Laura Fortunato

I am a PhD student in Biological Anthropology at the Centre for the Evolutionary Analysis of Cultural Behaviour [1] and the Human Evolutionary Ecology Group [2] at UCL [3]. My background lies within integrative biology and evolutionary anthropology. My research focuses on understanding patterns of variation in human cultural behaviour through the analysis of variation in cultural practices.

In particular, I am looking at variation in marriage practices in Indo-European societies: why do some groups settle for monogamy, while most human societies practice polygyny? What factors determine patterns of wealth transfers at marriage? The models developed to understand behavioural variation in non-human species provide the basis for understanding behaviour and decision-making at the individual level; I am interested in modelling how the patterns emerging at the level of societies from individual behaviours feed back to influence those behaviours.