Dr. Luke Premo
Ph.D., University of Arizona
Assistant Professor
Evolutionary Anthropology
Current Research - Courses - Graduate Students - Publications
Research Interests
Agent-based modeling, cultural evolution and diversity, cultural transmission, evolution of altruism, gene-culture coevolution, human evolution, life history, multilevel selection, paleodemography, social networks, spatially explicit models
I encourage prospective graduate students who are interested in these or related topics to contact me via email or by phone.
Current Research
I am an evolutionary anthropologist. I study Pliocene and Pleistocene hominin behavior and paleodemography, mainly through computer simulation and population genetics. My dissertation research focused on how the fragmentation of woodland habitat in East Africa during the Late Pliocene may have affected the evolution of altruistic food sharing among Plio-Pleistocene hominins and the formation of Lower Paleolithic archaeological landscapes. After earning my degree, I worked for four years as a post-doc in the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. There, I began studying many other interesting topics.
Although I am still very much interested in the evolution of altruism in humans, lately I have been addressing other evolutionary anthropological questions. Why is the genetic diversity of modern humans and Neandertals so much lower than that of living hominoids? Why does human life history differ so markedly from other large-bodied primates? How might Pleistocene paleodemography help us better understand why the archaeological record of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic appear temporally staid and spatially homogeneous? I am also interested in cultural transmission and, more specifically, in how various mechanisms of social learning affect levels of diversity and rates of change in attributes of material culture. I have become increasingly interested in studying the effects of different types of social networks on cultural diversity and change.
Courses
Graduate
- ANTH 547 Models and Simulation
- ANTH 565 Human Evolution
Undergraduate
- ANTH 101General Anthropology
- ANTH 260 Introduction to Physical Anthropology
- ANTH 465 Human Evolution
Current Graduate Students
- Jake Adams, Ph.D. (reader)
- Ricky Berl, Biology (co-advisor)
- Phil Fisher, Ph.D. (reader)
- Haley Gross, M.A.(advisor)
- Brad Newbold (reader)
- Adam Rorabaugh (reader)
- Kristin Safi (reader)
Past Graduate Students
- A. Friederike Kachel, Ph.D. (Biology, Univeristy of Leipzig)
Selected Recent Publications
(Please see CV for a complete list)
Premo, L. S. (2012) The shift to a predominantly logistical mobility strategy can inhibit rather than enhance forager interaction. Human Ecology 40:647-649.
Kachel, A. F. and L. S. Premo (2012) Disentangling the evolution of early and late life history traits in humans. Evolutionary Biology: 39:638-649.
Premo, L. S. (2012) Hitchhiker’s guide to genetic diversity in socially structured populations. Current Zoology 58:287-297.
Premo, L. S. (2012) Local extinctions, connectedness, and cultural evolution in structured populations. Advances in Complex Systems 15:1150002:1-18.
Kachel, A. F., L. S. Premo, and J-J. Hublin (2011) Grandmothering and natural selection revisited. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 278:1939-1941.
Kachel, A. F., L. S. Premo, and J-J. Hublin (2011) The effects of weaning age on length of female reproductive period: Implications for the evolution of human life history. American Journal of Human Biology 23:479-487.
Kachel, A. F., L. S. Premo, and J-J. Hublin (2011) Grandmothering and natural selection. Proceedings of the Royal Society, B 278:384-391.
Premo, L. S. and J. B. Scholnick (2011) The spatial scale of social learning affects cultural diversity. American Antiquity 76:163-176.
Premo, L. S. and S. L. Kuhn (2010) Modeling effects of local extinctions on culture change and diversity in the Paleolithic. PLoS ONE 5(12): e15582.
Premo, L. S. and J-J. Hublin (2009) Culture, population structure, and low genetic diversity in Pleistocene hominins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 106(1):33-37.
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