HBES

Why are humans so intelligent? A new article explores the evolution of human intelligence and expands upon Richard Alexander’s idea that humans had to “cooperate to compete”. hbes.com/why-are-humans…

The engravings from the Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa are made by early Homo sapiens and dated from ~100 thousand years ago. They are interpreted as intentional markings—but what functions did they actually serve? We examined this question by leveraging the combined analytical traction of transmission chains and cognitive experiments. hbes.com/how-function-s…

Why are humans so intelligent? A new article explores the evolution of human intelligence and expands upon Richard Alexander’s idea that humans had to “cooperate to compete”. hbes.com/why-are-humans…

Gaming is found in every human society, but why do we spend so much time competing under artificial rules? Our new research explores the possibility that games evolved as low-risk ways to assess skill, strategy, and reliability when forming alliances. hbes.com/evolutionary-a…

What can baby monkeys teach us about the origins of sexual behavior? New research in Evolution and Human Behavior followed wild infant capuchin monkeys continuously, from birth to their first year of life, and found that sociosexual behaviors emerge remarkably early—with surprising sex differences that challenge assumptions about "practice" for adult roles. The study reveals that primate sexuality is flexible and multi-functional, with marked sex differences, from the very beginning, with early interactions potentially serving social bonding functions well before reproduction is possible. hbes.com/the-surprising…

Why is romantic kissing so common yet not Universal. Samani & Thomas argue that it is easy for people to learn because of universal intuitions about close bodily contact and social intimacy, and that it arises when people need to distinguish romantic relationships and other intimacy relationships! hbes.com/abstract-core-…

📢 Deadline extended! Abstract submissions for the 2026 FOSSIL conference are now due June 30. Join us Aug 7–8 at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. All career stages & all areas of evolutionary human science welcome—please share widely! 📝 Submit: fossilconference.mystrikingly.com

Congratulations to Yukino Watanabe, winner of the #HBES2026 Poster Award! 📌

Takeaway: culture shapes whether policy works, persists across generations, and responds to interventions. Designing policy that ignores it tends to fail. Designing policy that works WITH local institutions can succeed in ways economists don’t expect. #HBES2026

Working WITH culture: in the DRC, age-set initiation rituals create cohesive cohorts of young men. Committees made up of young men in age-set communities did MORE oversight of chiefs, and chiefs captured fewer distributed health products as a result.

Plenary 3 at #HBES2026 🎤 Sara Lowes on "Culture, Policy, and Economic Development." Three big ideas: culture shapes policy outcomes, culture persists, and culture responds to policy. A thread 🧵

📢 If you know anyone on the job market, Arizona State University's Thunderbird business school is hiring in cross-cultural management! 🚨 App deadline = June 15. Starts this fall. apply.interfolio.com/183830 @ASU @SPSPnews @AOMConnect

Counterintuitive answer: short-lived species mostly die before they ever enter the senescence stage. It’s the long-lived species (albatrosses, humans) that have meaningful time in the shadow. Short lives don’t reveal senescence; they end before it shows. #HBES2026

A second (unpublished) thread: the "selection shadow," the age past which selection can’t see late-acting mutations. Using generation time to standardize ages across species, Kokko asked: who actually spends time in the shadow?

Plenary 2 at #HBES2026 🎤 Hanna Kokko on "A long life: how desirable is it, evolutionarily speaking?" A walk through why species vary so dramatically in lifespan, and a deep dive into one classic hypothesis. A thread 🧵