The resources below represent our on-going efforts to create and curate content and teaching materials about the evolution of our species that may help students understand the core concepts and causal relationships relevant to understanding the challenges to human well-being and sustainability we face today. The resources are organized by traits and themes (relationships among traits) that have more or less direct relevance to sustainability. Our focus is on themes and resources that help us understand our everyday behaviors and experiences, as well as human cooperation and our capacity to work together towards common goals under specific conditions. Other themes are included because they may be more broadly helpful for student learning of human evolution and for the development of deeper and transferable understandings of the complex causes inherent in the challenges of sustainable development.  

These resources are continously being developed, so if you have a question or idea, or would like to use these resources in your classroom, please contact us to discuss.

The following traits and themes are roughly arranged according to their estimated temporal appearance in the course of our evolutionary history. However, as is so often the case in evolution, many traits have evolved over long periods of time and in close interaction with other traits. Most human traits are actually more or less elaborated versions of traits we find across many animal species. Various research methods and insights of evolutionary anthropology are included on the respective pages, which help us explain the evolutionary origins and development of the various human traits.