Very excited that this paper is out! www.science.org/doi/full/10.... Led by the fabulous @dorsaamir.bsky.social with invaluable contributions from many awesome collaborators.

🚨WINNER ANNOUNCEMET🚨 EHBEA wants to congratulate @drboothroyd.bsky.social and @sheinalew.bsky.social on earning the 2026 EHBEA Award in Excellence in Public Communication and Outreach👏 @durhampsych.bsky.social @durham.ac.uk

🚨 New Paper Alert! We investigated the developmental trajectories of intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic social norm acquisition among BaYaka and Bandongo in northern Rep. Congo, a community where inter-ethnic cooperation is common. We found that... journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

My time at @durhampsych.bsky.social has ended on a massive high - so grateful to @zannaclay.bsky.social and @drboothroyd.bsky.social for their supervision, and to Prof Tina Malti and @sheinalew.bsky.social for making my viva experience so positive 😊

"The relationship between childhood exploration and population-level innovation in cultural evolution" with @ndersen.bsky.social @sheinalew.bsky.social @felixthehauskat.bsky.social out in Proc B royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

I was surprised by children's large contribution to family food production in my hunter-gatherer family simulation. Of course, they're eating most of this food, too! From this paper linking the evolution of menopause to family energy balance: menopause-preprint.wisp.place 🧪 #BioAnth

🚨Job alert! The ENDOW project is hiring a Research Officer in Research Database Management, to be based at @lsemethodology.bsky.social. Oversee & expand our database & contribute to research on social & economic inequality. Deadline 15 February. Share & reach out! jobs.lse.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

A new academic term is ramping up. Have you considered putting our episodes on your syllabi? Conversations offer an accessible and engaging format—your students will thank you! We have 100+ episodes to choose from, covering many forms of mind from all disciplinary angles. disi.org/manyminds/

Latest crop of early online papers at HGR includes some bangers - if I do say so myself. Not just this report on BaYaka Women's autonomy and my own article about cage traps, but also Sterelny on quasi-darwinian mechanisms in cultural evolution. www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/abs/10.3...

'Varieties of childhood' with @dorsaamir.bsky.social & @sheinalew.bsky.social Listen: disi.org/varieties-of...

🎄 New paper! 🎁 Since the 20s it's been said that "the Hadza don't use traps". Except sporadic snaring, none have been reported. So I was excited to find baited cage traps in use. More exciting, this was cross-cultural transmission — seldom seen in action! 1/​5 tinyurl.com/cagetrap

Among those murdered in Sydney is Rabbi Eli Schlanger.  Earlier this year, Rabbi Schlanger’s son Nossen became bar mitzvah, reading from a Torah that tied his family back generations, both to devastating loss and to Jewish resilience. www.australianjewishnews.com/an-incredibl...

I am incredibly proud of my PhD student @amandinevisine.bsky.social who won the Academic Achievement Prize for achieving the highest overall mark in her masters program 🤯 😱🤯 😱🤯 😱🤯 😱🤯 😱 Watch out world, here she comes!!!

Indigenous People Were the Heroes of COP30 countercurrents.org/2025/11/indi...

The 50 wealthiest families own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population. How can this Labour Government say this is a "cost of living" budget and refuse to tax the rich? They care about protecting power and wealth. And cost of living is a buzz phrase for them. Dire.

Young chimps play weird with tools and other objects & this can lead to innovation! Moss sponging, doll play, leaf clipping to ask for carrying. If copied and retained, rare kid innovations can contribute to cultural complexity 🧪🔬🐵 My fav article I've ever worked on: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

CALL FOR PAPERS: UArctic Congress 2026 www.uarcticcongress.fo/programme/ca...

"My NHS colleagues & I weren’t willing to let the bodies pile high in their thousands. Boris no longer mentions them at all." My piece on the responses to the UK Covid-UK Inquiry report that try to airbrush the dead away. Sincere thanks, @theobserveruk.bsky.social. observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Really enjoyed chatting with @michaelhobbes.bsky.social for this episode! In addition to being a delight to talk to, Michael was _extremely_ committed to getting the facts right & engaged very earnestly with our feedback. A scientist's dream.

At the Budget, the Green Party's message is clear: Cut Bills. Tax Billionaires.

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

This looks super interesting. I get frustrated by both the weird idealisation of foragers as perfect societies and the opposite simplification. Great to see a prompt for a different way of thinking.

The deadline has been extended - there is still time to get your abstracts in to join us in Morocco!

