Origins of Human Cooperation

Michael Tomasello is codirector of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. He is also codirector of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center. His research interests focus on processes of social cognition, social learning, and communication/ language in human children and great apes. Tomasello’s published books include First Verbs (1992), Primate Cognition (1997), The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (2003), Origins of Human Communication (2008), and Why We Cooperate (2009).