palaeogenomics and Bio-Archaeology Research Network (PaleoBARN). His research interests include evolutionary genomics, ancient DNA, domestication, human and animal dispersal, and phylogenetics. His work on the domestication of canines and the origin of the domestic dog has provided insights into the prehistoric bond between humans and early dogs. More»

#827 Joseph Henrich: Cross-Cultural Research, Intelligence, Mating Systems, and Religion

Aug 28, 2023

Podcast: http://bit.ly/3FeSNqb More»