Our Team

Robert Foley is Leverhulme Professor of Human Evolution, Emeritus at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of King’s College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is a co-founder of the Leverhulme Centre of Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge, an interdisciplinary research centre. His research has focused on the evolution and ecology of humans, especially their behavior and adaptations. Much of this work has concentrated on understanding humans in terms of general Darwinian patterns and processes, and relating human evolution to more general models of evolution, and the general applicability of phylogenetic approaches. Among his contributions are the development of off-site archaeology, community ecology and co-evolutionary approaches to hominin evolution, ecological models for human evolution, phylogenetic methods for analysing technological, cultural, social and linguistic evolution, the multiple dispersal model of human origins, and multi-disciplinary approaches to the evolution of human diversity.