Susana Carvalho

I am a primatologist and palaeoanthropologist. I was one of main founders of the field of Primate Archaeology. I have been studying stone tool use by wild chimpanzees in Bossou, Guinea, West Africa, since 2006, and carrying archaeological research in the Koobi Fora area, Kenya, East Africa since 2008, with a current focus on the archaeology of the Pliocene. I am the director of the Paleo-Primate Project Gorongosa since 2015, where an international team of 20 senior researchers is carrying an unprecedented interdisciplinary approach to understanding hominin origins and adaptations. In Mozambique, I am focusing on extant primates (baboons vervets) as models for behavioural evolution, and I am also directing surveys, excavations of fossil sites, and actualistic experimentations to achieve a more holistic understanding of our past evolution.

I received a BA in Archaeology from Oporto University (1997), then a MSc in Human Evolution from Coimbra University (2007), after having worked some years in between in municipal archaeology. My PhD in Biological Anthropology from Cambridge (2013) focused on living primates as behavioural models for the origins of technology. I held a Junior Research Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and had postdoctoral positions at Oxford and at the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, George Washington University, USA. I joined the University of Oxford in 2015, as Associate Professor of Palaeoanthropology and Fellow of St. Hugh’s College.