Mark is an Assistant Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology in the Department of Archaeology where he teaches evolutionary perspectives on human biology, behaviour, and health. Much of his research focuses on the evolution of human social behaviour and is informed by ethnographic fieldwork with hunter-gatherer communities in the northern Philippines, zoological fieldwork with wild meerkats in South Africa, and by computational and mathematical modelling. His central thesis is that social behaviour in humans (or any other species) is strongly related to social organisation: the size, demographic structure, and kinship composition of social groups.
Born and raised in Essex, Mark studied at Cambridge (Clare 2008), Oxford, and University College London before spells as a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Toulouse (2016–17) and as a JRF at Jesus College, Cambridge (2017–19). He was a Lecturer at University College London for four years prior to returning to Cambridge in July 2023.
