Do germ concerns shape our social lives? In a new study, people more wary of germs reported having, wanting, and thinking they ought to have fewer friends, especially casual friends and acquaintances at the outer edges of their networks.

More Friends, More Germs: How Disease Concerns Shape Our Social Circles - HBES

– by Soyeon Choi Much of the research on friendship focuses on its benefits. Friends are a major source of support, and people with closer, more supportive friendships tend to report better health…

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Since behaviors spread among familiars (via social learning or genetic transmission), familiars behave similarly. Conditioning cooperation on familiarity—i.e. empathy—concentrates the benefits of cooperation among cooperators, allowing this behavior to evolve.

Social context and the evolution of empathy - HBES

– by Jeremy Garrison We are a social species. Whether in the context of mammoth hunts, food sharing, child-rearing, war, or climate change, cooperation has always been instrumental to our individual…

hbes.com

Our paper revisits the long-debated idea of Man the Hunter and asks what the term has actually meant over time. We argue that the debates surrounding it inspired important research on cooperation, food sharing, women’s subsistence labor, and human behavioral flexibility.

Our new study provides empirical evidence for the proverb “actions speak louder than words,” especially in the context of reputation maintenance or self-presentation. When you see someone’s wrongdoing and hear them say, “I didn’t intend to do it,” you may doubt it. Your doubt has empirical support!

Can we trust the cheap excuse: “I didn’t intend to do it”? - HBES

– by Yohsuke Ohtsubo When you inadvertently step on someone’s foot, what would you say or do? Perhaps, you would say something like “Oops, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do that.” Most likely, both…

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What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

When someone we love gives time, care, or valuable resources to someone else, jealousy may signal more than insecurity. In this post, we explore jealousy as an evolved response to shifts in resource allocation—revealing how deeply humans need to feel chosen, prioritized, and uniquely invested in.

When Love Feels at Risk: The Hidden Logic of Jealousy - HBES

– by Ana María Fernandez, María Barbato, Michele Dufey Jealousy is often portrayed as irrational, possessive, or simply unpleasant. Yet from an evolutionary and developmental perspective, jealousy may...

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Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

Why are humans so intelligent? A new article explores the evolution of human intelligence and expands upon Richard Alexander’s idea that humans had to “cooperate to compete”. www.hbes.com/why-are-huma...

Why are humans so intelligent? - HBES

– by Jonathan Egeland, Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair, and Thomas Haarklau Kleppestø A central puzzle in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, studied since Darwin, is how to explain our uniquely human i...

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The engravings from the Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa are made by early Homo sapiens and dated from ~100 thousand years ago. They are interpreted as intentional markings—but what functions did they actually serve?

How Function Shapes Form - HBES

– by Murillo Pagnotta Symbolic artefacts as tools of the mind In the study of human evolution, evidence of symbolic behaviour is often taken to indicate when the mind of our deep past relatives became...

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Gaming is found in every human society, but why do we spend so much time competing under artificial rules? Our new research explores the possibility that games evolved as low-risk ways to assess skill, strategy, and reliability when forming alliances. www.hbes.com/evolutionary...

Evolutionary and social functions of gaming - HBES

– by Yago Moraes Imagine two strangers meeting for the first time. Instead of making small talk, they either play an ancient strategy game or role-play a mild disagreement between friends. Weeks later...

hbes.com

What can baby monkeys teach us about the origins of sexual behavior? New research in Evolution and Human Behavior followed wild infant capuchin monkeys continuously, from birth to their first year of life, and found that sociosexual behaviors emerge remarkably early

The Surprising Roots of Primate Sexuality: What Baby Monkeys’ Behavior Reveals About the Origins of Sexual Behavior - HBES

– by Irene Delval and Solimary García Hernández Traditionally, scientific and popular assumptions about sexual behavior have struggled to decouple it from its reproductive purpose. From primates to ne...

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Why is romantic kissing so common yet not Universal. Samani & Thomas argue that it is easy for people to learn because of universal intuitions about close bodily contact and social intimacy, and that it arises when people need to distinguish romantic relationships and other intimacy relationships!

