Jessica Thompson

Jessica Thompson is a paleoanthropologist based at Yale University and at the Yale Peabody Museum. She studies how environmental change shaped early human economies, social relationships, and population histories, even as humans gained increasing control over those environments. Her work targets three periods of key behavioral change in the human story: 3.5-2.5 million years ago (at appearance of the first stone tools), 130-60 thousand years ago (a time of accelerated technological and symbolic innovation), and 60 – 2 thousand years ago (the global spread and diversification of Stone Age foragers). Thompson is an expert on the analysis of animal bones from archaeological sites and leads field projects in the Zambezian ecosystem of southern-central Africa (Malawi and Zambia). Her fieldwork in Malawi has resulted in recovery of early evidence of human ecosystem engineering through landscape burning, discovery of the oldest adult cremation pyre, and publication of some of the oldest human DNA in Africa. Her research on older time periods in Ethiopia has led to a new model for understanding one of the most important dietary transitions in human evolution: the regular consumption of large animals. She is passionate about the translation of paleoanthropological research to broader audiences, and her work has been highlighted in outlets such as the New York Times, NPR, CNN, and the Washington Post. For more information about Dr. Thompson and her work, please visit https://campuspress.yale.edu/jcthompson/