It’s been a week since the end of the inaugural CES conference in Jena, part-hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. It was great to be at a conference where everyone was playing with the same rules: evolution is a general framework used to explain human and animal behavioural and artefact variation. I’m not sue how much CES differs from the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society meetings (HBES).
I gave a talk with my co-author Fiona Jordan that was well-received. We use Bayesian phylogentic analyses to examine the evolution of agricultural traits in the Pacific. Major conclusion thus far: new environments encountered in Polynesia explain the radiation of diverse techniques.
A highlight of the conference was seeing old colleagues and meeting new ones. The excellent German beer and food didn’t hurt.
Next year’s conference will be in Tempe, Arizona, at ASU. I encourage more archaeologists to attend, especially those interested in macroevolutionary studies, as these were somewhat lacking in Jena.