”’Siis minä olen kansallissosialisti. Sinä voit kutsua minua natsiksi, jos haluat, jos se kiinnostaa sinua kutsua näin. Mutta sillä ei ole mitään tekemistä sitten koristeiden kanssa. Tämä on yksityisalue.’ Tämän jälkeen Lehto alkaa taas puhua kynttilänjalan valitsemisesta.” – HS 12.5.

A tour of all things cave art! In which we discuss... - hand stencils and their missing fingers - the nonfigurative-to-figurative transition - archaeology's "sensory turn" - the puzzling preponderance of animals over humans - the power of pareidolia - palimpsests - children's drawing stages etc.!

Tämä ei ole @ylekov.bsky.social

”Harrastan friction-maxxingingia, ja haluan usein sytyttää itseni tuleen” – HS 8.5.

Today, it's a parody. Yet I believe this is exactly where the world is heading. LLMs personalizing every web page before we see it. The Ultimate Bubble. github.com/scosman/curs...

Check out our (@sobchuk.bsky.social) special issue on the cultural evolution of the arts in Evolutionary Human Sciences, with papers from @mikekestemont.bsky.social @babeheim.bsky.social @svalver.bsky.social and more! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

In just over a month, the duration of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine will match that of the entire World War I. And the entire might of Russia and its totalitarian allies, as well as of the Kremlin's corrupt useful morons in the West, still can't defeat Ukraine.

*Eyeballs chart* Sociology checks out. Can't think of a more prestige-biased field. Where mediocre or genuinely confused thinkers are given deity-level status.

the internet archive is truly a magical place

Universities pretend to want transdisciplinarity right up until a promotion case lands on a committee that has no idea where to file it.

reading native english speakers discuss what non-native english speakers are/aren't allowed to do and what they're supposed to prioritize when they're communicating in a language they did not born into is an alienating experience, let me tell you

Many have complained that the Iliad is indigestible, and now we have proof

This is such a valuable data point and I'm glad the authors dove deeper into it. Until now, there really was no solid evidence for (traditional) psychedelic mushroom use outside a cluster in the Americas.

People claim that psychedelics have been used by Indigenous groups around the world for millennia. But clear evidence of serotonergic psychedelic use has long been confined to the Americas. Until now. Here, we document clear evidence of Indigenous psilocybin use in Lesotho. 🍄 osf.io/preprints/so...

What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/

Don't let our reality become background noise or a "show" you've grown tired of. Please help us amplify the truth. Every life taken was important and irreplaceable. These are not just statistics; they are unspeakable crimes.

Every day, I write the same story: Russian strikes claiming lives. One person here, five there, a child, a grandparent... These tragedies have become so routine that the world is growing numb.

Academics: small non-random samples are unrepresentative and problematic. Same academics deciding what gets published and funded: a biased n=2 is fine, actually.

Siri, what's the Matthew Effect?

If there's one thing academia knows, it's how to design an inefficient system.

This basically amounts to "too many people are applying, so we'll make the process entirely insufferable to reduce applications". There would have been another option to reduce workloads of reviewers *and* applicants: making the application form less dense. Thoughts:

ERC could instead just make indirect costs ineligible That would get a lot of pushback from infrastructure-heavy institutions, but it’s justifiable on it own terms (“we fund the projects themselves, not the costs of running a place”) and it would certainly reduce the number of applications

Three weeks of practice later, juggled 3 balls with 92 consecutive throws. 🤹‍♂️ Hitting the 100s soon! (The kid stares at me with a confused face.)

Academics don't like being told that they live in an Ivory Tower, but I have to say, only people who have spent practically their whole life within the security of tenured employment could come up with such a cruel solution. There are more equitable ways to solve the low success rate problem.

My career experience has been that delivering excellence on the cheap doesn’t get rewarded. Delivering average but funded does

Actually thinking more, ERC could simply make indirect costs ineligible. That would get a lot of pushback but it’s justifiable on it own terms (“we fund the projects themselves, not the costs of running a place”) and would certainly reduce the number of applications

Truly one of the decisions of all time. If the reviewers were overloaded, why not just make the applications more lightweight? Now people spend months writing a B2 that no one reads, and may never get a shot at improving it. After 2 years an application idea is probably redundant, anyways.

