Santa Fe Institute

Bio

Peregrine’s research focuses on “big questions” of human history: Why did people come to live in cities?  How do coercive leaders maintain their power?  What happens when people from very different cultural and linguistic backgrounds come to live together?  He has pursued answers to these questions in a variety of different ways—from archaeological excavation to complex cross-cultural statistical analyses.  Most recently he has been working with other scholars at the Santa Fe Institute to integrate archaeological, linguistic, and genetic information to understand how modern humans expanded across the earth in the last forty to fifty thousand years and, more specifically, how the diversity of human languages emerged in the last twenty thousand years.