Russell Gray

Russell Gray completed his PhD at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1990. He spent four years lecturing at the University of Otago in Dunedin before returning to the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has received several prestigious fellowships, as well as the inaugural Mason Durie Medal for his pioneering contributions to the social sciences. In 2014, he became one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, where he led the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution. In June 2020, Gray and his department moved to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he was reappointed as a Director. He also holds an adjunct position in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland.

Gray’s research spans cultural evolution, linguistics, animal cognition, and the philosophy of biology. He helped pioneer the application of computational evolutionary methods to questions about linguistic prehistory and cultural evolution. This work has brought new evidence to long-standing debates about the origins and dispersal of Indo-European languages, a problem famously described by Diamond and Bellwood as “the most intensively studied, yet still most recalcitrant problem in historical linguistics”. In collaboration with colleagues in Europe, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the Americas, he has extended these evolutionary approaches to test hypotheses about the roles of culture, cognition, history, and environment in shaping linguistic diversity. These analyses have revealed both enduring universal tendencies and striking language-family-specific patterns in linguistic structure and change.

A major focus of Gray’s research has been the history of languages, cultures, and people in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Together with Simon Greenhill and colleagues, he developed large comparative lexical databases for the languages of this region and used Bayesian phylogenetic methods to test hypotheses about the sequence and timing of Pacific settlement. These studies revealed striking patterns of expansion pulses and pauses in the peopling of the Pacific. This work has increasingly been embedded in long-term collaborative partnerships, including fieldwork in Vanuatu that works with local researchers, cultural experts, and communities to document, analyse, and support the region’s extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity.

More recently, Gray and his colleagues have helped develop large global linguistic databases, including Lexibank and Grambank, which provide standardized comparative data on the world’s lexicons and grammars. These resources reflect a commitment to open, transparent, and reusable science, and make it possible to test broad claims about linguistic diversity, universals, functional dependencies, language history, and the interaction between language, cognition, culture, and environment on a global scale.

This linguistic work helped set the stage for Gray’s broader research applying ecological and evolutionary methods to the study of religion, cooperation, social complexity, and cultural change. His collaborative work has examined how ecological conditions, supernatural beliefs, ritual practices, intoxicants, political institutions, and geography interact over cultural evolutionary time. This research has shown, among other things, that beliefs about gods vary with ecology, that supernatural punishment and moralising religious concepts are linked to social and political complexity, and that ritual human sacrifice may have helped promote and sustain stratified societies in parts of the Pacific. Recent work has also used large-scale comparative methods to test influential cultural evolutionary hypotheses, including Jared Diamond’s axis-of-orientation hypothesis about the spread of crops, animals, and technologies, and Edward Slingerland’s “Drunk” hypothesis about the role of alcohol in the rise of complex societies.

Gray’s commitment to collaborative, place-based research also extends to the Peruvian Amazon, where he and colleagues helped establish the Chana Research Station. The station supports interdisciplinary research and training on language, culture, cognition, biodiversity, and human-environment relationships, while fostering sustained collaboration with Peruvian researchers and local communities.

Gray is also known for his work on animal cognition, especially the remarkable tool-manufacturing traditions of New Caledonian crows. When asked if he knows the other Russell Gray who works on New Caledonian crows, he sometimes replies with a grin: “I am Russell Crow.” With colleagues at the University of Auckland, he has shown that these birds’ sophisticated tool traditions are shaped by learning, innovation, and ecological opportunity, and are underpinned by advanced cognitive capacities, including aspects of causal reasoning.

He has published widely across evolutionary biology, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and the cognitive sciences, including ten papers in Nature and Science.