Daniel Smith

I am an Evolutionary Anthropologist interested in understanding human behaviour and adaptation from a Behavioural Ecology perspective, in terms of how individuals attempt to maximise their inclusive fitness in a given environment. I completed a PhD at UCL (awarded June 2017) exploring cooperation among the Agta, a population of Filipino hunter-gatherers. This involved ten months of fieldwork in remote forests where I conducted behavioural experiments to explore how much individuals cooperated, who they cooperated with, and why. I am also interested in the ontogenetic roots of cooperation, the evolution of storytelling, and wider links between cooperation, life history theory and cultural evolution.