CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny

You might not know that CARTA administers a graduate specialization in anthropogeny at UCSD. As part of the training, we held a two-day "primordial technology" workshop this May. Students explored the technologies and materials that were central to our species's evolution: stone, fiber, and clay, along with creating and controlling fire from scratch, and the importance of language in teaching and sharing. We have a new blog post on the CARTA website detailing this amazing workshop. Check it out by following the link below!

https://carta.anthropogeny.org/blog/primordial-technology-hands-workshop

CARTA is pleased to announce Skylar Batty as a recipient of a 2026–2027 CARTA Fellowship!

This fellowship recognizes outstanding graduate students pursuing research that advances our understanding of the origins of the human phenomenon. Skylar is a Ph.D. student in the Biomedical Sciences program at UCSD, mentored by Dr. Arshad Desai. Skylar’s research aims to define the molecular mechanisms that localize a protein called KLP-7 (the C. elegans homolog to human MCAK microtubule depolymerase) to kinetochores and spindle poles during mitosis and determine how this ensures faithful chromosome segregation during cell division.

Congratulations, Skylar!

CARTA is pleased to announce Xiaowen Xu as a recipient of a 2026–2027 CARTA Fellowship!

This fellowship recognizes outstanding graduate students pursuing research that advances our understanding of the origins of the human phenomenon. Xiaowen is a Ph.D. student in the Biological Sciences program at UCSD, mentored by Dr. Michael Corley. Xiaowen is interested in neuroimmunology, particularly the role of Mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells in brain aging and Alzheimer's disease. We look forward to following Xiaowen's research and contributions in the coming year.
Congratulations, Xiaowen!

Red meat helped make us human but now could be making us sick.

A new paper in The Quarterly Review of Biology featuring several CARTA members explores the surprising evolutionary story behind one of our oldest foods, and why what once fueled our ancestors may pose new challenges in the modern world. Read more:

today.ucsd.edu

The June CARTA newsletter just dropped! Check out what we've been up to, get caught up on the latest human origins research, and much more!

Anthropogeny Tracks: CARTA News, June 2026 Anthropogeny Specialization students participated in a two-day Primordial Technology Hands-on Workshop in May, exploring the foundational technologies of stone, fiber, clay, fire, and language through hands-on activities. By making tools, cordage, pottery, and fire from natural materials, students g...

What did humans gain—and sacrifice—as our brains evolved? In this CARTA video, Dr. Alex Pollen, Associate Professor of neurology at UC San Francisco, explores how the dramatic expansion of the human brain created new challenges alongside new cognitive abilities. Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/1h—hqVEpTU?si=WUa-1KT2kFVPSiBA

Today is Triton Giving Day at UC San Diego! If you like what CARTA does, consider supporting us at our TGD page!
https://tritongivingday.ucsd.edu/campaigns/center-for-academic-research-and-training-in-anthropogeny-carta-fund

Big news from the CARTA community! Hande Sever, a PhD candidate in Visual Arts, and CARTA Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny student, has been awarded a UC President's Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2026–2027. The competitive fellowship, which includes a $37,500 stipend plus tuition and fees, supports promising doctoral students in the final stages of their research.

Sever’s work operates at a critical intersection of art history, archaeology, and contemporary visual practice. Her dissertation examines sites such as Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in Anatolia (among the earliest known monumental structures in human history) and traces their mobilization within artistic discourse, particularly by artists engaging questions of human origins. Rather than treating these sites as neutral archaeological referents, her work interrogates how they are reframed within modern visual culture as origins to be claimed, interpreted, and aestheticized. A central focus of the project is Anatolian Humanism, a 20th-century Turkish intellectual formation that positioned modern Turkish culture as the sole inheritor of all civilizations that have inhabited Anatolia. Sever critically examines how this framework operates as a nationalist historiographic apparatus, one that produces continuity through selective appropriation while obscuring and erasing the historical presence of indigenous Anatolian communities.

Join us in congratulating Hande on this incredible achievement!

We are proud to highlight Raihan Alam, a third-year PhD student in Management, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, and CARTA Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny student, for his recent publications! Raihan researches the causes and consequences of moral disagreement, with applications to criminal justice, extremism, and political polarization.

In his work “Profitable third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation,” he shows that paying third parties to punish undermines cooperation by degrading the socio-moral signal of punishing, leading people to become less trusting of punishers and less cooperative with anonymous strangers.

In “Partisan Animosity as Blame: A Unifying and Generative Framework for Understanding and Transforming Affective Polarization in the Political Sphere,” he argues that partisan animosity is best understood as a form of blame toward political outgroups for perceived norm-violations, offering a unifying framework for understanding rising affective polarization and offers new strategies for reducing it.

To read his papers and learn more about Raihan’s work, check out the links below!

Read his papers:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2508479122
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10888683251407825

Learn more about Raihan: https://carta.anthropogeny.org/users/raihan-alam

Citations:
Alam, R., & Gill, M. (2026). Partisan Animosity as Blame: A Unifying and Generative Framework for Understanding and Transforming Affective Polarization in the Political Sphere. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 0(0).

R. Alam, & T.S. Rai, Profitable third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (34) e2508479122 (2025).