How Humans Came to Construct Their Worlds

Michael Arbib is an Adjunct Professor in Psychology at UCSD and Emeritus as University Professor, Fletcher Jones Professor of computer science, and professor of biological sciences, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and psychology at the University of Southern California. Born in England in 1940, Arbib grew up in Australia and received a B.Sc. (Hons) in pure mathematics from Sydney University. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from MIT in 1963. After five years at Stanford, he became founding chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1970, and remained in that department until his move to USC in 1986. Michael Arbib's main contribution to CARTA addresses the question "how did the brain get language?" He has used computational modeling to assess two complementary themes. (i) Comparative neuroprimatology: Comparing the brains, behaviors and social interaction of extant monkeys, apes and humans to ground hypotheses on our last common ancestors with monkeys and apes and the changes that must have occurred to equip Homo sapiens  with a language-ready brain. (ii) To work back from computational models for neurolinguistics  to contribute to an EvoDevoSocio approach to the cultural evolution whereby humans went from pantomime via  protolanguages to diverse languages, equally privileging signed and spoken languages. A current concern is with implications of such a framework for the architecture of the built environment. His current research focuses on the ABLE Project (Action, Brain, Language, Evolution) linking data on brain mechanisms in macaque, chimpanzee and human within an evolutionary framework. He also explores the possible roles of neuroscience in the architecture of the built environment. Arbib is the author or editor of over 40 books, including How the Brain Got Language: The Mirror System Hypothesis (Oxford University Press, 2012), the edited volumes Language, Music and the Brain: A Mysterious Relationship (The MIT Press, 2013) and From Neuron to Cognition via Computational Neuroscience (with James Bonaiuto, The MIT Press, 2016), and his single-authored book When Brains Meet Buildings: A Conversation Between Neuroscience and Architecture (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://global.oup.com/academic/product/when-brains-meet-buildings-9780190060954.

Ricarda Braun is an Advisor for International Exchange at the German Archaeological Institute, Germany. She has also held academic roles at Free University of Berlin, Germany, Christian-Albrechts University of Kiel, Germany, and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) teaching environmental modeling and GIS. Braun's dissertation is based on the assumption that today's perception of the landscape of the Neolithic site, Göbekli Tepe (southeast Turkey), arose through a semantic transfer of the singularity attributed to the place to the landscape, but is not based on research into the landscape. Various aspects that shape the current narrative about Göbekli Tepe, and especially its landscape, are seen as a reflection of recent ways of thinking and perception. In her work, she therefore carried out verifiable landscape analyzes and examined patterns of perception of landscape, space and archeology against the background of cultural-historical reflection. With the help of this approach, which combines archaeological and geographical working methods in an interdisciplinary manner, Göbekli Tepe was reinterpreted. The site is not seen, as has previously been assumed, as driving Neolithization forward, but rather as a backward-looking place where the Paleolithic way of life was retained. It is shown that the choice of location was not based on the most commonly cited reasons of desired control, efficiency or prominence. Instead, the architecture and location of Göbekli Tepe can be interpreted as an expression of the uncertainty that the transformation process from an appropriative to a productive way of life triggered in the early Neolithic.

Larry Barham, PhD University of Pennsylvania, has been researching human evolution in sub-Saharan Africa since 1982. His doctoral research was in Swaziland (Eswatini); since 1993 he has focused on Zambia. His approach is cross-disciplinary, whilst retaining a primary interest in the cultural and evolutionary impact of early technological transitions. Recent excavations led to the discovery of the oldest wooden structure, dated to ~500,000 years ago at Kalambo Falls, Zambia.

Barnabas Calder is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is also head of the History of Architecture Research Cluster – the largest architectural history research group in the UK. He is working on a history of the relationship between energy and human culture, and a complete works of Denys Lasdun, funded by the Graham Foundation and in collaboration with the RIBA British Architectural Library Special Collections. Barnabas also works on British architecture since 1945.

Michael Fox is a Full Professor of Architecture at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and has taught on the subject matter of interactive, behavioral and kinetic architecture at MIT, The Hong Polytechnic University, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_ARC) in Los Angeles, as well as numerous international workshops. He is a founding partner of the award winning architectural practice of FoxLin Architects. He is a registered architect, professor, author, and contractor. He is the author of two books by Princeton Architectural Press, including Interactive Architecture and IA: Adaptive World (2016). He is the recently twice elected President of ACADIA (Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture). His practice, teaching and research are centered on interactive architecture with a secondary focus on architecture for outer space and has carried out several projects for NASA. Fox is the past founder and director of the Kinetic Design Group at MIT as a sponsored research group to investigate intelligent kinetic architecture. Michael has lectured internationally on the subject matter of interactive, behavioral and kinetic architecture. He has won numerous awards in architectural ideas competitions and his masters’ thesis at MIT received the outstanding thesis award for his work on computation and design processes. Fox’s work has been featured in numerous international periodicals and books, and has been exhibited worldwide including the SFMOMA, the Venice Biennale, The Smithsonian Air and Space Museum among others. His work has been funded by NASA, the Annenberg Foundation, the National Space Grant Foundation, the Graham Foundation and others. 

