I have a MSc in Palaeoanthropology and Palaeolithic Archaeology from University College London, where I am also studying for my PhD, and a BA in History from the University of Copenhagen. Before starting my academic career, I spent a couple of years making short films, which taught me a lot about effective communication, something I have consistently applied in my academic work.

My fieldwork experience comes from both research and developer-led excavations. For the former, I have worked on Palaeolithic excavations and surveys in Tanzania, Spain, Germany, and Kenya spanning the past 1.8 million years of human evolution, whereas the latter has seen me spend a year in Ireland working on a range of sites from the Neolithic to post-medieval period.

Previously I held a talk at Krogerup Folk High School on the colonisation of Eurasia by our species, and I am currently collaborating with colleagues interested in diverse aspects of African archaeology on a website covering this unique, yet often overseen, part of our global human heritage.

My main research focus is on the evolution of modern human cognition. I am currently approaching this by conducting neuroimaging on expert and novice knappers producing technologies from throughout the Palaeolithic to create a high-resolution, experimentally derived model of the evolution of our brains for my PhD. This research will help create a much more detailed baseline model of when different parts of our brain evolved, something that is still hotly debated.

During my master’s degree, I approached cognition through archaeological lithic assemblages. Key was a study I conducted of the Kabwe lithic artefacts for my dissertation, which showed that the assemblage was characterised by Middle Stone Age technology. Combined with the presence of Homo heidelbergensis fossils, this opens up the possibility that early Middle Stone Age industries – usually associated with our own species, Homo sapiens – could have been produced by other species than our own. This led to a paper that is currently undergoing peer review.

I have also previously conducted research on medieval plague, combining historical archives, oral history, archaeological data, and genomics. Read the papers here and here.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/david-m-2751a6aa/

ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0009-6967-2247

Academia: academia.edu/DavidMiedzianogora

This CV was last updated in May 2025.