ANTH 6855 - Exploring Human Behavior, Culture, and Cognition: Evolutionary Perspectives

This graduate seminar introduces students to the various evolutionary approaches to human behavior, culture and cognition. The course is deigned to introduce the major work of various members of Anthropology faculty, and accordingly relevant faculty will each provide approximately two week of instruction. Topics that will be covered may vary but will include human life history and cooperative breeding, human adaptability and ethnogenesis among migrating populations, the behavioral ecology of cooperation, the relationship between natural selection, emotions and cognition, "common knowledge" and its relevance to language ritual and other social behavior, kinship, variation and change in language, the evolution of human life history, reciprocity, and the evolution of complex societies.