This course combines insights from biology, psychology, economics and history to make sense of human behaviour and culture. Rather than opposing ‘biological’ and ‘cultural’ explanations, this course will layout a framework that illuminates learning and culture within a broad evolutionary framework that will permit us to explore kinship, food preferences, incest, altruism, sex differences, social status, and religion. Using a comparative approach, we will contextualize human behaviour by examining both studies of non-human primates as well as the full breadth of human diversity, including both ethnographic and experimental data from hunter-gatherers, herders, agriculturalists as well as people from industrialized societies.

CILO-1: Acquire knowledge of the basic timelines of human evolution and human’s evolutionary relationships with other primates; CILO-2: Understand the logic of natural selection and be able to apply such logic to behaviours; CILO-3: Acquire key concepts in evolutionary theories for explaining human behaviour and culture.