Claudio Tennie

Since the end of 2012 I am based at the University of Birmingham (UK) - as a "Birmingham Fellow" (i.e., a research-focused lecturer).

My main research explores what makes human cognition unique - as well as why (and also, when this happened during our evolution and also during our development). In particular I study the factors and the prehistorical beginnings that enabled human forms of culture: i.e. cumulative culture – culture that evolves over time by way of treating earlier cultural items as stepping stones for later ones.

I do this by studying non-human animals (mainly great apes), human adults and human children (also cross-culturally - in collaboration with Mark Nielsen) with a diverse set of methodological approaches, combining insights from developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary archaeology, behavioural ecology and biological anthropology.

Through broadening the scope of species examined, extending my findings into our evolutionary past and by developing research paradigms that can be applied non-linguistically, I aim to probe the origins of cumulative culture in human ontogeny and phylogeny, as well as the distribution of cumulative culture across the animal kingdom.

October 2016