Next year in Zurich 😊 🏔️🇨🇭 #ehbea2027 will be held 29 March to 2 April. Website and Bluesky account are already set up (love the logo ❤️) @ehbea2027.bsky.social www.ehbea2027.com

New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks

Thank you to @rebeccasear.bsky.social for being an excellent President of @ehbea.bsky.social and for leading the EHBEA committee! The incoming President is @alexalvergne.bsky.social, who will also do an excellent job in this role. #ehbea2026

But N=30... If they'd sampled a different 30 people, the findings would be different too? #neuroscience

Psychology studies are becoming more global but often rely on highly educated participants. A study in Nature Communications suggests that cross-cultural samples of students or university-educated individuals over-represent cultural values that are typical of WEIRD countries, such as the US. 🧪

Analyses of ancient DNA sequences from >15,800 West Eurasian individuals finds surprising evidence of natural selection acting on hundreds of different genetic loci over last 10 millennia, according to paper by @aliakbari.bsky.social et al, published online today at @nature.com. 💀🧬🧪

Great talk by @babeheim.bsky.social at @ehbea2026.bsky.social on the cultural evolution of strategies in the game Go, including the convergence of AI on established strategies. #ehbea2026

Excellent talk on machine-human interactions, cooperation and learning by @iyadrahwan.bsky.social, presented at @ehbea2026.bsky.social. #ehbea2026 #culturalevolution

Great talk by @zannaclay.bsky.social on optimal maternal sensitivity in wild bonobos, presented at @ehbea2026.bsky.social in Leiden, Netherlands. #ehbea2026

🧪 ETHOLOGY: Do males invest less when females are mated? 🕷️💔 Clémot et al. tested this in sexually cannibalistic NZ fishing spiders. Males didn’t reduce courtship effort—but delayed it with mated females. Hesitation may reflect choosiness under high mating costs. #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1111/eth....

"Recently, 3 studies reported genetic evidence for matrilocality & genetic matriline connections across broad geographical and temporal scales. We draw on these 3 studies to explore past social organisation forms in light of new evidence & reconsider preconceptions that continue to endure over time"

We're looking for an Associate Lecturer in Evolutionary Anthropology (mainly teaching Evo Med and Stats at UCL Anthro) as maternity cover! Please share - closing date 30th April www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

New preprint out! 📢 We analysed 1.38M papers across 612 journals in ecology & evolution. We show the field is dominated by vertebrates: they’re studied more often, in higher‑impact journals, and get more citations + media attention than invertebrates, with little change in decades😵

Demographic causes and social consequences of adult sex ratio variation @natcomms.nature.com

Some evidence that humans have adaptations (immune & wound-healing responses) to better survive burn injuries than other primates onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.... Something to add to our paragraph on 'Fire-shaped humans' academic.oup.com/bioscience/a... 🧪🌍🔥🏺 #ecoevo #evolution #Anthropology

New paper out in Evolutionary Human Sciences (unformatted early access): Testing Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation via Meta-Analysis of Microfinance Repayment with Dougie Foster, Shakti Lamba & @erikpostma.bsky.social www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This project (with Stacy Rosenbaum and Nick Grebe) began in the dark days of Covid, and is finally ready to share. We've built a living database of primate paternity data (52 species, 3000 paternities) and completed first wave of analyses of paternity distribution. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

People represent men and women as balanced, mirror images of each other... right? e.g., women as communal but men as agentic We argue that people actually often see women as one thing but men as MANY New open-access piece out in TiCS, with @rachelesh.bsky.social www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s Read the full story: go.nature.com/4v4rxmQ

UCL's Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment invites Early Career Researchers for fellowship applications. Deadline: April 30, 2026. Details: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/life-sciences/gee #postdoc

Spring colours in my Scottish garden for this week's #sixonsaturday. #gardening 🌱

📣 Out now in @pnasnexus.org our *NEW PAPER* revamping a long-standing debate: to what extent does causal reasoning aid the cultural evolution of technology? academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...

1/ NEW in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology — our first review of a decade+ of research on understanding & predicting cultural change, with Michael Varnum. This one is personal. A thread on what we found, what surprised us, and how two kids reading Asimov ended up here. 🧵

What can we learn from bonobos and bottlenose dolphins about the evolution of between-group cooperation? 🏺🧪 royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article... Outlines emerging evolutionary and mechanistic frameworks for understanding the origins, maintenance and function of between-group cooperation.

