Marc Kissel

Marc Kissel received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014 and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Notre Dame from 2014-2017, where he worked on a project on the evolution of human symbolic thought that, intersecting with scholars from philosophy, theology, psychology and other related disciplines. He is currently an assistant professor at the Appalachian State University in North Carolina. 

Marc has published on various topics in paleoanthropology such as the morphology of early hominin mandibles, the processes by which our ancestors became human, pedagogy in college, and the role of war and peace in human evolution.  His first book, written with Nam Kim, Emergent Warfare in Our Evolutionary Past was published in 2018.  The book examines the origins and development of human forms of organized violence from an anthropological perspective, suggesting that human warfare is qualitatively different from forms of lethal, intergroup violence seen elsewhere in the natural world, and that its emergence is intimately connected to how humans evolved and to the emergence of human nature itself.

Marc’s current research projects are about the origins of symbolic thought, the role of interpersonal violence in the past, the origins and development of mobile containers, and how we can be better science communicators to demonstrate the relevance of anthropology.