Elena Miu

Young chimps play weird with tools and other objects & this can lead to innovation! Moss sponging, doll play, leaf clipping to ask for carrying. If copied and retained, rare kid innovations can contribute to cultural complexity 🧪🔬🐵
My fav article I've ever worked on: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone?

Our new preprint, led by
@anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social
shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

@durhampsych.bsky.social current has 5 (FIVE!!) PhD studentships being advertised!

3 to work with me on children as agents of cultural evolution

2 to work with @drboothroyd.bsky.social on examining school-based body image interventions.

Please share and apply!

www.durham.ac.uk/departments/...

Recreational Fear Across Childhood. A Cross-Sectional Study of Scary Activities that Children Enjoy - Child Psychiatry & Human Development This study investigated the prevalence of children’s engagement in recreational fear activities — i.e., playful engagement with scary stimuli where both fear and enjoyment are experienced. A detailed ...

🚨 Kids LOVE fear?!🚨
Our new study led by Mihaela Taranu from the Recreational Fear Lab uncovers something surprising:
Children across all ages actively seek out scary experiences - for fun!
📄 doi.org/10.1007/s105...
[1/🧵]

Description of agreement with fertility values. (a) Summary of agreement rates with the value statements for all women, and total completed fertility for post-reproductive women who agreed/disagreed. (b) Posterior predicted probability of agreement with each of the 7 value statements, as a function of the responder’s education.

A study of 22 rural communities in Poland looks at how female friendships influence women’s decisions about how many children to have. Educated women with more emotionally supportive friends outside their kin networks have fewer children. In PNAS Nexus: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

ASU expert in cultural evolution elected to National Academy of Sciences | ASU News A leading authority on cultural evolution, Robert Boyd, a professor in Arizona State University’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a research scientist with the Institute of Human Origi...

Join us in congratulating Robert Boyd, a SHESC professor and research scientist with the @asuiho.bsky.social, who has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences — one of the highest honors a researcher can receive! 🌟

news.asu.edu/20250505-uni...

I'm THRILLED that our book is out. This book, with other 60 contributors from across the globe (!!!) is a love letter to the science we want to do, and a how-to guide for how to do it. Please read it and share it!

Job announcement 🚨: paid fieldwork opportunity with Sanguatsiniq research project! Details in thread ⬇️ Please share!

Now with a more user friendly version here:
www.aesthetics.mpg.de/forschung/fo...

So much fun, thanks @masonyoungblood.bsky.social for putting it all together!

Finally, we propose emotional support as a key moderator of norm change in the domain of fertility, with implications for cultural change more broadly

We identify changes in friendship composition and in the types of support that flow across these relationships, and link these changes to key reproductive attitudes and values – this shift seems to be driven by educated women who exchange more emotional support with (nonkin) friends

We focus on close personal networks to understand mechanistically the spread of reproductive cultural norms - we use causal inference techniques and (many!) hierarchical Bayesian models to understand how personal support networks change in communities experiencing social and economic shifts

Female friendship and the cultural transmission of low-fertility values: Evidence from rural Poland Abstract. Understanding how demographic and cultural change interact is essential for understanding the trajectory of historical and contemporary societies

New paper out with @heidicolleran.bsky.social in @pnasnexus.org
academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...

This paper is now published. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Postnatal dependency as the foundation of social learning in humans | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Humans have developed a sophisticated system of cultural transmission that allows for complex, non-genetically specified behaviours to be passed on from one generation to the next. This system relies ...

“the prolonged period of post-natal dependency experienced by infants contributes to development of social learning. Because of motor limitations, infants learn to interact with & act through caregivers, establishing social learning skills that continue to develop as children become less dependent”

Quote: " In sum, leader-directed teaching of opaque cooperative norms would be a mutually beneficial strategy, where the costs incurred by influential teachers are, at least partly, outweighed by the long-term benefits of cultivating cooperation within the group."

