Richard McElreath, born 1973 in Landstuhl, Germany, studied Anthropology and Human Biology at Emory University, Atlanta, USA, and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the UCLA, studying cultural adaptation in the Usangu region of Tanzania, under the supervision of Robert Boyd. He spent his postdoctoral studies focusing on bounded rationality in Gerd Gigerenzer's department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany. In 2002 he joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. While at UC Davis, McElreath continued ethnographic work in Tanzania, participating in several cross-cultural projects, as well as completing a book on mathematical models of social evolution and another on Bayesian data analysis. He was awarded tenure in 2006 and promoted to Full Professor in 2014. In 2015 McElreath started his position as a director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.