Isles of Scilly fieldcourse with the BSc Human Sciences students: Iron Age burial chambers, life history data from gravestones, and island boat-hopping University of Exeter CEC

Today is the deadline for self-nominations for President and Student Rep of the Cultural Evolution Society! Cultural Evolution Society

When did ancient hominins begin building on the knowledge of past generations? Stone tools point to 600,000 years ago, around the time that humans and Neandertals split. This means we likely weren't the only hominins to bank know-how My latest for Scientific American: scientificamerican.com/article/0524-c…

My university has been blocking my emails over the last couple of weeks because I put an external link in my signature. If you’ve sent me an email recently and I haven’t replied, please resend without my email signature, or send to amesoudi ‘at sign’ gmail ‘dot’ com. Apologies!

We'll try to contaminate computational social science with a bit of cultural evolution thanks to Alex Mesoudi!

Applications now open for the Cultural Evolution Society Advancing Cultural Evolution Early Career Research Grants, deadline 27 Sep 2024, award of up to $3000 culturalevolutionsociety.org/news-and-event…

Do you or someone you know work on Human Evolutionary Biology, including human origins, human dispersal/ diversity, adaptation, coevolution with pathogens and symbionts, or the use of evolutionary analyses for understanding disease etiology, physiology, and the human condition?

Today I learned that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon should actually be Six Degrees of Rod Steiger. (in 2005 at least, as this is from Uzzi & Spiro 2005, Am J Sociol. Maybe Bacon has overtaken him since?)

We are looking for two PhD students interested in cumulative culture in great apes. By using observational, experimental and computational methods, we aim to test whether precursors of human culture are present in chimpanzees and bonobos. uu.nl/en/organisatio…

I wrote one of these on cultural evolution oecs.mit.edu/pub/u870vxpu/r…

Some thoughts on Dan's first two points: (1) Sweet energy dense foods were rare in ancestrally relevant environments. and (2) Humans lack psychological mechanisms whose function is to curtail or inhibit consumption of sweet energy-dense foods when these are abundant.

Progress in acculturation psychology has slowed due to overused methods and theories. In a new theoretical paper published in PSPR, Alex Mesoudi and I integrate insights from acculturation psychology with cultural evolution, outlining new ways forward. 1/ journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10…

I sincerely hope that Rob, Pete, Ruth and I get to appear in the video

Finally, a joint interview with Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson about the origins of their collaboration! These two are arguable the most important figures in the past 50 years of anthropology, providing a framework to understand where culture comes from and why it changes.

An updated programme for the ESLR Society workshop for 2024. We will have Aura Raulo, Charlotte Canteloup, Christian Hilbe, Jingyu Xi, and Marina Papadopoulou giving talks and workshops as well as talks and posters from participants. If you’re interested in networks, of whatever kind, sign up now!