Biennial Master Class I: “An Anthology of Anthropogeny”

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Abstracts

The human species presents a striking paradox as we combine an obvious mammalian and primate nature with distinct combinations of biological and behavioral traits, making us humans spectacular outliers among the living world. New fossils, archeological finds, ancient DNA and other ancient molecular data, combined with comparative behavioral studies and neuroscience are providing crucial new information.

Our understanding of human origins faces many humbling unknowns about the age of key human innovations. These include symbolic capacity, personal names or kinship terms, language, home base use, fire use, pair-bonding, projectile weapon use, composite tool use, fiber use, bodily modifications, and death rituals. The human phenomenon results from idiosyncratic concatenations of unlikely events. Key factors likely include both opportunities and constraints stemming from massive physical and cultural niche construction by our species that has increasingly taken its evolutionary fate into its own hands.

Animal Cognition and the Origins of Human Thinking

Stephan Kaufhold

Cognitive science and psychology are mostly concerned with human thinking. But humans are primates, and human cognition is a particular form of primate cognition. By comparing ourselves to other animals, we can reconstruct the evolutionary origins of our own minds. To this end, studying our closest living animal relatives, the nonhuman primates (e.g., macaques, orangutans, bonobos, chimpanzees), is particularly informative. In this talk, I introduce the field of comparative cognition and walk through several studies from the field, including my own work on how primates handle conflict over resources. I will discuss how psychological agency and cognitive flexibility evolved to deal with uncertainty in both social and physical environments.

Why Fairness Matters: From Monkeys to Modern Society

Raihan Alam

This lecture will explore one of the most powerful forces shaping human society: fairness. Why do humans care so deeply about being treated—and treating others—fairly? Why are we sometimes willing to sacrifice our own self-interest in the name of fairness? Drawing from behavioral economics, comparative research, developmental psychology, and cultural evolutionary theory, we will examine how our concern for fairness may have evolved to help sustain cooperation. The lecture will trace the roots of fairness from reactions to unequal outcomes in non-human animals, through the development of fairness norms and punishment in children, to the role of culture and institutions in enabling large-scale human cooperation. Participants will also learn about how fairness shapes trust and compliance with the law in modern society, and will explore social psychological theories that explain why—despite our taste for fairness—we see, and often accept, so much inequality in the world.

Stem Cells and Human Evolution

Carol Marchetto

Comparative analyses of brain cells in closely related species can shed light on changes occurring during evolution. The study of post-mortem brains of nonhuman primates (NHPs) has been limited and often does not recapitulate important species-specific developmental hallmarks. This talk will discuss new technology to investigate the development of live neurons from human and nonhuman primates and compare specific cell behaviors such as migration and maturation. We show differential migration patterns in human neural progenitor cells compared to those of chimpanzees and bonobos, suggesting changes related to maturation timing in human neurons. The strategy proposed here lays the groundwork for further comparative analyses between humans and NHPs and opens new avenues for understanding the differences in the neural underpinnings of cognition and neurological disease susceptibility between species.