Claudio Tennie

Claudio Tennie is a German professor at the University of Tuebingen. He is an evolutionary anthropologist, cognitive archaeologist and primatologist, whose research focuses on the evolution of culture, social learning, and cumulative culture in humans and non-human primates. In 2009 Tennie and colleagues proposed the Zone of Latent Solution (ZLS) theory, which outlines the main conditions for the evolution of human cumulative culture and seeks to explain differences observed between contemporary human and most animal cultures. In April 2024, Tennie successfully defended a rare triple habilitation in prehistory, psychology, and behavioral biology at the University of Tübingen. As the main focus of Tennie's research is the evolution of special types of culture within the human lineage, his experimental and theoretical studies intersect multiple research fields, including biology, psychology, archaeology and philosophy, with special emphasis on behavioural biology, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive archaeology of early stone tools, and philosophy of science.