The Stone Age Institute, in conjunction with IU’s Cognitive Science Program, has received a $3.2 million three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The grant is one of the largest ever awarded for evolutionary research.
It is also associated with various prehistoric archaeological research projects in Tanzania, the Republic of Georgia and China, according to an IU press release.
Titled “What Drives Human Cognitive Evolution?”, the project will be aimed at analyzing human brain development from an archaeological perspective and to explore patterns in physical and behavioral change.
The five project leaders, all IU faculty and members of the University’s Cognitive Science Program, are Kathy Schick, Nicholas Toth, Colin Allen, Tom Schoenemann and Peter Todd.
“This is a unique opportunity to address the question of what drives human cognitive evolution with a strong international component and a strong multidisciplinary component as well,” Toth said in the release.
Schick and Toth are founders and co-directors of the Stone Age Institute, an independent nonprofit center in Bloomington for human evolutionary studies.
The research will focus on the evolution of human cognition in the Cognitive Science Program. It will be used for three graduate fellowships and will help create a distinguished visiting scholars program.
It will also be put toward experimental research, exploring things like patterns of thought for tasks like tool-making, language and search for resources, as well as casts of fossil skull brain-cases that reveal prehistoric brain anatomy.
“A key component of studying cognitive science, and one that is too often forgotten, is exploring what various aspects of cognition are for — what problems did cognition help our ancestors to solve?” Todd said in the release. “This grant lets us do exactly that, uncovering the evolved cognitive mechanisms that help us tackle central human problems including making tools, constructing sentences, finding information and learning from experts.”
The grant will fund a collaboration of the Stone Age Institute in important archaeological field work at famous prehistoric sites on three different continents that contain remains from 1 to 2 million years ago, which was a significant time in human brain development.
There will be four international workshops throughout the next three years, in Tanzania, Republic of Georgia, China and the United States. In these countries, participants can collaborate on approaches and methods, examine prehistoric materials and archaeological sites.
“Findings will provide a valuable focus on the critical early periods of human cognitive expansion,” Schick said in the release. “They also will pave the way for future research.”
Funding will also support science education in Tanzania, Republic of Georgia and China, including teacher training, student field trips to museums and archaeological sites, and enhancement of collections and museum exhibits in these countries.
In addition, the grant will fund the creation of an educational website on human cognitive evolution.
Taylor Telford
