anthropology

#950 Zachary Garfield: An Evolutionary Take on Leadership, Reputation, and Conflict Resolution

Jun 6, 2024

Dr. Zachary Garfield is Assistant Professor at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in the Faculty of Governance, Economics and Social Sciences, and co-director of The Omo Valley Research Project. He investigates how behaviors such as leadership and followership, social learning, decision-making, and economic strategies are related to group-level pressures stemming from, for example, social contexts, network dynamics, political structures, and cultural norms. More»
#949 Angarika Deb: The Anthropology of Fairness, Individual Preferences, and Gender Inequality

Jun 3, 2024

Angarika Deb is senior PhD student at Central European University, Vienna. She is a cognitive anthropologist working on moral fairness, perceptions of it, and the topic of gender inequality. She has been looking at fairness perceptions as it occurs in diverse human societies, including hunter-gatherer groups, westernized groups, and different socioeconomic class groups in India. More»
#939 Michael Petraglia: The Origins and Migrations of H. Sapiens

May 10, 2024

Dr. Michael Petraglia is Director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University, Australia. Dr. Petraglia’s archaeological research is interdisciplinary, involving collaboration with geneticists, physical anthropologists, paleontologists, geographers, geologists, and environmental scientists, amongst others. His research has centered on a range of subjects concerning human evolution, including the evolution of cognition, the evolution of behavior, and the relations between climate change and hominin dispersals. More»
#933 Samuel Veissière: The Psychological Effects of the Internet, and Human Cognition and Culture

Apr 26, 2024

Dr. Samuel Veissière is a clinician-researcher at RAPS (réseaux Recherche et Action sur les Polarisations Sociales), formerly Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. He is an anthropologist and psychosocial clinician working at the intersection of psychiatry, cognitive science and the social sciences. Dr. Veissière has held multiple research grants to study the impact of the Internet on cognition, wellbeing and social relations. Past research includes leading experimental studies on social, symbolic, and ritual dimensions of placebo effects, and making original contributions to theoretical models of the co-evolution of cognition and culture that draw on Bayesian brain, active inference, and ecological niche construction paradigms. His current works examines risk and protective factors against violent radicalization and extremism, with an emphasis on digital, narrative, and gendered dimensions of social polarization. More»
#928 Charles Roseman: The Evolution of Complex Traits, Hereditarianism, and Understanding Sex

Apr 15, 2024

Dr. Charles Roseman is an Associate Professor of evolution, ecology and behavior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studies the evolution of complex traits. More»
#914 Eduardo Fernandez-Duque: Mating Systems, Biparental Care, and Cooperative Breeding in Primates

Mar 14, 2024

Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque is Professor of Anthropology at the School of the Environment at Yale University. He is a biological anthropologist with a general interest in understanding the evolution and maintenance of social systems. His main research interest is to examine the mechanisms that maintain pair-living, sexual monogamy and biparental care and the role that sexual selection may have had in the evolution of them. He is also motivated to study living primates as an approach to understanding the evolution of human behavior. He is particularly interested in male-female relationships, pair bonding and paternal care in humans and non-human primates. More»
#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»