Jonathan Paige

Co- Director and Research Scientist
Cultural Resource Sciences program, Center for Applied Fire and Ecosystem Science, New Mexico Consortium

Former: Post-doctoral fellow , Department of Anthropology
University of Missouri

PhD, Institute of Human Origins, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University
Dissertation: "The Evolution of Stone Tool Traditions" funded by the Leakey Foundation
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Affiliations

​The Institute of Human Origins

​I study the evolution of technologies, the role they play in human evolution, and how groups adapt to new and challenging environments. I am especially interested in when hominins developed a capacity for cumulative culture, the ability to transmit and maintain increasingly difficult-to-learn cultural practices across generations, which may have driven many other changes in human biology, sociality, and adaptiveness. To address these issues, I take a theoretically-informed and computational approach involving comparisons of thousands of archaeological assemblages spanning the past 3 million years of human evolution. More generally, I work with federal agencies on advancing our capacity to perform comparative research in archaeology through machine learning and extracting data from text.

Analyzing material from Pitcairn Island at the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand

Global sample of technological variability incorporating hundreds of assemblages.