Thomas Wynn

Thomas Wynn is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS), where he has taught since 1977. He earned his BA (sociology; anthropology) at Occidental College and his MA and PhD (anthropology) at the University of Illinois, Urbana. His doctoral research opened up a hitherto unexplored direction in Palaeolithic studies—the explicit use of psychological theory to interpret archaeological remains. His 1979 article in the journal Man, "The intelligence of later Acheulean hominids," continues to be cited 40 years after its appearance and is considered one of the foundation documents of evolutionary cognitive archaeology. In 2008, he and Frederick Coolidge organised the 139th Numbered Wenner-Gren Symposium, entitled "Working Memory: Beyond Language and Symbolism." He has published 150+ articles and book chapters in Palaeolithic studies, with a particular emphasis on cognitive evolution. His books include The Evolution of Spatial Competence(University of Illinois Press, 1989) and several volumes authored or edited with Frederick L. Coolidge, The Rise of Homo sapiens (Routledge 2009; Oxford 2018), Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution(Cambridge, 2009), How to think like a Neandertal (Oxford, 2012), and Cognitive Models in Palaeolithic Archaeology (Oxford, 2017).