Research Interests

Susana Carvalho’s current funded projects include tackling the environmental andbehavioural contexts of the earliest tool users in the Koobi Fora formation, Kenya (funded by N.S.F., with D.R. Braun); investigating human origins and adaptations in complex environments with the Paleo-Primate Project Gorongosa, Mozambique (funded by the John Fell Fund, National Geographic Society, and Gorongosa Restoration Project); and testing hypotheses for how technological-related behaviours emerged in hominin evolution via using wild chimpanzees as models, e.g. the project ‘Stones on the move: the real life of a chimpanzee tool’, funded by the National Geographic Society. Researchers in Susana’s new lab ‘Primate Models for Behavioural Evolution’ conduct a broad variety of exciting studies on the evolution of human behaviourusing extant primates as models (e.g. cumulative culture in non-human primates; primate behavioural responses to shifts in predation pressures; automated approaches to find fossil sites, etc.).