Mosaic plot illustrating the relationship between evidence for teaching and non-teaching social learning, based on a binary researcher-coded measure of teaching. "Although instrumental cultural transmission frequently occurs through both teaching and non-teaching social learning, opaque cultural information is predominantly transmitted through teaching, with relatively fewer instances of non-teaching social learning."

With @sheinalew.bsky.social: Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, in @naturecomms.bsky.social

#evolution #culture 🧪 #LeadSciSky #CultEvo

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm glad to be reminded of my favourite lab name!

New pre-print out with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social on how childhood exploration drives population-level innovation in cultural evolution www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚀COSMOS is BACK!!!💫 The Computational School on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) will take place in RIKEN, Tokyo, between 29 Sept - 3 Oct, organised by me and fantastic @thecharleywu.bsky.social ! Application deadline: 25th April. For more details see 👉️ cosmossummerschool.github.io

amazing body of work and showcase of the value of long-term studies. beautifully illustrated summary 🧵 👇

saw this come to life years ago and am in awe of friend Sara Keen’s inspirational blue sky thinking and how @nilomr.bsky.social carried it forward, to new heights and Open Science excellence
🧪

Language-like efficiency in whale communication Whale vocalizations follow efficiency rules seen in human language, revealing striking similarities in communication systems.

Do whales optimize their vocalizations for efficiency, just like human language? 🐋🎶 My latest study in
Science Advances (@science.org) suggests they do—following linguistic laws seen in human speech. 🧵 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

🏰 PhD position on computational modelling | collective dynamics | cultural evolution 🏰

Get in touch with any questions you might have and join me in beautiful Marburg!

stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/c... (Deutsch)

stellenangebote.uni-marburg.de/jobposting/3... (English)

Postdoktor i beräkningspsykologi/kognitionsvetenskap med fokus på social inlärning och kulturell evolution Vill du bidra till medicinsk forskning av toppkvalitet? Gruppen Mechanisms of Social Behavior vid Karolinska Institutet i Stockholm söker en högt kvalificerad postdoktoral forskare för att ingå i

💥Postdoc Opening! 💥We (@lucasmolleman.bsky.social & Piet van den Berg) seek a postdoc to study social learning and cultural evolution. We are looking for someone with math/computational modeling skills & interest in human behavior. Get in touch if you have any questions! shorturl.at/W6Qsb

Congrats Camille!!

We're hiring! Are you a cultural evolutionary modeller who wants to understand how and why children's peer cultures evolve? Here's a postdoc position for you! @culturalevolsoc.bsky.social @durhampsych.bsky.social @ehbea.bsky.social @eslr.bsky.social

Apply here: durham.taleo.net/careersectio...

Today, not one, but two(!!) articles about my latest paper about children, toys and innovation have been published online

Picture of Kevin Lala with the third edition of Sense and Nonsense

I am excited finally to have my hands on the very first copy of the third edition of "Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour", co-authored with @gillianrbrown1.bsky.social.

The paperback will be available in just over two weeks time, from Oxford University Press.

A Field Guide to Doing Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning: Theoretical, Methodological, Practical, and Ethical Considerations for an Interdisciplinary Field This volume addresses the critical gaps in developmental research on childhood learning by advocating for a more inclusive and cross-cultural approach. Recent studies highlight a concerning over-relia...

I'm so excited about our (>60 contributors) forthcoming edited volume! A Field Guide to Doing Cross-Cultural Research on Childhood Learning journeys through history, theory, fieldwork near or far, and policy, with loads of personal stories in between.

tinyurl.com/mvxxus55

Postdoctoral position in Palaeolithic gene-culture coevolution, Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Culture and Society - Department of Heritage Studies, Aarhus University

Hi y'all, I have this really awesome 2.5y postdoc open in my group here @aarhusuni.bsky.social, on gene-culture coevolution in the European Upper Palaeolithic. international.au.dk/about/profil... - deadline Jan 15; get in touch if you are interested.