HBES 2026 was a success! HBES 2026 was held May 13-16 at University Mohammad VI Polytechnic (UM6P) in Rabat, Morocco. The conference was four fantastic days of presentations, posters, and discussions, including great a shared day with the Cultural Evolution Society meeting. The conference featured plenary lectures from Youssef Bokbot, Hannah Kokko, Sara Lowes, Hugo Mercier, Brooke Scelza, and […]
– by Murillo Pagnotta Symbolic artefacts as tools of the mind In the study of human evolution, evidence of symbolic behaviour is often taken to indicate when the mind of our deep past relatives became equivalent to ours. While language is the ultimate yardstick of symbolic behaviour, in a broad sense this also includes other […]
– by Turan Gunduz, Hasan Gunduz, Erkan Eyrikaya and Hakan Cetinkaya Death has long fascinated philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and many other scholars. Alongside questions about why organisms age and die lies another puzzle: human awareness of mortality. Humans can imagine the future and know that their lives will one day come to an end. How […]
– by Soyeon Choi Much of the research on friendship focuses on its benefits. Friends are a major source of support, and people with closer, more supportive friendships tend to report better health and well-being. But friendship also has costs, including one that is easy to overlook: time spent with other people is also time spent […]
– by Jeremy Garrison We are a social species. Whether in the context of mammoth hunts, food sharing, child-rearing, war, or climate change, cooperation has always been instrumental to our individual and collective survival and propagation. Both the cooperation problems we face and our capacity to solve them are affected by our environments. Our capacity […]
– by Haneul Jang For decades, the phrase Man the Hunter has occupied a central place in discussions of human evolution. Today, however, the phrase sounds outdated, evoking a familiar image of men hunting large game while women gathered plants and cared for children. The phrase is often seen as representing overly simplistic and male-centered […]
– by Yohsuke Ohtsubo When you inadvertently step on someone’s foot, what would you say or do? Perhaps, you would say something like “Oops, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do that.” Most likely, both you and the other person would find it sufficient. People around you also expect that the other person would respond […]
– by Ana María Fernandez, María Barbato, Michele Dufey Jealousy is often portrayed as irrational, possessive, or simply unpleasant. Yet from an evolutionary and developmental perspective, jealousy may be better understood as a socially intelligent alarm system: an emotion that becomes activated when a valued relationship appears to be threatened by a third party. In […]
– by Jonathan Egeland, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, and Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø A central puzzle in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, studied since Darwin, is how to explain our uniquely human intelligence. Why did it evolve? What made it useful enough to be favored by selection? And what is the proximate explanation for how it works? […]
– by Yago Moraes Imagine two strangers meeting for the first time. Instead of making small talk, they either play an ancient strategy game or role-play a mild disagreement between friends. Weeks later, their impressions of one another have changed, but not in the way many theories about games would predict. This puzzle lies at […]