I study how culture transformed a run-of-the-mill tropical ape into one of the most successful species on Earth. The key to human ecological success is our reliance on socially transmitted information.
I work on understanding how biological evolution gave rise to the secondary inheritance system that we call culture, how both genes and culture interact, and their relative importance in allowing humans to occupy every terrestrial habitat on the planet. I use mathematical modeling, simulations, and comparative cross-cultural and archaeological data analyses.
Another complementary aim of my work is to show how archaeological data, with its macro-scale nature, can uniquely contribute to understanding cultural evolution. We can do so by recalibrating our research program to the quality of the archaeological record (rather than expecting the archaeological record to measure up to our research interests, too often defined by an agenda developed by other disciplines that study human behavior over short time scales). I call this line of work macroarchaeology. I outlined these ideas in a book called The Quality of the Archaeological Record (2019, University of Chicago Press), and you can see examples of this kind of research below, under the umbrellas of The Quality of the Archaeological Record and Macroevolution.
I put together a guide to help students with the fundamental academic skills they need to succeed in college. The guide covers how to take notes, study, and communicate with professors, among other things. You can find it here: Academic Skills v.2