Aaron Jonas Stutz

I am obsessively interested in illuminating how our evolution has been intricately, jointly shaped by the social environment and the bodily one. As a paleoanthropologist, I focus part of my inquiry on how consciousness, meaning, bodily experience, and the social and material environment constitute one another in a dynamic way. This entails considering humans and other animals in comparative behavioral and ecological perspective. It also entails studying fossil, archaeological, ethnographic, and biological evidence concerning how human cognition, behavior, and cultural environments have changed since our own evolutionary lineage--the hominins--split from the lineage of our close relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. The other main part of my research focuses on figuring out why human population--and its ecological impact on the wider biosphere--has tended toward change and disruption, rather than demographic and food-web equilibrium.

March 2017