4. Research Methods

Michelle Kline is a Senior Lecturer of Psychology at Brunel University of London, UK. Her work focuses on social learning, including the evolution of teaching, how people learn to be parents, and the learning and creation of present-day spiritual beliefs. Her f ieldwork has included research in the Yasawa Islands, Fiji and in the town of Glastonbury, England.

Ilaria Pretelli is an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse School of Economics & University of Toulouse Capitole, France. She is interested in the evolution of human life history, with a focus on the emergence of childhood, learning, and cooperative breeding. She carried out her doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. She has done f ieldwork on the island of Pemba, Zanzibar. Her research combines cross-cultural, statistical, and observational methods to study the evolution of human behavior.

Bruce Rawlings is a developmental, cross-cultural and comparative psychologist, based at Durham University, UK. He holds a PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology from the same university. His work examines cognitive and cultural influences on innovation, creativity, and tool use in children and great apes. He focuses on children across geographically and culturally diverse populations to understand what makes humans so unique. He also works to improve the validity of cross-cultural experiments

Katja Liebal is the head of the Human Biology and Primate Cognition group at the Faculty of Life Sciences, Institute of Biology, Leipzig University, Germany. She is a comparative psychologist with a background in behavioral biology. She is interested in the development and cross-cultural variability of children’s attitudes toward other animals. She cooperates with local collaborators from a variety of communities and uses a mixed-method approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods from anthropology and psychology, to study human-animal relationships across a range of socio-cultural contexts. She has conducted fieldwork in Namibia, Zambia and Indonesia (including research with nonhuman primates).

David Lancy is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Utah State University, US. He has conducted extensive cross-cultural f ieldwork with children in interior Liberia, multiple sites in Papua New Guinea, Trinidad, Madagascar, Uganda, and Yemen, among others. More specifically, David Lancy has contributed to a better understanding of childhood-related topics including delayed personhood, the chore curriculum, children as a reserve labor force, children growing up in a gerontocracy, how children acquire their culture, socio-historical analyses of schooling, and the culture of street kids. He has written a survey of the field—recently published in a third edition—The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. In total, David Lancy has authored nine books and edited three. His most recent work is Learning Without Lessons: Pedagogy in Indigenous Communities.

Jing Xu is a Research Scientist at the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, US. She is a cultural and cognitive anthropologist studying how culture and mind interact to shape child development in diverse geographic regions, historical periods and cross-cultural comparative contexts. She pursues interdisciplinary research, bringing together ethnography, experimental techniques, computational methods, and humanistic perspectives to study how humans become moral persons. She is the author of two monographs: The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool (2017) and “Unruly” Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village (2024).

Heejung Park is a cultural and developmental psychologist in the Department of Psychology, Scripps College, US. She studies cultural values, identities, and the lived experiences of children, youth, and families across diverse socio-cultural settings and historical periods. She is particularly interested in identifying the challenges and strengths associated with adaptation experiences following social change and migration in an increasingly interconnected world.

Annemieke Milks is a Paleolithic archaeologist, and currently holds a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Reading, UK. Her work explores the intersection between material culture, skill, and learning. She specializes in weaponry, early wooden artefacts, and Pleistocene childhoods. Annemieke’s work is interdisciplinary, exploring the archaeological record through macro- and micro-imaging of artefacts, morphometrics, experimental archaeology, and ethnography.

Felix Riede is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. He works in a broad and inclusive cultural evolutionary framework. Focused on understanding the interactions between social learning, niche construction, and environmental change, he explores the role of children in human cognitive evolution, and the role of object play as a motor for material culture variation, innovation, and adaptation.

Roman Stengelin completed his PhD in Psychology at Leipzig University, Germany, in 2020, followed by postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, where he now works as a senior scientist. His research focuses on the development of childhood social cognition and learning, with an emphasis on (cross-)cultural perspectives. He has conducted f ieldwork among Namibian San communities, including the Khwe and Hai||om.

Akira Takada is Professor in the Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. He has worked with/among groups of the San of southern Africa (particularly !Xun and ǂAkhoe in Namibia, G|ui and Gǁana in Botswana) since the late 1990s. He has published a number of books and articles, including Hunters Among Farmers: The !Xun of Ekoka (2022), and The Ecology of Playful Childhood: The Diversity and Resilience of Caregiver-Child Interactions among the San of Southern Africa (2020).

Joscha Kärtner received his PhD from the Department of Culture and Development at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and is head of the Developmental Psychology Lab and the Center for Learning, Development and Counseling at the University of Münster, Germany. From a dynamic developmental systems perspective, his main research interests include cultural influences on early social, socio-cognitive and socio-emotional development. Besides basic research in these fields, a second emphasis is on developing culturally informed programs and policies for applied developmental science.