Charles Perreault

Research

I study how culture transformed a run-of-the-mill tropical ape into one of the most successful species on Earth.

My research lies at the intersection of archaeology and evolutionary anthropology. I use archaeological and comparative cross-cultural data, mathematical models, and simulations to study how culture evolved, how genes and culture interact, and how socially transmitted information allowed humans to occupy nearly every terrestrial habitat.

A central aim of my work is to develop macroarchaeology: a research program that takes advantage of the archaeological record's distinctive scale. Instead of asking a coarse-grained record to resolve the behavior of individuals, macroarchaeology asks questions about cultural change that can only be answered across thousands of years and large regions of space. This approach treats the scale of the archaeological record as a source of evidence, not simply a limitation.

Selected recent work

• Human range expansionEmpirical comparisons with other mammals show that cultural evolution accelerated human geographic expansion by more than two orders of magnitude. PNAS, 2026.
• The emergence of cumulative cultureA record of 3.3 million years of stone-tool manufacturing suggests a major shift toward cumulative technological culture by roughly 600,000 years ago. PNAS, 2024.
• Cultural inheritance and human adaptationComparative analyses of 172 small-scale societies show that social learning is the main mode of human adaptation and that cultural history explains behavior better than local ecology. Proceedings B, 2015; Proceedings B, 2016.

Publications

Cultural macroevolution

• Perreault, C. 2026. Cultural evolution accelerated human range expansion by more than two orders of magnitude. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(11): e2523038123.
• Perreault, C. 2025. A georeferenced ethnolinguistic map of Driver et al. Indian Tribes of North America (1953). Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 13: 18.
• Paige, J. and Perreault, C. 2024. 3.3 million years of stone tool complexity suggests that cumulative culture began during the Middle Pleistocene. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(26): e2319175121.
• Paige, J. and Perreault, C. 2023. A dataset describing the manufacturing of stone tools over 3 million years. Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 11(12).
• Derex, M., Perreault, C., and Boyd, R. 2018. Divide and conquer: intermediate levels of population fragmentation maximize cultural accumulation. Philosophical Transactions B, 373: 20170062.
• Mathew, S. and Perreault, C. 2016. Cultural history, not ecological environment, is the main determinant of human behavior. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 283: 20160177.
• Mathew, S. and Perreault, C. 2015. Behavioural variation in 172 small-scale societies indicates that social learning is the main mode of human adaptation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 282: 20150061.
• Perreault, C., Brantingham, P. J., Kuhn, S. L., Wurz, S., and Xing, G. 2013. Measuring the complexity of lithic technology. Current Anthropology, 54(S8): S397-S406.
• Perreault, C. 2012. The pace of cultural evolution. PLoS ONE, 7(9): e45150.
• Perreault, C. and Mathew, S. 2012. Dating the origin of language using phonemic diversity. PLoS ONE, 7(4): e35289.
• Kandler, A., Perreault, C., and Steele, J. 2012. Cultural evolution in spatially structured populations: A review of alternative modeling frameworks. Advances in Complex Systems, 15(1-2).
• Panchanathan, K., Mathew, S., and Perreault, C. 2014. Explaining group-level traits requires distinguishing process from product. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3): 269-270.

Cultural microevolution

• Perreault, C. and Boyd, R. 2022. Evolution of social learning with payoff and content bias. Games, 13(7).
• Perreault, C., Moya, C., and Boyd, R. 2012. A Bayesian approach to the evolution of social learning. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(5): 449-459.
• Perreault, C. and Brantingham, P. J. 2010. Mobility-driven cultural transmission along the forager-collector continuum. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 30(1): 62-68.

The quality of the archaeological record

• Perreault, C. 2023. Archaeology after the loss of innocence. Antiquity, 97(396): 1369-1380.
• Paige, J. and Perreault, C. 2023. How surprising are lithic reduction strategies? The information entropy of the Modes A-I framework. Lithic Technology, 48(3): 237-252.
• Perreault, C. 2019. The Quality of the Archaeological Record. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Perreault, C. 2018. Time-averaging slows down rates of change in the archaeological record. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 25(3): 953-964.
• Rhode, D., Brantingham, P. J., Perreault, C., and Madsen, D. 2014. Mind the gaps: testing for hiatuses in regional radiocarbon date sequences. Journal of Archaeological Science, 52: 567-577.
• Perreault, C. 2011. The impact of site sample size on the reconstruction of culture-histories. American Antiquity, 76(3): 547-572.
• Perreault, C. 2010. A note on the reconstruction of animal social network from independent small group observations. Animal Behaviour, 80(3): 551-562.
• Brantingham, P. J. and Perreault, C. 2010. Detecting the effects of selection and stochastic forces in archaeological assemblages. Journal of Archaeological Science, 37(12): 3122-3225.

The prehistory of Tibet

• Shen, X., Dongju, Z., Perreault, C., Xia, H., Liu, Y., and Fahu, C. 2022. Exploitation of lyddite and jasper by Epipaleolithic foragers in the Northeastern Tibetan Plateau and surrounding regions. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 14(7): 1-16.
• Zhang, D., et al. 2020. Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau. Science, 370(6516): 584-587.
• Madsen, D. B., Perreault, C., et al. 2017. Early foraging settlement of the Tibetan Plateau highlands. Archaeological Research in Asia, 11: 15-26.
• Perreault, C., et al. 2016. Characterization of obsidian from the Tibetan Plateau by XRF and NAA. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 5: 392-399.
• Brantingham, P. J., Gao, X., Madsen, D. B., Rhode, D., Perreault, C., Woerd, J., and Olsen, J. 2013. Late occupation of the high-elevation northern Tibetan Plateau based on cosmogenic, luminescence, and radiocarbon ages. Geoarchaeology, 28(5): 413-431.

Selected public coverage

My research has been covered by science and general-interest media for broad public audiences. Selected examples:

• "Humans Conquered the Planet 300 Times Faster Than Genetic Evolution Can Explain", Scientific American, 2026. Published in the July/August issue as "Culture Power."
• "Humans Started Passing Down Knowledge to Future Generations 600,000 Years Ago", Scientific American, 2024.
• "How Humans Took Over the Planet", ASU News, 2026.
• "Archaeologist Wants to Hear the Whole Song of Humans' Past, Not Just Individual Notes", ASU News, 2019.

Students and teaching

Graduate students

• Jonathan Paige, PhD 2022
• Cindy Hsin-yee Huang, PhD candidate
• Pietro Beltrame, PhD candidate

Academic skills guide

I wrote a guide for undergraduate students on note-taking, studying, communicating with professors, and other foundational academic skills. Download Academic Skills, version 2.