Universitetet i Bergen

Christopher Stuart Henshilwood 🇿🇦

• Supervisor of PhD candidate 8

Professor Christopher Henshilwood’s interests as an archaeologist, scientist, project leader and teacher encompass the development of complex technology, social systems, subsistence, environment, syntactic language and material culture associated with early Homo sapiens, especially those groups who evolved in southern Africa between 100,000 – 50,000 years ago. He has concentrated on finding archaeological sites that were occupied by H. sapiens during the Later- and Middle Stone Age and has excavated 20 of these sites in southern Africa. He currently leads research involving more than forty foremost scientists in diverse fields in Europe, Africa, the UK and USA. He holds a 5 year SARChI Research Chair in Origins of Human Behaviour (2017 – 2022) at Wits University, and is the Director of a 10 year Centre of Excellence, the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) at the University of Bergen, Norway funded by the Research Council of Norway (2017-2026). A core focus of his projects is to encourage young researchers, especially women and the previously disadvantaged, in Africa and Europe. He has authored or co-authored more than 80 peer reviewed, wide-ranging papers on the origins of language and symbolism; the effects of climatic variation on human demographics, and on the theory of human behavioral evolution and published two books.