The concentration in Human Evolutionary Biology (HEB) provides students with the skills and knowledge they need to investigate and answer questions about who we are, how we got here, and what makes us unique. Research in human evolutionary biology is increasingly influencing medical science, economics, linguistics, psychology, and political science, and HEB concentrators learn how to use an evolutionary perspective to help solve real world problems.
Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology is one of the world’s leading programs to study the fundamental question “How did evolution make humans the way they are?” Our program evolved from the subfield of biological anthropology (sometimes called evolutionary anthropology), but we are more than that because we address issues in human evolutionary biology by bringing together and integrating scholars and students engaged in many fields of research relevant to our core question including: anatomy and physiology of primates and humans; primate and human behavior and ecology; molecular, developmental, and population genetics and genomics; and paleontology and the physical record of primate and hominin evolution.