My postdoc work at Notre Dame was part of a project titled “The Evolution of Human Wisdom”. Sponsered by the Templeton Foundation, it brought together scholars from diverse fields to discuss what makes us human. My job was to both enagage in this debate and figure out how biological anthropological data can inform on this topic. I compiled a database of the archeological evidence of potential representational items (often termed “symbolic”) from the Middle to late Pleistocene, with a cutoff of 45 ka because the post-45ka data are more well-known and widely available).
view the open access database here
A write up of the project was recently published in Evolutionary Anthropology