Dor Shilton

Hello.

I am a writer and researcher living in Tel Aviv. I study human cultural evolution, with a particular focus on music and ritual.

I wrote my PhD thesis in Tel Aviv University on the cultural evolution of music, under the supervision of Eva Jablonka, Daniel Dor, and Ian Cross.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Cohn Institute in Tel Aviv University and a research affiliate at The School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford.

I was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Besides my academic work, I have written short films, short fiction, and several pieces for the Israeli press, which you can find below.

Latest Papers

Why collective music-making is sometimes rare: A study of four indigenous societies (2025)

Dor Shilton, Aniruddh D. Patel, Kim Hill, and Chris von Rueden

Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context (2023)

Dor Shilton, Sam Passmore and Patrick E. Savage

Research

Shilton, D., Patel, A. D., Hill, K., & von Rueden, C. (2025). Why collective music-making is sometimes rare: A study of four indigenous societies. Evolution and Human Behavior, 46(4), 106695. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2025.106695

Shilton, D., & Savage, P. E. (2024). Conflicting predictions in the cross-cultural study of music and sociality – Comment on “Musical engagement as a duet of tight synchrony and loose Interpretability” by Tal-Chen Rabinowitch. Physics of Life Reviews, 49, 7–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2024.02.004

Shilton, D., Passmore, S., & Savage, P. E. (2023). Group singing is globally dominant and associated with social context. Royal Society Open Science. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230562

Shilton, D., Jablonka, E. (2022) Rituals, Music, and the Landscape Metaphor. Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion. https://doi.org/10.1558/jcsr.22389

Shilton, D. (2022). Sweet Participation: The Evolution of Music as an Interactive Technology. Music & Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043221084710

Shilton, D., Breski, M., Dor, D., & Jablonka, E. (2020). Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-Control? Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00134

Shilton, D. (2019). Is Language Necessary for the Social Transmission of Lithic Technology? Journal of Language Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzz004