Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias

About me

I'm a PhD candidate at the Human Evolutionary Ecology Group at the University of Zürich under the supervision of Prof Andrea Migliano. 

I am interested on the social and ecological drivers of the diversity of ways in which humans live and have lived throughout our evolution. Moreover, how this diversity has shaped our cultural and genetic makeup.

For my PhD, I combine methods and data from genetics, computational modelling, archaeology and field research among the BaYaka hunter-gatherers in the Republic of Congo.

I am copy editor of the scientific journal Hunter Gatherer Research.

I also like writing for popular science magazines and participating in science communication platforms.

You can find a full copy of my CV here.

What I'm interested on

Im interested in a broad range of questions regarding human origins and human evolution as well as the causes and consequences of evolutionary processes (in general) from a theoretical perspective. Some include:

Some projects I have worked on recently

Diversity in early learning experiences

I have worked since 2019 in the Yucatán peninsula in collaboration with Dr Laura Shneidman on how changing socio-ecologies affect children's early learning experiences, and how those changes translate to population-level cultural and linguistic outcomes. See Research for some of the publications from this project.

Hunter-gatherers' lifestyles in archaeology

In collaboration with Robert Bischoff and Dr Claudine Gravel-Miguel, I have worked on creating a computational model to understand how different aspects of the lifestyles of hunter-gatherers get reflected in archaeological assemblages. Our model is fully publicly available (See Research for our paper and Code for the model).

Emergence of complex social networks from foraging behaviour

Alongside Dr Ketika Garg, Nicolás Restrepo Ochoa and Bleu Knight, I developed an agent-based model to understand whether hunter-gatherer foraging behaviour could create social networks optimised for information transmission. See Research for our paper.

Genetic markers of cousin marriage and honour cultures

I have collaborated with Olympia Campbell and Prof Ruth Mace in a project exploring the relationship between cousin marriage, intensive kinship and honour cultures through genetics.

Spatio-temporally explicit models of mobility and cultural evolution

Alongside Dr Natasa Conrad and Johaness Zonker, I developed a model to assess how changing ecological landscapes in Central Africa over evolutionary history would have shaped hunter-gatherer demography, mobility and cultural evolution. See Research for our paper.

Ecological drivers of ancient hunter-gatherers' lithic technologies

In collaboration with Dr James Blinkhorn and Prof Matt Grove, we worked on curating a dataset of Middle and Later Stone Age lithic assemblages in Central Africa to test hypotheses about the drivers of cultural dynamics in the past.

Funding

Bodies that have funded my research include: