Warfare

Looking at the biological and archaeological roots of modern human behavior.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.

Working with scholars in the humanities to better understand what it means to be human.

Recent collaborative project looking at the evolutionary roots of human violence

Rahul Oka, Agustin Fuentes, Susan Sheridan, Mark Golitko, Nam Kim, and I recently published a paper in PNAS looking at how demographics affects both the size of a war group and conflict causalities. Here is the gist: Many scholars have noted that in hunter-gather populations, the number of people involved in fighting can be as much as 40% of the population, but this percentage drops in big state-level societies.