anthropology

#1020 Cara Ocobock: Can Women Hunt?

Nov 15, 2024

Dr. Cara Ocobock is Associate Professor and Director of the Human Energetics Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame. Her research program integrates human biology and anthropology, with a focus on the interaction between anatomy, physiology, evolution, and the environment. She explores the physiological and behavioral mechanisms necessary to cope with and adapt to extreme climate and physical activity. Dr. Ocobock’s research is at the intersection of metabolic physiology, evolution, culture, and behavior. More»
#1017 Erica Cartmill: The Evolution of Ape Gestures and Human Language

Nov 8, 2024

Dr. Erica Cartmill is Professor of Cognitive Science, Anthropology, and Animal Behavior at Indiana University. She studies the acquisition and evolution of human language. Her work bridges the biological and linguistic subfields and involves both comparative and developmental approaches to communication. She is interested in how the multimodal aspects of communication contribute to and constrain the construction of meaning in spontaneous interaction. She is particularly interested in whether gesture played a role in the origins of human language. More»
#1012 Lance Grande - The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions

Oct 28, 2024

Dr. Lance Grande is a Distinguished Service Curator Emeritus at the Field Museum. Dr. Grande's research covers many aspects of fossil and living fishes, including the early development of North American freshwater fish fauna. Over the last 30 years, he has led numerous field trips to collect fossils from Fossil Lake, a 52-million-year-old lake bed in Wyoming. Studying these fossils, together with other well-preserved fossils and living species, allows Dr. Grande to investigate broad-scale questions about the history of the earth and its inhabitants and how they evolved together. He is the author of The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions. More»
#1009 Jaroslava Valentova: Sexual Orientation, Gender Expression, and Physical Attractiveness

Oct 21, 2024

Dr. Jaroslava Valentova is a Professor Doctor at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. She has research experience in evolutionary psychology, anthropology and human ethology. Her primary research interest is human sexual orientation, and its proximate and ultimate causes. She further focuses on research of masculinity and femininity, differences between men and women in sexual strategies, sexual orientation attributions, mate preferences and mate choice and she has also been studying dynamics of long-term relationships, such as factors influencing relationship satisfaction, homogamy, complementarity, and jealousy. More»
#998 Timothy Weaver: Human Evolution, and the Interaction between Neanderthals and H. Sapiens

Sep 26, 2024

Dr. Timothy Weaver is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Weaver studies human evolution, with a focus on the origins, evolution, and disappearance of Neandertals, and the related topic of the origins of humans who were anatomically and behaviorally modern. While his emphasis is on the later phases of human evolution, he has also worked on earlier periods, mostly in the context of the evolution of human bipedal walking and running and childbirth. More»
#973 Jade d'Alpoim Guedes: Foraging, Agriculture, Crop Dispersal, and Climate Change

Jul 29, 2024

Dr. Jade d’Alpoim Guedes is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, in Seattle. Dr. Guedes is an environmental archaeologist and ethnobiologist who employs an interdisciplinary research program to understand how humans adapted their foraging practices and agricultural strategies to new environments and have developed resilience in the face of climatic and social change. More»
#965 Eleanor Scerri: The Origins and Dispersal of H. Sapiens

Jul 11, 2024

Dr. Eleanor Scerri is Professor at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, where she is the Head of the independent Max Planck Human Palaeosystems Research Group. She is an archaeological scientist interested in exploring the articulation between material culture, genetics, and biogeography to further theoretical, methodological and scientific advances in the field of human evolution. Her group is exploring the pan-African evolution of our species, Homo sapiens through a number of diverse projects. More»
#955 Elizabeth Pillsworth: The Anthropology of Partner Choice, Mating Systems, and Gender

Jun 17, 2024

Dr. Elizabeth Pillsworth is Professor of Anthropology at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at California State University, Fullerton. Her research questions include patterns of mate preferences, mate choice, sexuality, gender, romantic love, and reproduction. Her research projects include studies with U.S. populations and 15 years of fieldwork with an indigenous hunter-horticultural population in Amazonian Ecuador. More»
#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»