My research focuses on the evolution of human social life and the cognitive capacities that underpin complex social interactions. How and why were humans able to scale up their social lives from the very small social groups we lived in for much of our prehistory to the global social networks which characterise people’s lives today? My work takes a multidisciplinary perspective which emphasises the interrelations between the physical and social environments in which human evolution has taken place, and I am
Within this broad area I work on two interlinked areas of research which focus on earlier and later periods of human social development. In the first I look at the relationship between physical and social environments during human evolution. I use a variety of techniques including GIS and agent-based modelling to investigate how interactions between humans, other animals, plants, landscapes and material culture affected hominin life history and social structure, and how this in turn impacted on the evolutio
My second area of research focuses on the social and material culture developments which formed part of the shift from mobile hunting and gathering to settled village life, which occurred from around 20,000BCE in the Near East. In this work I use techniques derived from social network analysis to investigate changes in material culture distribution as a proxy for social relations during the transition from mobile hunting and gathering to settled village life in the Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic of the