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

Another, new paper on the relevance of human infants' early helplessness for social development, this time by Hammond et al: The evolution of human infants’ helplessness: unique, relational, and long-lasting developmental implications doi.org/10.1093/cdpe...

Cooperative behaviours that can be costly to the individual but beneficial to others were discussed in a key 1981 publication go.nature.com/4c0jVdj

my former postdoc has a new paper out! It was fun to watch this experiment come together and so grateful to all who helped her with it www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Contributions [of reproductive ecology] include a greater understanding of the physiological mechanisms that manage lifetime reproductive effort, resource allocation, life history trade-offs, demographic variation in fertility...& novel insights into reproductive health challenges such as cancer"

This week on Wonkhe: Students aren't confused about AI – they're making rational choices in a system that has removed the incentives to learn. Jim Dickinson and Mack Marshall preview findings from new research on learning in an age of AI

❓ Why do children conform so eagerly to gender norms? A new study in Developmental Psychology @apajournals.bsky.social contributes some interesting new data on this question: doi.org/10.1037/dev0...

Towards a better understanding of adaptation: Problem description, partial solutions, and recommendations. doi.org/10.32942/X2108Z

Cross-cultural analysis in non-industrial societies using eHRAF suggests toolmaking skill acquisition is mostly from kin (vs conformity or prestige) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Final version just published of our review on the ecological and evolutionary consequences of cooperation www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/... @ryosukeiritani.bsky.social @annadewar.bsky.social @asgriffin.bsky.social @lauriebelch.bsky.social @asn-amnat.bsky.social

I hadn't realised that Bob Trivers had died. What a complicated legacy. jjffh.com/tribute/deta...

Shiramizu et al's (2026) meta-analysis on 2D:4D digit ratios: little evidence for group differences based on sexual orientation after adjusting for publication bias, and "even the robust sex difference in 2D:4D does not necessarily imply a prenatal testosterone mechanism". 🧪 @sbn-bsky.bsky.social

How can we study human development over two thousand years? For most periods and regions, we lack reliable data on income, health, or education. Before 1800, and outside Europe, historical records are extremely fragmentary. Thread 👇 🧵

New paper in TREE co-led w @jennakohles.bsky.social: We explore how resource variability shapes the value of social information for maximizing resource gain & minimizing variance. This eco-evolutionary lens helps us explain why collective sensing emerges in dynamic ecosystems! 🧪 tinyurl.com/2rurcry7

HRAF President, Carol Ember, is offering two types of workshops this spring. Free to join! Learn how to sign up: hraf.yale.edu/cross-cultur...

There are currently two Japanese print exhibitions, at York Art Gallery and this just started at Manchester's Whitworth. www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exh...

Interested in the Big Questions of human evolution, culture and society? In the Vienna area? Come join my colloquium at the Konrad Lorenz Institute on March 26 at 15:00. I will be speaking on: The Science of an Evolutionary Transition in Humans kli.ac.at/en/events/ev... Also online.

My colleague, Charles Perreault, has published cool new paper documenting impact of culture on human capacity for adaptation: http//www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2523038123

PhD Opportunity working with @shona-d.bsky.social and me on the development of children’s collaborative problem-solving skills. This is an Academic Associate position (PhD + teaching) for 4 years. Full details here: jobs.yorksj.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx.... Please get in touch with any queries.

"Man the Hunter" is often conflated with Dart's "killer ape theory"; A pity because, though imperfect, the MTH conference was a departure from previous Hobbesian colonial Hunter-Gatherer narratives. In this new Target Article we map out some of that intellectual history.

"we present a historical summary of the ape culture wars since their inception and how this has evolved over time. We then focus on debates surrounding wild versus captive-ape research with an emphasis on culture, detailing major arguments arising from both research domains" doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

'No difference across genders was found for either emotion expression or emotion perception.' #psyscisky

How does development shape the variation evolution can act on? In our new paper in @pnas.org , we bridge developmental dynamics and quantitative genetics, linking dynamical models of phenotype formation with the statistical parameters used to study evolutionary change www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Job opportunity at the Natural History Museum in London! Principal researcher in human evolution. jobs.nhm.ac.uk/Job/JobDetai...

What does it mean for culture to “shape” cognition? In our new TiCS paper, @benjaminpitt.bsky.social & I offer a typology of four possible effects: culture can Privilege one cognitive process over others, Prune out disfavored ones, Produce new ones, or have no effect. www.cell.com/trends/cogni...