Come and do a PhD at Exeter with me and Chico Camargo (Computer Science) on human-genAI coevolution "Leveraging Natural Language Processing for Data-Driven Agent-Based Modelling of Online Cultural Dynamics" www.exeter.ac.uk/v8media/recr... More details here: www.exeter.ac.uk/study/fundin...

The Labour Government reeling off the same far-right talking points on immigration. And look who is celebrating. The far-right. There is a political alternative that won’t ever scapegoat those fleeing war, persecution and torture join.greenparty.org.uk

🚨 🐍 Our new paper on the consequences men face when countering patriarchal norms in rural Tanzania 🐍.🚨 We carried out focus groups and detailed interviews with a whopping 172 women and men about their perceptions of men who support women's empowerment... 📝 1/5

For a party that has always, and always will, stand up for refugee rights - join.greenparty.org.uk

JOB KLAXON 1 Yr Project Researcher @ucdarchaeology.bsky.social working on @britishacademy.bsky.social funded *Prehistoric Policies* with Ben Elliott (@archsoundscapes.bsky.social), Alice Rudge (@alicerudge.bsky.social) and me. Contact me with queries. Pls share! my.corehr.com/pls/coreport...

This paper clearly exposes the hereditarian project for the pseudoscience it is 👇 Also highlights how overtly political are those who promote the claim there are evolved racial differences in cognitive and behavioural traits, despite strong protestations to the contrary

Zadie Smith.

Such a cool paper! Congrats @mandolinguist.bsky.social!!!

Some very clever colleagues have written this toolkit paper, offering "a set of recommendations for evaluating development across middle childhood, with attention to the eco-cultural context of maturation" Highly recommend!! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Evolutionary psychology makes a big to-do about their finding that sexual selection favors a "feminine body type" that "signals fertility/reproductive potential", including some rather... silly research. Turns out, those traits don't seem to signal reproductive success. Oops! doi.org/10.1017/ehs....

Latest paper: Boxgrove is a key European site dating to 480,000 years ago. At GTP17, hominins knapped handaxes and then butchered an adult female horse. A fragment of the horse's scapula appeared to have evidence of impact from a wooden spear..... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Super proud to have hosted at @aiasdk.bsky.social an excellent group of researchers to think through all things play, childhood, and innovation. I'll be buzzing about this for a while!

New research on wild chimpanzees shows juvenile innovation is not play but a cultural engine. Young chimps invent tools, refine adult techniques, and introduce novelty. What if childhood experimentation drove early human cultural evolution too? #Primatology #Anthropology #Archaeology #HumanOrigins

New paper! We found that intensifying market integration in Rep. Congo does not uniformly shape BaYaka and Bantu adolescent behaviour and consumption, and that adolescents may be contributing to shifts in norms regarding the sharing of money. rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Karen's work on how children's contributions to the family are essential in underwriting high fertility is really excellent, and described nicely in this podcast. Also something that doesn't get enough attention in current debates about low fertility onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...

I’ll be considering graduate school applications for Fall 2026 – positions are fully funded, typically for 5 years. Deadline to apply to the Cognition program is December 1. Come do science with me in beautiful Amherst, Massachusetts! www.umass.edu/natural-scie...

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be joining the faculty at @umassamherst.bsky.social next year as an assistant professor in Psychological & Brain Sciences! 🥳

👋 Meet Sarah, our Secretary! @anthrosarah.bsky.social is an Assistant Professor at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. As secretary, she helps connect with the evolutionary social sciences community, planning events and collaborating with the team to shape the future of W+EBS. (1/2) #WplusEBS

Sustainable education should include Indigenous knowledge "In our research with hunter-gatherer communities in the Global South, we see that participation in education often undermines Indigenous knowledge systems and cultural integrity." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper out on the important role of social learning in breastfeeding! academic.oup.com/emph/article...

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

👋 Meet Abbey, our Chair! @abbeyepage.bsky.social is a lecturer in Psych at @brunelcce.bsky.social ! As chair, she sets the agenda and overall direction of W+EBS to best support our members. She arranges and chairs meetings and hosts W+EBS events at HBES and other conferences. 1/2 #WplusEBS

I am happy to announce that our project on risk and social learning is now in press at Psychological Review. Several new additions and revisions thanks to detailed feedback from colleagues and anonymous reviewers. osf.io/preprints/so... @psmaldino.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social

How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go! 400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!

Cover reveal for my forthcoming book, WE HAVE COME TO BE DESTROYED: GROWING UP IN COLD WAR BRITAIN which tells the history of Cold War Britain (c.1956-89) through the eyes of children & young people! Out with @yalebooks.bsky.social 28 April 2026 #booksky #skystorians yalebooks.co.uk/book/9780300...