He has held research positions in the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, the School for the Study of Religion at the University of Aarhus, and the Zoology Department at the University of Reading, UK. He is Associate Editor for Evolution and Human Behavior and on the editorial board of Diachronica. His work uses methods and thinking from evolutionary biology to answer questions about the evolution of human culture and language, including the origin of religion, the spread of Indo-European languages and the evolution of sociality.