Abstract core knowledge may shape the basins of cultural attraction: romantic kissing as a case study - HBES

– by Hossein Samani & Ashley J. Thomas It may be easy for many readers to assume that romantic kissing (lip-to-lip contact between romantic partners) is universal. While romantic kissing is common aro...

hbes.com

📢 Deadline extended! Abstract submissions for the 2026 FOSSIL conference are now due June 30. Join us Aug 7–8 at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. All career stages & all areas of evolutionary human science welcome—please share widely! 📝 Submit: fossilconference.mystrikingly.com

FOSSIL Conference

Flyover State Scientists Integrating Evolution (FOSSIL) Conference---a new regional conference for evolutionary social scientists

fossilconference.mystrikingly.com

Congratulations to Yukino Watanabe, winner of the #HBES2026 Poster Award! 📌

Plenary 3 at #HBES2026 🎤 Sara Lowes on "Culture, Policy, and Economic Development." Three big ideas: culture shapes policy outcomes, culture persists, and culture responds to policy. A thread 🧵

Isotopes and food residue show that as people in Kenya’s Turkana Basin transitioned from fishing and foraging to herding cattle, around 5,000 years ago, they took a full millennium to fully shift to a specialized diet centered around livestock. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/NTIa50Z3eRr

And Julien Lie-Panis presented his work on trade and how Intermediaries concentrate exchanges, creating incentives for reliability! (4/4) #HBES2026

@olkcampbell.bsky.social gave an interesting talk on the relationship between cousin marriages and exposure to intimate partner violence and coercive control. She finds that women in cousin marriages reported less intimate partner violence and less coercive control! (3/4) #HBES2026

@anthroliz.bsky.social discussed parental influence on mate choice in Nepal and the effects of different levels of parental vs offspring choice on reproductive success. One key takeaway: we need to stop dichotomizing arranged marriages when studying these effects! (2/4) #HBES2026

Some amazing finalists for the #HBES2026 Postdoctoral Investigator award! A thread 🧵👇 (1/4)

Plenary 2 at #HBES2026 🎤 Hanna Kokko on "A long life: how desirable is it, evolutionarily speaking?" A walk through why species vary so dramatically in lifespan, and a deep dive into one classic hypothesis. A thread 🧵

A recently discovered femur and tibia of a 1.8-million-year-old hominin, Paranthropus robustus, allows researchers to recreate its locomotor patterns, suggesting it spent a lot of time in trees—much more than its contemporary, Australopithecus africanus. In PNAS: https://ow.ly/89AT50Z1bTI

Congratulations to Joakim Zahl, winner of the #HBES2026 New Investigator Award! 🎉 For his work “Return the Favor: Preverbal Infants Represent and Emotionally Value Direct Reciprocity.” 👏

Congratulations to Elizabeth Agey, winner of the #HBES2026 Postdoctoral Investigator Award! 🎉 For her work on “Parental influence on mate choice shapes reproduction and socioeconomic resources in Nepal.” 👏

Congratulations to the winners of the #HBES2026 Don Symons Adaptationism Award: Michael Barlev & Steven Neuberg, for “Rational Reasons for Irrational Beliefs” (2025) psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

Congratulations to Steven Neuberg, recipient of the #HBES2026 Lifetime Career Award! 🏆

Congratulations to our #HBES2026 Early Career Award winners: Daniel Conroy-Beam and Anne Pisor! 🎓

Congratulations to Sheina Lew-Levy, recipient of the #HBES2026 Rising Star Award! 🌟

New paper with @tadegquillien.bsky.social and Azzurra Ruggeri: "Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner's generosity". Out in @humbehevosoc.bsky.social EHB: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 🧵

Children seek out observations that can reveal a partner’s generosity

Humans face the adaptive challenge of assessing how much other people value them. Evidence suggests that the human mind is well-equipped for this task…

sciencedirect.com

The joint @ces2026.bsky.social / #HBES2026 is a wrap. Local organizers @zhgarfield.com, @edseabright.bsky.social, @sarahalami.bsky.social, & @matcharbonneau.bsky.social & their amazing support team pulled off TWO back-to-back conferences. The vibe, food, high-tech venue & talks were fantastic!

Human Behavior & Evolution Society@humbehevosoc.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Final day of #HBES2026! 🌍 Parallel sessions kick off at 9:00, followed by Martin Daly’s lunch panel on the history of HBES, the Postdoctoral Investigator Award finalists, and our closing keynote at 15:05: Simon Baron-Cohen on “The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention.”