Dr. Natalie Uomini
Main Focus
COLT Lab (COgnition, Language and Technology)
Curriculum Vitae
2017 - 2021: Templeton World Charity Foundation grant, "Teaching in wild New Caledonian crows"
2020 - present: core member, Ethics Working Group, Interspecies I/O
2015 - present: Senior Scientist, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena
2014 - 2015: Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
2013 - 2014: Career break
2011 - 2013: Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, University of Liverpool
2010 - 2011: Career break
2008 - 2010: British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Liverpool
2008: PhD Evolutionary Anthropology & Archaeology, University of Southampton
2001: MSc Biological Anthropology, Durham University
2000: Master Linguistics & Teaching French as Foreign Language, University of Grenoble
1999: BA Cognitive Science & Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
I'm interested in the evolution of cognition. My focus is on tools and language. I integrate different disciplines and different species (including humans) to study:
-
what are evolutionarily shared traits (continuities in the evolution of tool-use, intelligence, or communication across species)
- what makes a species unique (some behaviours or abilities in a species which seem to be unique)
I
combine the approaches of Psychology/Cognitive Science and Evolutionary
Anthropology on
the one hand, which generally focus on human uniqueness, and Biology and
Ecology on the other hand, which generally focus on similarities across
species. I think each species has both shared and unique traits, and
both are important to define a species while understanding its origins.
My current projects are:
- Neuroarchaeology study of language and stone tools in the brain (fMRI with humans)
- Grammar of tool-making in wild New Caledonian crows (behavioral observations and field experiments)
- Laterality in California sea otters (behavioral observations)
- Evolution of speech (chimpanzee phonetics)
- Social transmission of technology, social learning (controlled
experiments with humans, human cross-cultural syntheses, and wild animal
behavior)
- Co-evolution of language and material culture (human comparisons and real-world experiments)
- Teaching in a cross-cultural and cross-species perspective
Archaeological fieldwork I have directed
- Cave exploration and surveying in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (Mt. Hagen area)
- Surveys at Camp Guernsey, Wyoming, USA
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