I study how intelligence actually works, where it comes from, what shapes it, and what limits it. My background is in early humans and fossil mammals from the Cradle of Humankind, where I’ve spent years working with real landscapes, real constraints, and the messy reality of how organisms survive and adapt. That perspective still anchors my work. I’m interested in intelligence as something that emerges under pressure, limited energy, incomplete information, changing environments, not as an idealised system. Much of what I’m exploring sits between deep-time evolution and artificial intelligence, asking what we’ve missed by ignoring the conditions that actually produced intelligence in the first place.