Minuakin haastateltiin tähän juttuun, joka ilmestyi pidempänä myös Tiede-lehdessä. En näe, mitä tekstiin lopulta päätyi, mutta omat mietteet alla: - Kulttuurievoluutio on jo nyt geneettistä evoluutiota "nopeampaa". - (Myös) siksi evoluution "suuntaa" mahdoton ennustaa. www.hs.fi/tiede/art-20...

Conserved, catalogued, photographed, re-housed ... after 5 years work a major ethnographic collection (the Hampton Archive) is on its way back to Papua, where it will form the nucleus of a new museum ...

Right in time for #FungiFriday, my new research paper – in the works for two years – is out. Living in the Mycelial World: A global cross-cultural ethnomycological review In which I document #mushroom traditions across 193 cultures worldwide. A thread on how humans lived with and from #fungi 🍄📷:

Throwback to a year ago: my large, cross-cultural review of how humans have coexisted with, used, and abused mushrooms. A potpourri of fungal traditions.

Did you know that the spinning top is one of the most common forms of traditional play worldwide? Our research found tops to be nearly universal across human cultures. Wherever you come from, your ancestors probably spun tops. New preprint: Top of the World osf.io/preprints/so... Thread:

Pretty proud of getting this into a chi paper tbh

Behold, something incredible!

Really fun @izzywisher.bsky.social / @kensycoop.bsky.social cross-over. Tune in for a really insightful discussion on cave art and on investigating prehistory (also) with a cognitive science perpective.

Joutsenia ja telkkiä jo paljon, kurkia ja hanhia vielä odotellaan.

Hungary: National parliament election Turnout at 1:00 PM CEST 2010: 35.88% 2014: 34.33% 2018: 42.32% 2022: 40.01% 2026: 54.14% Source: Nemzeti Választási Iroda ➤ europeelects.eu/hungary #Hungary

Taking a break from work has been refreshing. All the stroller walks outside get the creative juices running. I think I just came up with one of my most inventive research designs yet – on a fun and very odd topic. That plus a few other fun ongoing projects will keep me busy for a while!

I’m on the @manymindspod.bsky.social podcast! We covered a lot in this one - from Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, missing fingers in hand-stencils to children drawing in caves. If you’re (somehow) not tired of hearing me talk about cave art, give it a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/2pVl...

Please place your bets... Probability in the Pleistocene: Origins and Antiquity of Native American Dice, Games of Chance, and Gambling🏺🧪 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Shows dice, games of chance, and gambling were a feature of Native American culture from 12 kya

Easter came to Finland with Christianity via Sweden but the name of the holiday did not. In Swedish, Easter is påsk, in related languages they have pascha, páska, pasqua and pâques. The Finnish version would have been paska (shit) or paskiainen (shithead), but for some reason they were dismissed

What a cool set of ideas presented here. Bummed to miss out on this one. Next time!

In which we discuss... - reference and the symbol grounding problem - LargeLMs vs BabyLMs - jabberwocky and pattern matching - the Platonic representations hypothesis - Quine's topiary - poverty of the stimulus arguments - the data efficiency gap between LLMs and human children - etc.!

A related thought I've been entertaining: if there is alien life out there that has developed complex culture (whatever that is), chances are they too are using the same knots as us. There's something Platonic about the physics and mathematics of knots like that.

Hyperfixation of the week: there is apparently a field called “forensic hairdressing” where people try to reconstruct ancient hair techniques. Below is one from Ancient Rome ca. 120 AD. The leading figure is a hairstylist-turned-archaeologist named Janet Stephens who also does video tutorials. Cool!

Very proud to have worked on the 2026 update to the CRediT taxonomy with @rbly.bsky.social

Scandinavian Mesolithic hunter-gatherers abstractly engraved bones & other materials. What can we learn from their visual complexity? New paper w @ll-herskind.bsky.social , @helenamiton.bsky.social & @felixthehauskat.bsky.social . (doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...). 1/

A Hadza collaborator of mine suddenly lost his wife earlier this week. They had two young children. I am seeking to raise a small amount of money to help Endeko cover funeral expenses and short-term childcare costs. Any small donations would be appreciated www.gofundme.com/f/support-en...