Biweekly Colloquia: “Cultural and biological co-evolution?”
Lectures by international invited experts from different disciplines presenting their research on specific topics: Mondays, 4:15 PM, on a biweekly basis. Organised by the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS & the CRC 1266.
Topic of the summer term 2023 is “Interdisciplinarity and creativity in researching the past: from case study to models”
With one exception, the Biweekly Colloquia will take place at Leibnizstraße 1, Room 204 on mondays from 4:15-5:45 PM.
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For more information please contact office@roots.uni-kiel.de or office@sfb1266.uni-kiel.de.
Download Poster Biweeky Colloquia summer term 2023
Biweekly Colloquia: From cultural evolution to the evolution of cooperation (Charles Stanish / University of South Florida & Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, USA)
Jun 12, 2023 from 04:15 PM to 05:45 PM
Leibnizstraße 1, room 204
Charles Stanish • Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment, University of South Florida & Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, USA
This talk explores some emergent theoretical frameworks in contemporary cultural evolutionary studies. Stage-based evolutionary models were abandoned in the early 1980s and a number of fruitful approaches have been developing since that time. This talk examines cultural transmission models that combine elements of evolutionary game theory and complexity theory. These elements include self-organized criticality (SOC), pathway dependency, costly signaling, and emergence, among others. This approach is epistemologically-aligned with the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES) and provides an exciting way to model the social evolution of our species. An empirical example from prehistoric Peru is used to illustrate how this new framework can model the emergence of complex society in the archaeological record beginning in the 3rd millennium BCE.
Biweekly Colloquia Abstract: Charles Stanish
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Biweekly Colloquia:The Evolution of Material Wealth-Based Inequality at the Bridge River site, British Columbia (Anna Marie Prentiss / Anthropology at University of Montana, USA)
Jun 26, 2023 from 04:15 PM to 05:45 PM
Leibnizstraße 1, room 204
Anna Marie Prentiss • Anthropology at University of Montana, USA
The evolution of social inequality remains a critical topic for archaeologists and socio-
cultural anthropologists. Multiple explanatory models have been proposed that consider demographic, economic, and social variables. While we have a good understanding of conditions under which inequality persists, we still debate the proximate factors that would permit inequality to evolve from within societies favoring persistent egalitarian relations. Archaeological research at the Bridge River housepit village in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, has permitted fine grained tests of alternative models concerning emergent material wealth-based inequality. Results to date suggest that both cooperative and coercive strategies were important.
Biweekly Colloquia Abstract: Anna Marie Prentiss
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Biweekly Colloquia: The Origins of War: Demonic Males or Avengers of wrongs? (Paul Roscoe / Anthropology at the University of Maine, USA)
Jul 10, 2023 from 04:15 PM to 05:45 PM
Leibnizstraße 1, room 204
Paul Roscoe • Anthropology at the University of Maine, USA
Extrapolating from data on conspecific killing in chimpanzees and several other animal species, an important theory for the origins of war proposes that males have evolved a dominance drive, a disposition to seek out low cost opportunities to kill that pays off in terms of mates and material resources. This presentation places this “Demonic Male” claim within current evolutionary theorizing about the origins of war in order to critique it on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Drawing on the stated causes of 1,068 military actions in contact-era New Guinea, the presentation proposes that war evolved not from a male disposition to kill but from the proclivity in numerous species to punish or avenge infringements on individual and collective wellbeing. This finding casts doubt on widespread claims that chimpanzees practice a primitive form of human lethal raiding.
Biweekly Colloquia Abstract: Paul Roscoe
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