Ruth Mace FBA (born 9 October 1961) is a British anthropologist, biologist, and academic.
She specialises in the evolutionary ecology of human demography and life history, and phylogenetic approaches to culture and language evolution.
[1] Her doctoral thesis was titled "The dawn chorus: Behavioural organisation in the great tit (Parus major)".
[3] Having completed her doctorate, Mace began her academic career as a research fellow at Imperial College London; she held a NERC Postdoctoral Fellowship.
[4] In 1994, having met Mark Pagel at University College, the two co-authored "The Comparative Method in Anthropology", that used phylogenetic methods to analyse human cultures, pioneering a new field of science — using evolutionary trees, or phylogenies, in anthropology, to explain human behaviour.