The artwork that illustrated our PNAS paper on the oldest wooden tools was made by Gleiver Prieto, who has also worked with me on illustrations for previous projects, including the paleoenvironmental reconstruction of Marathousa 1. Gleiver's art really brings Pleistocene Megalopolis to life ✨ 🤩

It was such a privilege to get to work on this amazing material from an incredible site and team - now the earliest handheld wooden tools in the archaeological record, taking evidence back to 430,000 years! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Early humans in central China may have been making sophisticated stone tools as early as 160,000 years ago, according to research in Nature Communications. This discovery challenges the perception that stone tool technology in Asia lagged behind Europe and Africa during this period. 🏺 🧪

🧪🏺 WOWWWW New dates in SE Asia for rock paintings - major implications: - nature of early aesthetics, innovations - relationship to oldest known Australian settlement? - and (IMO) impacts claims that cave art in Europe >50 Ka is necessarily work of #Neanderthals www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My mum just came back from a walk around a field with this, saying it’s probably not old but she wanted to show me just in case. It’s an early medieval stirrup mount! Landowner contacted and shortly off to local Finds Liaison Officer! Always worth keeping one eye on the ground!

More Breaking Palaeo-news! 🐘 Boxgrove preserved oldest Elephant Bone beyond Africa. 🐘 Early Neanderthals using bone to shape beautiful tools. 🐘 New research from Simon Parfitt @uclarchaeology.bsky.social Silvia Bello of the @nhm-london.bsky.social. 🦣🏺🐘https://share.google/20WUjY5TybDAr4QoT

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...

Please join us next week, Thursday 13h November, for our next talk. We will be joined by Finn Stileman, University of Cambridge. More details 👇 Please register here: liverpool-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/regi... We hope to see you there!

📣 PUBLISHED OPEN ACCESS 📣 An international team, including our own Finn Stileman, have published a new study in Nature Communications on a monumental rock art tradition in northern Arabia dating between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 📸 @finnstileman.bsky.social

New discovery! Here @mariaguagnin.bsky.social and our team report on 12,000-year-old life-size camel rock art engravings in the Saudi desert. #GreenArabia @griffith.edu.au www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our new paper is out! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 12,000 year old camel engravings marked water sources in the desert. A great team effort @mdpetraglia.bsky.social @finnstileman.bsky.social @stewiestewart.bsky.social et al!

Was great to present a poster at #ESHE2025!

Happy to share the first paper from my PhD! Open access in a special issue of JAS, 'The Mind in Deep Time: Interdisciplinary explorations of cognitive evolution' When less is more: risk, reward and optimisation in Acheulean handaxe manufacture and the impact of skill share.google/hj43OR6QWXtc...

Thrilled to share our latest article on the Lower Palaeolithic occupation of Fordwich Pit, Old Park - including at least one likely glacial occupation in MIS12! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

More ceramics! So fun to work with!

Picked up a stone-textured dish at a pottery market that perfectly nests a porcelain handaxe; makes me think of the tool latent within a nodule before being shaped to fruition

🏺🧪🦣 #Neanderthal Fat Factory! V. exciting to see new, massive evidence of this grease-rendering behaviour which we've long believed was going on. (someone once commented I use the word "fat/fatty" a lot in the narrative/poetic sections of #Kindred, THIS IS WHY) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#Neanderthals Ran “Fat Factories” 125,000 Years Ago. Groundbreaking discovery by @paleomonrepos.bsky.social @unileiden.bsky.social @leizarchaeology.bsky.social and the LDA in Saxony reveals large-scale fat processing by Neanderthals: idw-online.de/de/news854632 #archaeology #paleolithic #prehistory

My latest weekend pastime has been to model clay replicas for my little museum! Particularly fond of the Neanderthal (La Ferrassie 1) skull!

40,000-year-old mammoth tusk boomerang is oldest in Europe — and possibly the world www.livescience.com/archaeology/...

Finally got round to finishing this drawing of a 300,000 year old #handaxe from Stoke Newington, London, found by S.H. Warren in 1894. Now this little-un, along with others from Stoke Newington that I've drawn, lives at the British Museum

'Scientists discovered a new kind of human with its pinkie bone. Now we have a skull' www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

Calling all palaeolithic archaeologists. Come and work with me on a really exciting new survey and excavation project in Uganda: euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/348570

And here's the scan from the same handaxe! A razor (tranchet sharpened) tip!

Giant egos, hidden fossils and Machiavellian scheming in the academy - in this tale about what might (or might not) be the oldest hominin. A thrilling read! www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Spent the day with master flint knapper, John Lord, to 3D scan handaxes. Some were made by him, but this one was collected from a quarry spoil heap at Lynford and dates to 65,000 years ago! Fresh as the day it was made!

More delightful flint fingerprints, c.300,000 years old. #handaxe #lowerpalaeolithic #illustration

🧪 But seriously, this one study has more clear creations of form as a means of 'marking' a medium (in this case, water) than we have for the entirety of the #Neanderthal archaeological record. If they can control the shape enough to make the perfect O, then the other forms may be intentional too?

Been trying my hand lately at the 'coup de tranchet' ("slicing blow") technique that's famously abundant on Boxgrove handaxes. A tricky detail that testifies to complex cultural transmission 500,000 years ago!

A wet knapping session with intresting flint! Any ideas what the inclusion could be??

My favourite thing to make has always been handaxes! This making process is my central research interest; how do knapping kits affect tool forms, and what drives hammer choice? Can we infer cultural variation not only from handaxes but also from the broader technologies that support flint knapping?

Don't miss it — Dr Eduardo Paixão's #LEXA seminar is this Tuesday, 3 June at 14:00 WEST! 🪓 Join us on Zoom!

Finally abandoned 'X' and back to sharing some knapping! I've got some lovely vibrant flint left over from experiments to play with!