Headed by Professor Richard McElreath the Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture is going to start its work at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA).

The new department will investigate the role of culture in human evolution and adaptation. The evolution of fancy social learning in humans accounts for both the nature of human adaptation and the extraordinary scale and variety of human societies. The integration of ethnographic fieldwork with mathematical models and advanced quantitative methods will be the department's methodological focus.