Pascal Gagneux is CARTA's Executive Co-Director, a Professor of Pathology and Anthropology, and the Department Chair of Anthropology at UC San Diego. He is interested in the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for generating and maintaining primate molecular diversity. The Gagneux laboratory studies cell-surface molecules in closely related primates species. His focus is on glycans, the oligosaccharides attached to glycolipids and glycoproteins of the surfaces of every cell and also secreted into the extra-cellular matrix. Gagneux's laboratory is exploring the roles of molecular diversity in protecting populations from pathogens as well as potential consequences for reproductive compatibility. Dr. Gagneux’s interest is in how glycan evolution is shaped by constraints from endogenous biochemistry and exogenous, pathogen-mediated natural selection, but could also have consequences for sexual selection. Dr. Gagneux has studied the behavioral ecology of wild chimpanzees in the Taï Forest, Ivory Coast, population genetics of West African chimpanzees, and differences in sialic acid biology between humans and great apes with special consideration of their differing pathogen regimes. In 2011, while Associate Director of CARTA, Dr. Gagneux helped to establish a graduate specialization in Anthropogeny at UC San Diego. This wholly unique graduate specialization is offered through eight participating graduate programs in the social and natural sciences at UC San Diego.

I have several avenues of research currently underway all stemming from an interest in relationships between behaviour and the correlated neural processing, specifically the processing of spatial information; adaptive specialisation of memory; effects of behavioural experience on the development of the avian hippocampus, particularly in migrant songbirds; field tests of spatial memory and context-dependent choice in hummingbirds.

Professor Paul Memmott is an anthropologist and architect, and for some decades was the Director of the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre at the University of Queensland, School of Architecture and Institute for Social Science Research. This has now become the Aboriginal Environments Research Collaborative (AERC) within the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Queensland. The AERC has provided and continues to provide an applied research focus on a range of topics in relation to Indigenous populations, including institutional architecture, vernacular architecture, housing, crowding, governance, well-being, homelessness, family violence and social planning for communities. 

Michael E. Smith is a Professor of Archaeology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University. Smith’s research foci include excavation of houses at Aztec sites, urban analysis of ancient Teotihuacan, and the transdisciplinary and comparative study of premodern cities in relation to contemporary urbanization. His book, At Home with the Aztecs (2016, Routledge) won the Best Popular Book award, Society for American Archaeology. His latest book is Urban Life in the Distant Past: The Prehistory of Energized Crowding (2023, Cambridge University Press).

Kristine Stiphany Ph.D., AIA, is an Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Stiphany is a multidisciplinary urban scientist, designer, and scholar of Latin American urbanism interested in the politics and design agency of urban transformation, with a particular focus on the role of informal housing in community and urban infrastructural systems. She is the founder and principal of Chapa Studio, a digital humanities initiative of citizen scientists for social justice in urban transformation. Supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation (two), the Andrea von Braun Foundation, and the J. William Fulbright Fellowship, Kristine's practice, scholarship, and teaching frames-built environments not only as technological artifacts, but a spatial politics for transforming where and how urbanization-vulnerable communities live in cities.

Trevor Watkins is an Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Prehistory at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he taught the prehistory of southwest Asia and the ancient history and archaeology of early civilizations of the region for many years. Watkins directed excavations and surveys in Cyprus, central Turkey, northeast Syria, and north Iraq. has investigated the transition that introduced radically new features of the Early Bronze Age to Cyprus. Since retiring from teaching and fieldwork, he has focused his research on developing an account of the Epipalaeolthic-Neolithic transformation in the context of cultural niche construction and cultural evolutionary theory.

Relevant publications:

• Watkins, T. (2024). Becoming Neolithic: the pivot of human history. Routledge.
• Watkins, T. (2023). Settling down in Southwest Asia: the Epipalaeolithic-Neolithic transformation. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 5, Article 1250167. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2023.1250167
• Watkins, T. (2017). Architecture and imagery in the early Neolithic of southwest Asia: framing rituals, stabilizing meanings. In C. Renfrew, I. Morley, & M. Boyd (Eds.), Ritual, Play and Belief in Early Human Societies (pp. 129-142). Cambridge University Press.