Many of my papers can be found on my Academia.edu page or just email me if you want a copy.
My research is aimed at elucidating the key variables that transformed our early ancestors into modern humans, while emphasizing humans as both biological and cultural beings. In order to do this, we need to apply anthropological insight to the questions of human origins. I’ve applied this framework to questions of human genetic variation, Neandertal climatic adaptations, and in understanding the processes by which hominins became human though symbolic thought and niche construction. I’m also interested in semiotics, the study of signs, and have been working on how to bring semiotics into paleoanthropology to better understand the processes of human evolution
My postdoc work at the Univeristy of Notre Dame involved creating a database of the evidence of human symbol-making. When creating it, we realized that it would be helpful to make it open-source. Below is a map of the sites in the database. If you are interested, please check out this link.
While working on the creation of a dataset of the fossil record of Homo sapiens I became interested the origins of interpersonal violence and warfare. Nam Kim and I have written a book that discusses the evolutionary arc of human warfare. This book details the anthropological data on violence and the emergence of warfare, providing a holistic anthropological view of the question of when war began. We argue that “emergent warfare” must be considered in association with “emergent peace,” as the same capacities that make us human allow us to interact and socialize in very complex ways also give us creative ways to organize our behaviors, whether violent or nonviolent. This manuscript will be published in 2017 by Routledge.
This research has led to a new project that examines the question of whether violence has declined or increased over our evolutionary history. It brings together ethnographic, archaeological, and biological data. Some of this research has recently been published in PNAS (Oka et al. 2017), looking at factors that effect the size of war groups. See the blog section of this site for more details
This work is in parallel to my research completed at UW-Madison, which examined genetic models of hominin evolution. Alongwith colleagues, we are working on a project to test how different evolutionary forces affected the Neandertal populations of Europe
My postdoc at Notre Dame was co-sponsored by the Center for Theology, Science and Human Flourishing. I worked alongside theologians, philosophers, psychologists, and other scholars tracking the evolution of human wisdom. As a trained anthropologist, I will admit that when starting this project my knowledge of what theologians did was pretty rudimentary. However, after numerous conversations I’ve come around to the notion that such discussion are not only fruitful, but necessary. Discussions about human origins are by their very nature political ones and we need to be cognizant of how the facts of human evolution can often be misused, intentionally or not, by people wishing to cause divisions and create hostile situations between groups. Some of this work has been published in a new book The Evolution of Human Wisdom which I can highly recommend to anyone interested in these kinds of conversations.
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