Achievement

IPEM faculty member Barry Hewlett and trainee Adam Boyette have been participating in a Japanese-led project entitled “Replacement of Neanderthals by Modern Humans: Testing Evolutionary Models of Learning”, or RNMH. RNMH is a 5-year, international effort funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology seeking to test the hypothesis that the divergent outcomes between Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens are due to a difference in learning abilities. Hewlett and Boyette are part of the research team studying human learning behavior across development based on fieldwork among modern hunter-gatherers. Hewlett’s research on infants among Aka hunter-gatherers of the Central African Republic has provided evidence that “natural pedagogy” is a human adaptation. This contradicts the argument of cultural anthropologists that teaching is rare and evolutionarily unimportant in humans. Boyette’s contribution to RNMH grew out of his IPEM-funded research.