Email: q.atkinson@auckland.ac.nz Phone: +64 9 923 4316

Recent news:

2013:

Applications are invited for fully funded PhD studentships to study the evolution of cooperation in the Pacific and the cultural evolution of religion.

May 2013:

In PNAS Mark Pagel, Andrew Meade, Andreea Calude and I show how Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia. Read more at Science NEWS here.

April 2013:

Robert Ross, Simon Greenhill and I examine the cultural geography of a European folktale in this week’s issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B.

March 2013:

My commentary on the descent of words in this week’s issue of PNAS.

January 2013:

Talking about language evolution on National Radio’s nine-to-noon show.

December 2012:

Claire Bowern and I tackle the internal structure of the Pama-Nyungan language family in the journal Language.

August 2012:

In this week’s issue of Science, I team up with experts in linguistics, cultural evolution and Bayesian phylogeography to tackle the “most recalcitrant question in historical linguistics” - the origin of the Indo-European language family. Listen to a Science podcast here or read the NY Times article. We’ve also made a cool FAQ website, complete with a movie of the Indo-European expansion.

June 2012:

In this month’s Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Will Hoverd, Chris Sibley and I investigate “Group Size and the Trajectory of Religious Identification”.

February 2012:

Invited talk on the evolution of languages at the Govett-Brewster Contemporary Art Museum, Taranaki, New Zealand. Part of the Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye Exhibition.

December 2011:

On this week’s Our Changing World podcast, I talk to Veronika Meduna about work with Susanne Shultz and Kit Opie on the evolution of primate socialty.

November 2011:

In this week’s issue of Nature, Susanne Shultz, Kit Opie and I look at the evolution of primate sociality. Commentaries in Nature and ScienceNOW.

July 2011:

Conference talk on modelling major language expansions at the 20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Osaka, Japan.

June 2011:

Invited lecture on language change in time and space at the Human evolution – plagues, pathogens and selection meeting at the Kavli Royal Society International Centre, UK.

April 2011:

In this week’s issue of Science, I show that, like human genetic diversity, the global distribution of phoneme diversity in the world’s languages is consistent with a serial founder effect model of expansion from Africa.

Russell Gray, Simon Greenhill and I discuss Language Evolution and Human Prehistory in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B.

February 2011:

Conference talk on tracing language origins in space and time at the NZ Phylogenetics Meeting in Leigh, New Zealand.

January 2011:

Harvey Whitehouse and I use a large cross-cultural data set to examine the   The cultural morphospace of ritual form, in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Pierrick Bourrat and I use data from the World Values Survey to test whether beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperation.