Its main focus is on how the “Social Brain Hypothesis” might be able to illuminate the archaeological record, providing new insights and testable predictions about what changes in hominin social and cognitive capacities might have happened when and where.
Evolutionary Anthropology Research Projects
Research at ICEA focuses on understanding social evolution in broad taxonomic range. In part, that involves trying to understand what it means to be human, and how we as a species came to be that way. But the breadth of our interests also extends beyond humans to include primates and other social mammals and birds and the broader origins of sociality. To this end, we draw on a broad range of cognate disciplines, including evolutionary, cognitive, developmental, social and neuro-psychology, evolutionary and social anthropology, evolutionary biology and behavioural ecology, archaeology, history, and linguistics in a new multidisciplinary approach to some of the central questions of existence.
What unifies our projects is a commitment to developing empirically tractable research questions and then testing relevant hypotheses with the most appropriate methodologies. These can variously involve observational studies of natural populations, experimental or neuroimaging studies, or the analysis of cross-cultural or historical databases.
